'I couldn't stand it': In 2008, Laurent Ponsot, a winemaker from Burgundy in central France, discovered that a fraudster was making millions selling fake Grands Crus. And will launch a global hunt worthy of Hollywood.
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“Well, it all started on April 23, 2008 at 6:00 a.m.…”: With these words, said by Laurent Ponsot in a New York court in December 2013, he begins a statement that implicates Rudy Kurniawan, the greatest wine counterfeiter ever was arrested.
On April 23, 2008, the winemaker read an email from an American friend. “Since when have you been producing Clos Saint-Denis?” asks this lover of great Burgundy, ready to pay tens of thousands of dollars for this famous Grand Cru, which was then auctioned in New York in 1945, 1949, 1959… But Laurent Ponsot replied, “We’ve only been producing them since 1982.”
The winemaker from Morey-Saint-Denis (Côte d'Or), a prestigious address in Burgundy, then flew to New York and had lunch with the seller: Rudy Kurniawan, a Chinese, Malaysian or Indonesian “golden boy”. . We don't really know.
The thirty-year-old, who supposedly comes from a wealthy family, is invited by all of New York, crowned with his nickname “Dr. Conti,” alluding to his passion for Romanée-Conti, uncorking the world’s most expensive Burgundy wines “like bottles of lemonade,” Mr. Ponsot recalled in an interview with AFP.
When Rudy Kurniawan was confronted by the winemaker, he gave him the two phone numbers of the people who gave him the controversial bottles, he said. But one is a fax machine and the other is airline customer service.
Laurent Ponsot then decides to carry out the investigation. Because for this wine man, who was born “over a cellar” 69 years ago, it was “haunting.”
“I couldn't stand it: this guy tainted the spirit of the wine. I went on a crusade,” recalls the winemaker with the look of a gentleman farmer, shoulder-length gray hair falling over an elegant jacket.
A “magic cellar”
From hiding to “tricks”, as he says in the language of the detective he has become, Laurent Ponsot follows the thread from New York to Singapore, Hong Kong and then to Indonesia.
The so-called “Rudy” is actually Zhen Wang Huang, son of humble Chinese grocers from a village in Malaysia who studied in Indonesia before living illegally in the United States. His great oenological knowledge gradually led him into the circle of the greatest amateurs.
As he tells it in a book called FBI, False Bottles Investigation, Laurent Ponsot monitors the counterfeiter's California apartment and follows his every coming and going. He then finds the suppliers from whom the crook buys caps, wax, labels, etc.
“I was dealing with an ace of dissimulation,” he remembers. But the winemaker does not have the power to search. He's stuck.
Until 2009. Then Laurent Ponsot was contacted by the FBI: He also investigated the counterfeiter and discovered that Burgundian was already on his trail. The American federal police therefore asked him to share his findings.
On March 8, 2012, the FBI broke into the counterfeiter's home. In a kind of “magic cellar” there are hundreds of bottles, thousands of fake labels and numerous recipes, such as the one for making a Château Mouton Rothschild 1945: “Half a bottle of Pichon Longueville 1988, a quarter of oxidized Bordeaux and…” a quarter Californian wine.
“We have never seen so many counterfeit bottles. There must have been 20,000, including 500 from my field.
After his New York trial at the end of 2013, the Indonesian was sentenced to ten years in prison and ordered to pay $28.5 million to the injured winemakers.
For his part, Laurent Ponsot is named “Honorary FBI Agent”.
Rudy Kurniawan was released from prison in 2020. But “10 days after his release, I knew he was at the bar at the Mandarin Oriental in Singapore,” a very famous luxury hotel, says Mr. Ponsot, who “still keeps an eye on him.”
The Indonesian “still has millions in Hong Kong,” he accuses. “He gets back in the saddle.”