An accused wine swindler once tried to pawn off a counterfeit vintage 1929 French Burgundy — using a label made more than five decades later on a printer from Indonesia, an expert testified Monday.
Renowned “wine detective” Michael Egan pulled back a label from what was supposed to be a rare 1929 bottle of Roumier Bonnes-Mares while testifying at Rudy Kurniawan’s fraud trial in Manhattan federal court.
He then revealed to the jury a slight watermark that read “Concord,” explaining his research revealed this as the name of a printer created by a company based in Kurniawan’s native Indonesia.
“I don’t think a [vintage] Bordeaux or a Burgundy would be using a printer from a company that was only established in 1983,” said Egan, who specializes in sniffing out fake wines and has been used extensively by billionaire Bill Koch in his ongoing $25 million crusade to go after wine fraudsters.
Koch testified Friday that he was duped into spending $2.1 million on 219 fake bottles of vino from Kurniawan.
Egan told jurors that “sophisticated” wine counterfeiters “start from scratch.” In Kurniawan’s case, he said, it was scanning bottle labels into a computer at his Arcadia, Calif., home and then using Photoshop to erase the vintage year.
“My opinion is that the materials I reviewed are materials for the manufacturing of counterfeit wine,” testified Egan, who said he examined thousands of labels from Kurniawan’s home.
“Almost all, with very few exceptions, are counterfeit,” he said.
Testifying how fakes have become prevalent in a wine-collection industry that has grown from $90 million to $300 million since 2002, Egan boasted to jurors how he’s uncovered 1,433 bogus bottles of wine over the past seven years.
He said 1,077, or 75 percent, were made by Kurniawan. Most of the bogus bottles were bought by Koch and another top wine collector, real-estate titan Michael Fascitelli.
Egan showed jurors dozens of other bottles of counterfeit wine allegedly sold by Kurniawan. They included labels and stamps of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti that were altered with many inauthentic fonts and type sizes.
In their first criminal case of vintage-wine counterfeiting, the feds claim Kurniawan turned his four-bedroom home in to a virtual “wine factory.”
Kurniawan was busted last year after spending about a decade as one of the country’s leading wine connoisseurs, famed for hosting lavish late-night tasting parties at restaurants, including the since-closed Cru in Greenwich Village.