In early November, wine fraud expert Maureen Downey warned in her blog about a famous criminal's attendance at an exclusive July dinner in Singapore. The seven guests commissioned Kurniawan to create fake versions of a Romanée-Conti from 1990 and a Pétrus from the same year. The game was to compare fakes with originals. Downey revealed that most people preferred the fakes. “Here we are again to experience the magic and knowledge of Rudy,” reads the note from one of the participants. “Mr Kurniawan is a wine genius.”
More than twenty years have passed since the day Rudy Kurniawan, an Indonesian national, entered the United States on a student visa and walked into the Woodland Hills Wine Company store. He was 24 years old. He was assisted by Kyle Smith, who would become his mentor and friend. I wanted to know everything about French wines. He took notes and memorized scents. It would soon become clear that he had a gifted palate. He excelled at the blind tastings he took part in.
As recounted in the documentary Sour Grapes (2016), Kurniawan appeared at every auction in California and spent around a million dollars a month on bottles. “Nobody has ever spent so much money so quickly,” said Downey, who served as an advisor to the FBI in the investigation against the counterfeiter. At every dinner he was invited to, he showed up with bottles that were hard to find. It was rumored that his family sold Heineken beer in China, although it later emerged that his money came from the criminal dealings of two of his uncles.
The next step was to offer our own properties. He did this with the help of John Kapon, the owner of a small boutique called Acker Merrall, which auctioned bottles of Kurniawan for $35 million between 2003 and 2006. They were wines that had never been on the market before. The auction catalog advertised the owner of these wines as one of the most reliable collectors. Acker Merrall became the largest wine auction house in the world.
Rudy Kurniawan. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Enf
The decline was slow. First, a mistake in 2003, with a batch of Bordeaux with incorrect labels. Then some magnums of Château Le Pin from 1982, which were denounced by representatives of the winery. Finally, the CEO of Domaine Ponsot, which has been making Burgundy wine since 1911, flew to Los Angeles to personally meet the collector who was counterfeiting his wine.
In 2012, the FBI broke into Rudy Kurniawan's home and found a lab with hundreds of empty jars, thousands of labels and corks scattered throughout the house, and even soaked bottles in the pile to remove the glue. His approach was to combine different vintages until he achieved a perfect blend that resembled the impossible-to-find wines he incorporated into his batches.
He was sentenced to ten years in prison in the USA and was finally released in 2021. Downey warns that many of his bottles worth thousands of dollars are still on the market. Their appearance in Singapore shows that Kurniawan's fakes have become iconic for some. A fact that is related to a quote from the film F for Fraud by Orson Welles: “The true quality of a painting lies not in whether it is good or bad, but in whether it is a good or bad forgery.”
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