New poster here so forgive any mistakes with posting rules. Can anyone recommend any good books to help with authenticating high end or old vintages of wine?
Hire Don Cornwell.
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Maureen Downey MW provides these services too. You might remember her from the documentary ‘Sour Grapes’
I cannot really imagine why anyone with expertise in this niche would want to write a book about how to do it. Plus it would need to be massive - the collection of old legit labels that Cornwell has is just vast.
That’s a fair point; just trying to find a good resource to learn what to look for
This
And this.
Having done this for over 20 years now as a sideline, I would also add that given all the variables present it would be impossible to write a book that could be totally reliable.
Wine as a valued collectible and sign of status has been with us through the ages, but a world in which there is a viable and highly efficient secondary resale market for wine is still a very new thing. And quite frankly, the wide circulation of high end wine outside the realm of royalty, aristocracy and the wealthiest of the “lesser born” is also a somewhat new concept.
And so when you look back prior to around the 2000 vintage, and certainly going back even further to a time when many wines were bottled by multiple parties, there are just not any of the consistencies or security safeguards you see today.
And sometimes you do not even have to reach back. On this forum, there have been concerns expressed in the past about recent magnums of Roumier having a generic bright red capsule. Well, the few of us who ever purchased or seen original cases of Roumier magnums can tell you that they do in fact carry a generic bright red capsule that bears no resemblance to that used for 750 mls. It is a practical concession owing to the extreme rarity of the former as compared to the latter.
To make matters even more complicated- I can only attest to that fact with direct first hand knowledge up to the 2010 vintage. If someone came to me with a magnum of Roumier from 2011 or later, I would know how to find the answer on whether the capsule was correct- but not having actually seen a 2011 Roumier magnum capsule, I could not affirmatively know on my own that it was correct. Maybe it changed. Things change often these days. A couple of vintages ago Ramonet changed the paper on which they print their labels in several readily notable ways. And it is possible there have been more discrete changes in the interim.
It is barely possible to keep up with all the current changes to labels, corks, glass and the proportions and shades thereof among the population of the top 200 or so wines that dominate the high end collecting market. It is truly impossible to do the same looking back decades and render definitive judgments all of the time.
That said- Don and Maureen have done some extraordinary work examining details that many of us never even dreamed of- right down to sediment residue and other factors. I marvel at the knowledge they have gathered. But it was knowledge dearly bought with years of careful examination- and even then it is not foolproof. That is not a commentary on their skills, but merely a statement of reality. They are certainly better equipped to give a far more educated judgment on a bottle than most wine appraisers out there- but certainty is often very elusive. Spotting fakes is not the hard part in many cases- it is realizing that something very obscure or that has not been seen before is likely to be authentic, or harder still- realizing that an original bottle with original cork and capsule does not contain the original contents. The best fakes in the world remain bottles where only the contents are not the real deal.
Long story short- wine authentication has some subjective parameters to it that are very important and cannot be quantified in a book. As for the objective parameters, sticking to them exclusively in making a judgment is fraught with peril- and anyone who has accumulated as much objective knowledge as someone like Don or Maureen and publishes a detailed book is ultimately going to be giving free hints to counterfeiters more than providing a degree of instant knowledge that would allow a laymen to function with the same level of accuracy as those of us who have at this a long time.
Closest you’ll come to a book is here, but the signal/noise ratio for the details you seek is low: RUDY KURNIAWAN & GLOBAL WINE AUCTION FRAUD THREAD (MERGED) - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers
Arv, Don’t believe Maureen is an MW yet. She is an old friend.
which reminds me, in the past she has offered some courses in London on detecting counterfeits, so OP might want to reach out and see if any of those are calendared for anytime in the future.
(I also retract my MW accusation)