This wine could drive you to drink!
Two Bronx wine collectors bought a $46,227 bottle of red from a celebrity chef only to learn he sold them a phony, a new lawsuit claims.
“It’s frustrating. I thought it was a bargain, but it turned out to be a fake,” wine collector Bekim Frrokaj, 41, of New Rochelle, told The Post.
Frrokaj says he and cousin Ilir Frrokaj flew to Chicago last June to check out a dusty, double-size bottle of 1945 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti owned by the titular chef host of PBS cooking show “The Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter.”
Trotter gave the cousins a convincing sales pitch, prompting them to plunk down cash on the spot — but a month later they learned the rare vino was “counterfeit” when they tried to buy insurance for the bottle, Bekim Frrokaj claims.
A wine expert then informed them the vineyard that had supposedly made the wine had never actually produced a bottle that size in that year, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit calls the bottle “valueless” and the chef “deceptive.”
The suit, filed in federal court in Illinois Thursday, demands that Trotter refund the money and pay for travel expenses as well as $30,000 in punitive damages.
“It’s disappointing,” Frrokaj said.
Trotter could not be reached yesterday.