My comments werent specific to the loose bottle of 89 Petrus, to be honest. I do agree that its unlikely a loose bottle would still be held in bond right now, but I’m sure theres plenty of 89 Petrus lying in bonded warehouses. Here’s 12 with BI for example : https://bordeauxindex.com/fine-wine/red-bordeaux/pomerol/petrus-1989 and 6 with BBX - Buy 1989 Petrus, Pomerol, Bordeaux Wine - Berry Bros. & Rudd
Yes, there is plenty of Petrus in bond. But, and pardon the bluntness of the phrasing - so what?
Again, being in bond says nothing about its provenance, only about its tax status. If I read your posts correctly, you seemed to be implying that buying wine in bond was inherently less risky. I can’t agree that’s the case.
Now you could reasonably argue that buying from an excellent company like BI reduces your risk, because they should assess the bottles. But the fact that the wine is in bond is irrelevant to your risk of it being fake.
I suppose I go back to my original point. The proliferation of fakes in the UK seems, at least anecdotcally, much rarer (when purchased in bond) as compared to the US and Hong Kong. Obviously there are things like fakes appearing at auction in the UK anyway.
I appreciate how theoretically buying in bond is no riskier and no safer than buying at auction, but evidentially, it does seem safer - for example looking at that BBC article about BBR’s fake rates, suggesting 1 bottle every 3 months checking 200 cases a week, that’s an incidential fake rate of 1 fake bottle per ~30,000. Obviously it doesnt give us any testimony to the cost, quality, etc of those bottles so its not a simply reflective state against wider auctions, but its an interesting data point.
Again, this is about the evidential, rather than the theoretical. It’s like the Drake Equation - seems to imply certain things, and hard to argue with theoretically. Infact the more we discover, the more we think the Drake equation underestimates the numbers. But evidence tells us otherwise (and Fermi’s Paradox)!
I guess the other angle is that, to my understanding, all wine in bond is held with a rotation number. Full lineage of it (e.g. since arriving into bond) is available. If you buy an 89 Petrus and it only shows as landing into bond in 2015 with an international importer (say from Hong Kong, I dont know if that level of detail is captured), that might throw a lot more suspicion than a rotation number that indicates it landed into bond in 1991 from Corney and Barrow.
My understanding of rotation numbers may be wrong, this is just what I’ve inferred from having to do a little bit of tracing and tracking of my own wine through rotation numbers previously.
Logically, I guess there are a few explanations:
1 - My premise is ultimately wrong, and there is a large proliferation of fakes in bond in the UK but it isnt publicised or they arent readily identified.
2 - My impression of fakes in auctions in HK and the US is overblown by, for example, reading a lot of Dom Cromwell posts
3 - Fakes are deliberately averted away from buyers who would move it in to BI or BBR or other similar merchants who would check stock. How you’d do this, though, I dont know. If I buy wine through a merchant, they’ve got no idea where I’m likely to send it until after I’ve made the purchase.
4 - Fakes are deliberately targetted at the US and HK/Asia. This isnt necessarily because the in bond system makes it very hard to land them in to the UK, but its more hassle than its worth or some other workflow issue that means the premise is not fundamentally wrong.
There may be other explanations too of course. Either the premise is flawed, the evidence is flawed, or it’s correct. I suspect the answer is probably number 4 - whilst in bond in the UK is theoretically no more secure, there are things that make it more of a hassle for a wine frauder than selling it at auction in the UK and Asia. Obviously this then means that buying in bond in the UK is (evidentially/practically) less risky, if not theoretically.
I wouldn’t put a lot of stock in the BBR man’s statistics. Based on his numbers, each of his men are checking 171 bottles a day on average – far too many to be able to give each bottle a really close examination. Moreover, there’s really not much incentive for BBR to closely scrutinize bottles at this stage, simply entering the warehouse. If a customer wants to sell the wine through BBR, that’s when you’d expect (and hope) they look closely.
So, what are the (incidental) fake rates found in the U.S. and Hong Kong? And then, the types of wines need to be the same, or materially similar, for any such comparisons to be relevant.
Can I add a number 5: the UK public (and the Dutch and most European consumers) are not as prone to buying these “trophy” wines as the US and Asian consumers? Over here at least, I very rarely see bottles of old Petrus/Latour/DRC/etc consumed publicly.
Following that logic, anyone forging high profile wines would target the markets with more apparent consumption. Supply would follow demand in that sense.
The argument that a delayed tax payment (which is essentially what in bond is) protects against forgery seems far fetched. Some of the renown UK traders might function as gatekeepers to an extent, but I don’t believe they’re that much more on top of their game than their US/AP counterparts.
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Agreed, I dont have that statistic and that’s a bit of a gap. Though I would look at threads like the Fraud thread on WB and it does seem like the vast majority of reports are US and Asia-centric, without much hit rate in the UK.
That’s a really good point, thanks for calling it out. So perhaps the supply of frauds just follow the demand, rather than anything more systematic.
I still fail to see how, for example, being able to track the rot numbers for wine in bond since the day it landed doesnt at least help. If your wine has proof of being in bond since soon after it was bottled, that clearly goes a lot further than a 1961 Palmer that has no lineage until 2010 when it was imported from the States, for example
Wine Pages is, I believe, the wine forum that houses the greatest quantity of UK-based participation; I don’t think WB is representative of that population the way Wine Pages is. Sadly, I lost my login information for Wine Pages many years ago when they re-did their UI, and I never signed-up again; I probably should …
thanks for the pointer, I’ve only ever been on here for wine convo (and CT)
a final thought/query/hypothesis: Are there cultural differences at play that might (partially) explain any differences in fake rates? It is my impression that Americans are far more confrontational than Brits. I do wonder if Americans are more likely to “call out a fake,” as that is an inherently confrontational act.?. I dunno, but it’s something to chew on. I would compare this, loosely, to the chapter in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” about Korean Air.
Can’t comment on H.K. because I am not familiar with the culture there the way am I with American and British cultures.
Good book btw - really enjoyed it.
It’s a good question. I would hope that gets removed with professional checking of wines, but evidence (which clearly I love so much) tell us a lot of the best fraud detectors are American!
FWIW, Brits are happy to be confrontational over email and remote, it’s the in person thing we dont like so much 
LOL! ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
Not to mention in Question Period and on TV. Jeremy Paxman was a brilliant and frighteningly aggressive interviewer when I lived in London – like Mike Wallace was in the US in the 70s.
the exception that proves the rule! So controversial he got his own TV show 