Wine History
Wine History: Forgery
As much as 5% of wine sold in secondary markets today is fraudulent…
Wine has always been a luxury product — and those high prices have proved tempting for criminals over the years. Today, as much of 5% of all wine sold in the secondary market is estimated to be fraudulent.
The Ancient World
The most prestigious wine in Ancient Rome was Falernian, a sickly-sweet wine full of sugar. The wine was grown over three vineyards on Mount Massico, thirty miles north of Naples. The wine was made from an indigenous Italian varietal called ‘Aminea Gemina’, and the best wine came from midway up the slopes, owned by one man called Faustus. The alcohol content of Falernian was around 15 – 16 percent, but the wine was normally cut with water when drinking it.
This wine was exclusive, then, and tightly-produced, with yields of no more than a few thousand bottles per year. However, there are records of Pliny the Elder complaining that there seemed to be many, many more multiples of this being drunk throughout Rome in the form of cheap knock-offs, in what is the first known example of wine forgery.
Medieval Era
In the early medieval period, the principle method of wine forgery was simply by mixing two different wines together or by dilution. In 1342, a law was passed which stated that “no taverner should mix putrid and corrupt wine with pure and good wines” — however, just 22 years later, two taverners, a John Rightways and a John Penrose were charged with selling unsound wines. Penrose’s punishment was a year and a day’s imprisonment, “to drink a draught of the bad wine, and the rest to be poured over his head”, as well as being expelled as a vintner.
In the period 1400–1550, there is little mention of dishonest vintners, at least in medieval London. However, after 1550 there was a resurgence in wine merchants who would stretch the truth when it came to their wares — in 1593, John Eliot described how London vintners added lime, brimstone “and other more beastly things to be spoken” into wine, causing “infinit maladies, and specially the goutes”. A year later, Sir Hugh Platt (1552–1608) wrote of several dishonest vintners operating throughout London.
In the late medieval era, a more systematic form of adulteration emerged. This either consisted of using leftover lees with cute (concentrated must), or adding excess spices to wine which had already turned into vinegar. The addition of excess spices was termed “ridding away” wines, and the adulterations were so widespread that they were even reported in Tatler.
One of these ‘spiced’ wines was hippocras, which consisted of white wine, sugar, cinnamon, cloves, a ginger substitute called galingale, cardamom and rosemary. As the preservation of wine became easier thanks to the work of Pasteur and the accessibility of sulphur dioxide, these spiced wines became more obscure and any wine forgery became more malicious than a vintner trying to salvage his spoiling stock.
Forgery and Age
One could argue that much of the marketed mystique of wine nowadays comes from the ageing process, and the majority of forged wines pretend to be far older than they are in reality. Producers from one region generally work with the same grapes and terroirs as their neighbours, with tight AOC, DOCG and other regional classifications exerting strict controls over much of the juice extraction and additive process. Great wines spend far more time in the bottle than on the vine or a vat, and the living juice can change drastically over this period, and so much of the individual character of great estates arises through the ageing process. Indeed, Parker maintains that the ability of a wine to age is “an indisputable characteristic of great wines”. Rudy Kurniawan, who was the subject of a fascinating Netflix documentary on forgery, faked many aged wines in the kitchen sink in his California home.
For any intrepid reader hoping to taste a wine that is as similar as possible to an ancient wine, there is a thriving but niche market run by archaeologists from the University of Catania reproducing Roman winemaking techniques. Alternatively, today’s Georgian wines use techniques consistent with production of the original domesticated grape wine from 8,000 years ago. To taste something resembling an ancient mixed beverage, Greek retsina is still widely available in many parts of Greece. However, all of these have relatively limited production and are challenging to find in an everyday wine shop or supermarket. In practical terms, the greatest and most famous Ancient wine was undoubtedly the highly sweetened, yellow Roman Falernian wine, which is echoed most prominently in modern mainstream production by a modern-day Sauternes.
Chinese Forgeries
On reading an interesting book called ‘Thirsty Dragon’ recently, several fascinating cases of wine fraud came to my attention. In China, the import and export – particularly of foreign wines – is tightly regulated. This has led to a thriving internal market of wine forgery. In the early 2010s this was particularly prevalent, given that at this time there was little wine grown in China itself compared to today.
Between 2008 and 2010, a gentleman by the name of Wang Chunping earnt 28 million yuan from selling a mixture of leftover grape pulp and skins mixed with sugar, water alcohol and yeast. Suzanne Mustacich posits in Thirsty Dragon that some 70% of Bordeaux wines sold in China are fake, with the majority of bordelaise wines in reality wines produced in Changli.
So, then – it is apparent that, like most forged goods, the motive and environment which favours wine forgery best are high-prestige, lower-knowledge environments. Nowadays, wine forgery is commonplace, with investors like Bill Koch famously falling prey to forged stock.
