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Kurniawan Rudy

The Indonesian-born wine merchant Rudy Kurniawan (*1976) is considered the "largest and most successful wine counterfeiter in the world". In a trial in New York, he was proven to have counterfeited wine worth 20 million dollars. He was therefore sentenced to eight years in prison on 8 March 2012. Kurniawan had entered the USA at the end of the 1990s on a student visa and became the world's most sought-after dealer in rare old luxury wines from Bordeaux and Burgundy. Initially, comparatively inexpensive old Burgundies from small vineyards and small wineries were mixed with young Pinot Noir wines from California. The auction he organised in 2006, "The Cellar II", generated record proceeds of $24.7 million. Today we know that the majority of the wines were fakes. His speciality was large-format bottles from the 1947 vintage and wines from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. This is why he was nicknamed "Mr 47" or "Dr Conti" in the scene.

Kurniawan - gefälschte Flaschen

Counterfeiting of Burgundy wines

Wines from the famous Romanée-Conti vineyard were repeatedly traded, although only a few thousand bottles are produced annually from less than two hectares of vines. In April 2007, Christie's was to auction off a few magnum bottles of Château Le Pin from the 1982 vintage. However, the auction did not materialise because Le Pin warned Christie's that the bottles were fakes. Kurniawan's success finally made him careless. The owner of Domaine Ponsot travelled to New York to prevent an auction of supposedly old wines from his estate. Kurniawan offered Clos Saint-Denis from vintages from 1945 to 1971. However, the domaine only produced its first Clos Saint-Denis in 1982. The four bottles of Clos de la Roche 1929 from Domaine Ponsot were also counterfeit, as Domaine Ponsot only began marketing under its own name in 1934.

Kurniawan - Zertrümmerung der gefälschten Flaschen

Destruction of counterfeit wine bottles

The FBI confiscated 5,329 bottles from Kurniawan's stock. Exactly 392 bottles were identified as clearly counterfeit, as determined by small samples taken with a thin needle. A further 156 were deemed unfit for sale due to damaged corks. These 548 bottles were smashed by the US Marshals Service in Creedmoor (Texas) using a combination of a construction crane and a three-tonne electromagnet.

Fraud victim William Koch

Among the buyers of his counterfeit wines was the US businessman and collector of rare wines William Koch (*1940), who had sued Kurniawan in 2009 over bottles of old vintages of Château Pétrus that he had bought. Koch had already filed a lawsuit against the German wine collector Hardy Rodenstock (1941-2018) for fraud. It can be assumed that there are still a number of counterfeit Kurniawan wines in the cellars of bruised wine collectors today. A documentary film about the machinations of Rudy Kurniawan was produced in 2016. See also cinema and TV films and other spectacular cases under the keywords wine scandal and wine adulteration.

Images: Flickr US Marshals / U.S. Department of Justice

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