The Most Expensive Wine in History

Buying $1 million a month of wine

Once upon a time, in a dark underground cellar in France, I squeezed passed a dusty stack of barrels that were marked in white chalk, “Pouilly Fuisse for America.” Pouilly Fuisse is a strictly controlled, very good but not great, white wine whose vintners are allowed to grow only one grape: Chardonnay. At the time I was there, it was the most famous French wine in America and was on every restaurant list in the country.

People who knew nothing about wine would sit down in a restaurant and say “bring me a Pouilly Fuisse” even though its name is more or less impossible to say in English. The demand for Pouilly Fuisse was off the charts. Unfortunately, the supply of real Pouilly Fuisse was not.

Suddenly, the supply of Pouilly Fuisse for sale was nearly twice as much as had been made. Hence the barrels above. The actual wine in those barrels and ultimately in the bottle was from Algeria. It didn’t taste anything like Pouilly Fuisse, but it was white and said Pouilly Fuisse on the label and cost the sellers a lot less than the real stuff.

Of course, it sold to consumers for the same price as real Pouilly Fuisse. Profits ensued. Americans never noticed. At least not until it became a scandal on TV and the French government clamped down.

OK, so they fooled normal people. But, who could fool the experts?

The most famous and expensive wine of Roman times was called “Falernian”. Pliny complained that there were so many cheap, fake versions of Falernian that nobody could be sure they were drinking the right thing. See Wine Searcher for more information on forged wine. (https://www.wine-searcher.com/m/2018/06/wine-frauds-final-journey)

Buying $1 million a month of wine

A couple of weeks ago, The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement department (ICE) deported Rudy Kurniawan following his release from prison. They put him on a plane in the Dallas-Ft.Worth airport and on April 12th, he landed back in his home country of Indonesia.

The story of how Rudy was able to fool the greatest wine experts in the world for years is told in the documentary film, “Sour Grapes” made by Jerry Rothwell and Reuben Atlas in 2016. It’s an amazing story and what really happened is still a bit cloudy.

Part of how Rudy did it was by spending up to a $1 million a month at auction houses. The auction house of Acer, Merrall and Condit in New York City sold over $35 million of Rudy’s wine in 2006 alone. Nobody knows for sure how much of it was fake, but it might have been all of it.

Despite his obvious social skills, Rudy made two mistakes that came back to get him. First, he sold bottles of Domaine Ponsot, Clos de St. Denis from 1945, 1949 and 1966 (among others) for record breaking prices. Domaine Ponsot produces some of the truly great wines in the world from their Grand Cru vineyards in Burgundy, France.

Alas for Rudy, the owner of Domaine Ponsot, Laurent Ponsot, saw the catalogue. See the thing is, Domaine Ponsot didn’t make a Clos de St. Denis in those years. That’s because they didn’t make one at all until 1982. Monsieur Ponsot was not amused. He made a public announcement to that effect and Rudy was in trouble.

The second mistake he made was that he cheated Bill Koch of the famous billionaire Koch brothers. Here’s a little life tip—don’t cheat billionaires. They have really expensive lawyers and lots of them. Bill Koch was not amused either. Koch sued for $12.4 million in damages.

Mr. Koch is a world famous collector of many amazing things, although these days he doesn’t do much with wine anymore.

Rudy ended up in jail with a 10 year sentence in 2014. I guess he got time off for good behavior. Or maybe the government was just tired of him.

The Most Expensive Bottle of Wine Ever Sold

Before Rudy Kurniawan, there was Hardy Rodenstock. Sort of. It turned out his real name was Meinhard Görk, a German pop band manager and promoter of Schlager music. Stay with me here, you can look up German Schlager music later.

My goodness was Hardy good. He was presumably the inspiration for Rudy Kurniawan. Before Rodenstock, almost all wine fakes were taking cheap wines and putting more expensive labels on them. The newly labeled wine brought higher prices but nothing exorbitant so as to avoid suspicion.

Hardy was having none of that. The wines he faked were the most expensive wines in history and he did it for nearly 20 years. The most famous people in the wine business were taken in, including Michael Broadbent, Robert Parker, Jancis Robinson and many other “experts”.

Rodenstock claimed he had unearthed wines from a bricked up basement that had been Thomas Jefferson’s personal cellar while he was serving as U.S Ambassador to France. Christie’s Auction house, in the person of the “world’s best palate” —Michael Broadbent—sold the 1787 Lafite with Thomas Jefferson’s initials on it for the equivalent at the time of $156,000. It was then the most expensive bottle of wine in history.

No one knows for sure whether it was real or not, but most people now believe it was a fake.

Hardy’s success was built largely on a brand new approach to forging wines. Instead of changing the labels, he bought old and used bottles that were real, then he ordered the music company that made his bands’ posters to print labels on old paper so the labels appeared to be authentic.

Then he filled the bottles with only God-knows-what. Only God knows because Rodenstock settled out of court. The famous wine experts that had been fooled so badly were not eager to get their pictures in the news anymore than they already had.

Rodenstock’s most famous tasting was monumental. He threw a tasting in Germany with 125 vintages of the world’s most famous dessert wine, Chateau D’Yquem, going back to 1784. At least, that’s what the label said.

The festivities went on for a week with the best experts in the world nodding and eating really expensive food. There were 5 luncheons, 7 dinners and 175 other wines. Nothing like it had been seen before or since.

At the time, Robert Parker (who invented the most influential wine rating system in the world) gave 100 points to a magnum of 1921 Chateau Petrus. The fine readers of this newsletter (April 10, 2021) will recognize Chateau Petrus as the wine that went into space for 14 months and came back intact and feeling good.

Sadly, the winemaker at Chateau D’Yquem allowed as how that was all well and good, but D’Yquem didn’t bottle any magnums in 1921. Shades of Clos St. Denis and Rudy Kurniawan.

I believe I have mentioned the problems with wine experts and rating systems before. You have been forewarned. Trust yourself.

“Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

—Puck to Fairy King Oberon in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

More frauds

I have been to tastings like these, and I may very well have been fooled too. I don’t know, although there was a great bottle of 1924 Krug Clos du Mesnil Blanc de Blanc Champagne in a ridiculously indulgent black tie dinner in New York City one time that gives me pause these days. Very expensive cigars were involved.

Now, I wonder if the cigars were real.

The great frauds above aren’t the only famous wine frauds in history but I think they are the best. In the 1970’s Bernard Grivelet was convicted of selling 70,000 bottles of $4 wine for $25. I was visited and interviewed by Interpol of all people in New York City over some of that Pouilly Fuisse I mentioned above. Apparently, it had origins that seemed more African than French.

I’m sure there will be others in the future. But for me, Hardy Rodenstock set a bar that will never be beaten. He died in 2018. The world may never see his like again.