Fads and frauds

In May last year, the Hong Kong branch of Berry Brothers & Rudd – the world’s oldest wine merchant, was reportedly mobbed by Chinese people waving cheque books and shouting: “Just tell me the number I need to write.” They were desperate to get their hands on some Bordeaux 2009 – a much-hyped vintage where the opening prices for the top 60 chateaux were up 70% on the year before.

Behind the Chinese came a surge of speculation and fraud. At the Bordeaux Index, which acts as a mini stock exchange for collectable wines, sales director Sam Gleave was deeply concerned. “The potential for damage is massive,” he explained. “If they [the Chinese] lose money they lose face and hence trust in fine wine as a product.” And they will lose money once the speculative bubble bursts, which it will do probably sooner rather than later. The ensuing collapse of the Asian market will leave fraudsters and legitimate traders staring at a very dead goose with no more golden eggs to lay.

At the other end of the market, hundreds of bottles of fake Jacob’s Creek began appearing in the south of England in February. They were said to have come from China, and consumers were warned to be suspicious of inferior quality and to check the back labels where the words “wine of Austrlia” was a bit of a giveaway.

Around 20 years ago Christopher Fielden wrote a book on the subject called Is This The Wine You Ordered, Sir? It includes a rogues’ gallery of additives, from the lead used by the Romans to sweeten their wines to the gooseberries turned into fake champagne by the Victorians. Other ingredients included arsenic, bacon fat, horseradish, soot and vinegar, which was used to sweeten tart (presumably very tart) wines. My favourite is swallow beaks, which were cooked up and ground into a powder which was added to the wine and stopped you getting drunk – apparently.

The book covers frauds such as an Italian producer who could create instant chianti, frascati and lambrusco from a recipe involving ox blood and the sludge from banana boats, to the Austrian antifreeze scandal of 1985. As Fielden points out, the additive was not actually antifreeze and no-one suffered more than a headache, but it made a good headline and killed Austrian wine exports almost stone dead.

He has plans to write a sequel, so I asked him if wine fraud has got worse.

He replied: “I feel there have been two big developments, one at the top end with demand from the Chinese for great claret, and the other in the mass market where consumers move in droves and production cannot keep up. Rather sadly, fashion is dictating what we should drink.”

Pinot grigio, unheard of a generation ago, is now the most popular white after chardonnay. But Fielden has “absolutely no doubt that vast quantities had nothing to do with pinot grigio”. At least with the current over-production in wine, which has caused grape prices to collapse, there is less incentive to use soot or banana sludge.