Wine fraud is turning empty bottles into hot commodities
Scroll through eBay’s “collectibles” category for a few minutes and you’ll find something odd. Empty wine bottles—objects that most people would see as worthless—are going for tens to hundreds of dollars.
Who’s buying them? Collectors? Probably not. Wine bottle collecting isn’t exactly a common hobby. Though some people like to save the labels from particularly memorable bottles, most wine collectors prefer to collect the full ones. The empty-bottle buyers are much likelier to be wine counterfeiters who plan to stealthily refill and resell these bottles. (One clue? The eBay listings advertise the presence or absence of an original cork, one of the first things a buyer who suspects fraud might think to check.)
On eBay, empty bottles of expensive wine go for suspiciously high prices.
As you might suspect, the more expensive the bottle was full, the more people are willing to pay for an empty. Bottles from prestigious châteaux and exceptional vintages are some of the most popular items. A 1982 Leoville-Poyferre is currently listed for an eye-watering $400, while a less storied vintage from the same château can be had for as little as $50.
Refilling empties with cheap wine and passing them off as the good stuff is nothing new. In 1884, one British trade journal ran an ad for distinctively colored foil capsules designed to make it easier to detect refilled bottles.
One of the most famous recent examples of wine fraudsters employing this technique is Rudy Kurniawan, who was found to have purchased empties of high-value Burgundy and refilled them with equally old, though less costly, wines. As Kurniawan found, refilling old bottles (rather than, say, counterfeiting newer vintages) comes with distinct advantages. Some bottles are rare enough that even experts may not have tasted many, or any, examples before. While the best blind tasters can often detect minute clues to a wine’s origins, most wine drinkers—prominent collectors among them—have no idea what exceptionally rare bottles should taste like. This, added to the natural complexity and variability of wine aging, means that taste is an unreliable indicator of wine fraud—convenient for potential bottle-refillers. While wine counterfeiters like Kurniawan often try to ensure that the wines taste plausible, they usually don’t have to work too hard.
Though wine fraud can be found in just about every country today, the wine swindlers buying bottles on eBay are likely to be targeting the Chinese wine market. In China, wine has become exponentially more popular over the last decade, but consumer knowledge has not yet caught up. As Prof. Anqi Shen of Northumbria Law School notes in the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, because wine’s increase in popularity in China is so recent, even consumers with the cash for big-name bottles often lack the same level of knowledge of consumers in countries with longer traditions of grape winemaking. These wine buyers may miss signs of counterfeiting that might seem obvious to buyers in other countries, such as misspellings on the label.
Luckily, wine education in China is also booming. As of this year, The Wine and Spirits Education Trust (WSET) now licenses over 100 course providers in mainland China. China also got its first Master Sommelier, Lu Yang, in 2017. So the days of rampant Chinese wine fraud may be numbered—although, if the many wine fraud news stories coming out of Europe are any indication, even countries with centuries of winemaking don’t have it all figured out yet.
Further reading
The British Trade Journal and Export World, Volume 22, 1884 (available for free on Google Books)
