A French wine expert says he sniffed out that vino collector Rudy Kurniawan was a fraud trying to pawn off fake vintages long before he was busted last year.
Laurent Ponsot, of the renowned Burgundy estate Domaine Ponsot, testified at Kurniawan’s Manhattan federal court trial on Thursday that the 37-year-old once put up at auction 97 bottles of wine he claimed came from the winery for prices ranging from $440,500 to $602,000, AFP reported.
Ponsot said he knew they were fakes and flew to Manhattan to have the bottles pulled from the April 2008 auction by Acker Merrall & Condit. He said a catalog had the auction offering Clos Saint Denis bottles from 1945 to 1949 — even though the winery didn’t start producing that appellation until 1982.
“This one is very obvious,” he said, while reviewing one of the bottles. “Clos Saint-Denis, and it says 1945. This cannot exist.”
In what is their first criminal case of vintage-wine counterfeiting, the feds claim Kurniawan turned his four-bedroom home in Arcadia, Calif., into a virtual “wine factory” in which he used his computer and printer to create the labels while mixing cheap French wines and California blends to pass off as rare vino.
He was busted last year after spending about a decade as one of the country’s leading wine connoisseurs, famed for hosting lavish tasting parties at posh New York restaurants.