Of wine and fraud

Do wine consumers face mass scale adulteration risks that plague the whiskey market?

Sassicaia

It is said, possibly apocryphally, that more scotch is sold in India than is manufactured in Scotland — an estimate used to highlight the rampant adulteration in the desi whiskey market and the dangers of buying Johnny Walker and Glen{filig}dditch from your bootlegger, however reliable you think he is.

Is wine immune from such mass scale fraud? It may seem tempting to think so. Most stories about wine fraud after all have to do with gullible individual collectors and small quantities of high-end wine. (Example: In 1986, a collector of antiquities paid half a million dollars for four bottles of what he thought was a 1787 Chateau La{filig}te that belonged to Thomas Jefferson. He was fooled on both counts.)

Of course, wine history records a few instances that go beyond this kind of speci{filig}c collector fraud. What was known in medieval England as Devonshire colic was the result of the widespread practice in Europe of adulterating wine with lead to improve its longevity. In the mid-Eighties, large quantities of German wine were mixed, against regulations, with Austrian wine; and a decade ago, almost 2000 cases of Sassicaia, the legendary Super Tuscan, was found to be adulterated.

But do wine consumers face the kind of persistent mass scale adulteration risks that plague the whiskey market? Some years ago, the answer would probably have been no. No longer. The reason for this can be summed up in one word: China.

For many years now, the Chinese have showed an insatiable thirst for luxury wines — mainly reds from Bordeaux. The country, which has become the second biggest export destination for Bordeaux after the European Union, has driven the prices of {filig}rst and second rung wines from the region to unimaginable levels.

This phenomenon has been accompanied by another — adulteration. Empty bottles of vintage wines, which are openly solicited on websites, are fetching huge prices. A report quotes one buyer as saying he will buy only genuine empty bottles, which suggests that there is a market for fake empties as well! There are guesstimates that over half of Chateau La{filig}te consumed in the country is counterfeit.

Rich wine-loving Chinese have been scammed in other ways as well. Traders have sold Bordeaux en primeur (or wine futures) to gullible customers with no intent of making a delivery. And a number of Chinese wineries have been raided late last year for adulterating their wines.

Skyrocketing prices and a growing global demand exacerbate the risk of mass scale wine fraud. This is something I suspect Indian consumers will be talking about in a few years.

We have a showy and shallow whiskey drinking culture in which Scotch is a must, never mind if bootlegged and counterfeit. It will be a pity if we go the same way with wine.