Released Wine Faker Rudy Kurniawan awaiting Deportation

Arrested in 2012 in California, Rudy Kurniawan was released from the prison on November 6 and is reportedly awaiting deportation at the El Paso Center of ICE. There are rumours that he may not even be deported.  After over a decade of making and selling fake wines made in his house, he was arrested ahead of an Auction in 2008, caught selling forged vintages of 1945-1971, by Laurent Ponsot, 4th generation owner of Domaine Ponsot. He was awarded a sentence of 10 years that was reduced to 7 years.

His basic method of blending old commercial grade wine from France with young American wine made from the same variety of grapes was very successful. The gullible collectors were very impressed with the funk of old wine, but an amazing youthful fruit layer. Recycling old bottles, he’d re-label them as legendary French vintages.

Also Read : Kurniawan Sentencing postponed to August 4

Wine counterfeiting is low on the list of crimes by the US government for prosecution. He might not have been prosecuted but for the effort of New York prosecutor Hernandez, who is a passionate wine collector.

Home Alone

It is still not clear if he worked alone or was part of a well-knit network. Nobody has so far established who provided his initial funding. His trial suggested it was improbable that he could have caused so much damage to the fine wine system all alone. However, nobody else has been booked for the offence yet.

Fake Wines- a big market

Fake fine wine is a lucrative business worth about $3 B, with an estimated 20 % of fine wine sales being counterfeit. But verifying provenance is not easy for rare and fine wines, where guaranteeing authenticity is not easy since wines can change ownership frequently and document tampering is a risk.

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Maureen Downey was a Speaker at the second edition of MUST Fermenting Ideas in Cascais, Portugal in 2018 which I had attended. She created ripples when she said that counterfeiting was as early as winemaking in Egypt but people do not take fake wines seriously until there are deaths. Giving examples of the fraud she claimed that the real culprits were still not prosecuted.

The penalty for being caught is too little and after spending time the criminals go back to the same work. One has to take a dim view of collectible wines. She gives out a lot of information on winefraud.com and offers services for identifying fraudulent wines. She claimed that the East European mafia was behind counterfeiting. All the confiscated wines are generally returned to the owner after trial and are back in circulation. Unfortunately, people are more concerned about price than provenance, she claimed.

Back to where he once belonged

It is not clear what Rudy plans to do if and after he is deported, which in all likelihood will be to his native country Indonesia. He could possibly mend his habits and become an expert in spotting fake wines professionally-a respectable business. But like the Bollywood blockbuster Bunty Aur Babli, it is unlikely and he might even team up with his uncle Eddy Tansil.  

Also Read : Historical Conviction of Indonesian for Selling Fake Wines

Tansil went to China after bribing his way out of an Indonesian prison in 1996, barely 2 years after being awarded a 17-year sentence for embezzling $420 million from Bank Pembangunan Indonesia. Two years later he was running a large beer brewery in Fujian. Indonesian request for his extradition remains pending (reminds one of the case of Vijay Mallya of India now awaiting extradition in the UK).

"It's the same bad guys over and over again. When they do get caught, they don't get in any trouble. The United States is unlikely to make wine counterfeiting an important crime. These wines are not trading publicly. If they got rejected by an auction house, they sell privately. To the affluent clients who get shafted in the process,” says Downey.

Change in Fraud Business

‘But the wine counterfeiting business has changed while Kurniawan was in prison’, Downey says. He was a specialist in older, rare wines. Nowadays, counterfeiters make current release wine, which is a lot easier. Just last month, Italian police busted a counterfeit ring near Milan that had been about to sell 1100 cases (6-bottles) of fake Sassicaia 2015.

Making fakes slightly more difficult

Meanwhile, Researchers have been working hard to devise modern techniques to make fake wine more difficult. A recent research from the University of Adelaide promises to offer a fast and reliable method of verifying the authenticity of any wine bottle.

The team wanted to produce a quick, cheap, and reliable method of testing the authenticity of wines, to protect the health and interests of clients and to give winemakers means of building regional branding. They successfully applied a novel technique of molecular fingerprinting using fluorescence spectroscopy to identify the geographical origins of three wine regions in Australia and the Bordeaux region of France with 100% accuracy.

“Wine authentication can help to avoid any uncertainty around wine labelling according to the origin, variety, or vintage. The application of a relatively simple technique like this could be adapted for use in the supply chain as a robust method for authentication or detection of adulterated wines.” says Ruchira Ranaweera, a Ph.D. student in the Waite Research Institute, who conducted the research. The relevant paper has been published in the journal Food Chemistry.

Also Read : Days of Wine and Wealth over for Indonesian

The fake fine wine business is not going to be eliminated fully. Collectibles are best afforded by billionaires or high net worth millionaires who don’t mind losing a few millions because of 20% chance of fake wines in their portfolio. Downing continues to provide consultancy service to such clients spotting the fakes.

Subhash Arora

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