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.

Add to that hundreds of bottles popping up from the half a dozen other fraudsters convicted in the past couple of years - and new players who haven't yet been caught. The number could easily add up to several hundred million dollars.

If you're a serious collector looking to educate yourself on what to avoid, or you just want to stay tuned to the latest wine crimes and detection methods, subscribing to Winefraud.com may be worth it. (Though it won't be cheap.)

Ms Downey, who got her start as a wine authenticator at three auction houses, founded her own wine collector management firm, San Francisco-based Chai Consulting, in 2005.

Over the past decade, she's built an extensive database of photos and information about fake bottles and a gallery of authentic ones for comparison, including every vintage of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild.

All of this fills 49,943 computer files. "You can't assess authenticity on taste," she says. The files also contain photographs of the bottles, labels, and "to do" lists from the 20 boxes of evidence that the FBI had found in Kurniawan's home and on his computers. (Written on one half-bottle is his recipe for concocting 1945 Chateau Mouton Rothschild!)

"I noticed a lot of things Rudy got wrong with some wines, like the word chateau misspelled on a cork," Ms Downey says. "That's a marker to watch for."

The most useful section on the website will be Wine Authentication 101, a virtual tutorial in specific counterfeit practices, with information from print and paper experts. "There will be enough for collectors to see that a particular bottle might be problematic, but not enough to train counterfeiters," she assures me.

If your thirst for the details of wine crime stories isn't satiated, a blog by former assistant US attorney Jason Hernandez will give you the Kurniawan story from the prosecutor's side.

On the free portion of the site will be a list of merchant members who are committed to fighting fakes and who've been vetted by Ms Downey. Users will be given access by subscription, with three levels of membership: enthusiasts, collectors, and professionals.

Fees will be "in the "hundreds of dollars," according to Ms Downey, but a whole lot cheaper than hiring an expert to vet all your bottles. The collector level includes a professional review of two bottles per year by Ms Downey or another respected authentication expert, Michael Egan, and a discount for additional consulting.

The professional level will list insider information for vendors on specific bottles that have been officially identified as fakes in case they pop back up on the market, as well as alerts on stolen wines, such as those taken from The French Laundry that were later recovered in North Carolina. As prices of rare wines continue to rise, the payoff for selling fakes is huge - even as Kurniawan provides a cautionary example serving a 10-year jail term.

Will this website push merchants to check what they're selling more carefully and help collectors avoid getting conned? I hope so. BLOOMBERG