Rudy Kurniawan: The Great Wine Counterfeiter

He was the golden boy of the fine-wine world — a young collector with a magical palate and a seemingly bottomless supply of the rarest old Burgundy on earth. He was also the greatest wine forger in history, faking priceless bottles in his kitchen and selling them for tens of millions of dollars. The rise and fall of Rudy Kurniawan is the story of how the world’s most trusting luxury market got played¹.

The wunderkind of rare wine

In the booming rare-wine market of the 2000s, Rudy Kurniawan seemed to come from nowhere and conquer everything. Young, charming and apparently rich, he bought and sold the world’s greatest wines with abandon, and he seemed to possess an almost supernatural cellar — case after case of impossibly old, impossibly rare Burgundy and Bordeaux³.

His palate was genuinely gifted, and collectors adored him; they called him “Dr Conti” for his devotion to Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, the most coveted wine on earth. In one year alone he sold something like thirty-five million dollars’ worth of wine at auction. Almost no one asked the obvious question: where was all this ancient, vanishingly rare wine actually coming from?³

The forgery in the kitchen

The answer was his kitchen in Arcadia, near Los Angeles. There, from 2004 to 2012, Kurniawan ran an astonishingly brazen counterfeiting operation¹. He blended cheaper, younger wines to mimic the taste of famous old vintages, poured them into genuine old bottles, and sealed them with fake labels he printed and aged himself — even soaking labels and mixing recipes to match specific legendary wines.

When the FBI later raided the house, they found the whole factory: thousands of fake and empty bottles, stacks of counterfeit labels, old corks, rubber stamps, and notes on how to blend one great wine from several ordinary ones². He had been manufacturing legends by the case.

The bottle that gave him away

His undoing came, fittingly, from a wine too good to be true. At a 2008 auction, Kurniawan offered magnums of a rare Clos Saint-Denis from Domaine Ponsot, from vintages of the 1940s through the 1960s³.

The domaine never made those wines — so how could he be selling them?— Laurent Ponsot, on the fake bottles³

There was just one problem: Domaine Ponsot had not started producing that wine until 1982. Alerted to the impossible bottles, Laurent Ponsot flew to New York and had the lots pulled from the sale — and began quietly pulling at the thread that would unravel the whole fraud.

The raid and the reckoning

Ponsot was not alone. The billionaire collector Bill Koch, who had bought Kurniawan fakes, launched his own relentless pursuit through the courts⁴. In March 2012 the FBI finally raided Kurniawan’s home, found the counterfeiting lab, and arrested him.

Convicted in 2013 and sentenced in 2014 to ten years in prison, he became the first person ever found guilty of wine counterfeiting in a US federal court¹. His extraordinary story was later told in the documentary Sour Grapes⁵.

The fakes that are still out there

The most unsettling part of the tale is its aftermath. Kurniawan flooded the market with an estimated tens of millions of dollars of counterfeit wine, and no one knows how many of his fakes are still out there — sitting in cellars, changing hands, perhaps waiting to be opened at some grand dinner⁵.

The scandal forced a reckoning on the fine-wine world. Auction houses and collectors grew far more serious about provenance and authentication, and the comfortable assumption that a rare old bottle was exactly what its label claimed was gone for good. Rudy Kurniawan’s real legacy is a market that learned, the hard way, to stop trusting the label and start checking the wine⁴.

Frequently asked questions

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References

1. U.S. Department of Justice (SDNY) — Prominent Wine Dealer Rudy Kurniawan Sentenced to 10 Years. ↑
2. FBI — Rare Wine Dealer Sentenced in Counterfeiting Scheme. ↑
3. Wine Spectator — Wine Counterfeiter Rudy Kurniawan Sentenced to 10 Years. ↑
4. CBS News New York — California Wine Counterfeiter Rudy Kurniawan Gets 10 Years. ↑
5. cas d’intérêt — The Contentious Comeback of Wine Forger Rudy Kurniawan. ↑

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine

Hugh Johnson

A grand history of wine and the rare-bottle market that a forger like Kurniawan learned to exploit.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses

Tom Standage

On the value and meaning humans pour into wine — the very things that make counterfeiting so profitable.

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