Wine fraud website in April to track the real McCoys

CONVICTED wine counterfeiter Rudy Kurniawan is safely behind bars, but many of his fakes are still floating around in cellars - along with plenty of other suspect bottles.

Just in time, wine consultant Maureen Downey, who helped the FBI bring Kurniawan down, is launching a website in early April to teach fine wine lovers how to spot what's real and what's not. "Winefraud.com will be a resource for everyone wanting to do due diligence on rare wines," she said. "There's been nowhere to learn about this stuff before." The site will provide tutorials on how to spot fraud and a gallery of photographs of the real wines to compare against a suspect bottle or label.

How big is the fake wine problem? No one really knows. Ms Downey estimates the value of the counterfeits Kurniawan dumped on the market between 2002 and his arrest in 2012 to be roughly US$130 million when he first sold them.