Supermarket wine fraud: Yes, it’s a thing, pt. 1
Most people associate wine fraud with pricey bottles from big-name producers. Why would you counterfeit a $20 basic Burgundy when you could make a $20K Romanée-Conti? How is it possible to make a profit counterfeiting the type of wine you’d find at Trader Joe’s?
This question has more than one answer. Recent investigations have uncovered dozens of instances of wine fraud across the world involving thousands of bottles destined for supermarket shelves. In this series of posts, I’ll talk about some of the ways fraudsters make money from grocery store wine. First up: appellation fraud.
Plonk by any other name
This year, the Grupo Reserva de la Tierra, a Spanish wine producer, got in trouble for allegedly using false labels on their wines. Prosecutors contend that the company inaccurately used Protected Designations of Origin (read: European place names, often known as “appellations,” that are illegal to use if you didn’t grow the wine in that place) on 22.4 million bottles of bottom-shelf table wine sold at supermarkets across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
The company went as far as to prepare multiple tiers of fraudulent bottles: a higher level of quality for submission to wine competitions (gotta have that gold medal on the label), a middle tier for convincing professional wine buyers to stock their products, and the lowest tier for supermarket wine shoppers.
How does this type of fraud usually work? The perpetrators are typically wine producers who buy cheap, low-quality wine from bulk wine-producing areas and sell it as their own product, usually labeling it with appellations known for high quality. This was the case in a recently-uncovered fraud that involved cheap wine imported from various places in Europe and sold as Bordeaux, and in a 2014 bust that saw 220,000 liters of bulk Italian table wine passed off as pricier Brunello and Chianti Classico.
The cost of appellation fraud
Why is supermarket wine fraud such a big deal for wine drinkers? It matters because a PDO label indicates that a wine measures up to a particular quality standard and uses grapes and winemaking techniques typical of its region. If you opened a bottle of Priorat—one of the appellations alleged to have been used fraudulently by Reserva de la Tierra—you’d expect to find a full-bodied, tannic red of good to excellent quality. Consumers who drank the falsely labeled wines received a product that fell short of those expectations, both in quality and style.
“Okay,” you might be saying, “but isn’t it their fault for not knowing the difference between jug wine and the good stuff?” Thing is, consumers likely did catch on that the fake wine wasn’t up to par, especially if they were fans of the wine region whose wines they thought they were buying. However, faced with an unusually bad bottle, most people would say something like “This bottle’s a little off!” instead of “This is clearly dollar store-grade wine with a fake label.” Indeed, court documents reveal “repeated quality complaints” from Aldi and Lidl shoppers about Reserva de la Tierra’s wines, and importers of the fake Brunello reported a “bitter” taste.
Perhaps some drinkers blamed themselves for leaving the wine in the car a little too long and ate the loss. Or maybe they swore never to buy Priorat again, thinking they’d been wrong about the region’s reputation for quality. In other words, wine drinkers and real PDO producers lost out, and companies like Riserva de la Tierra (allegedly) profited—in this case, at a cool €14 million per year.
Stay tuned for the next installment in this series, where I’ll talk about other ways fraudulent wine producers and other bad actors in the industry make money from everyday wines.
