How to identify counterfeit wines

The true and false of wine is not as easy as a Picasso painting. The so-called real painting is Mr. Picasso's own handwriting, and the fake painting is the copy of others. There are many different wines. A fake wine from a fake Lafite winery may be injected into an empty bottle for several years of Lafite, marked with a good year but blended in with a slightly different year, or there may be some wine It's not Lafite. It's from a cheap place of production in Shenzhen. It's also possible that the bottle is not wine at all. Rafi, who was strongly sought after in the market in 1982, has been active for more than 10 years, but it still seems to have a steady stream of sources.

The most famous fake wine “Jefferson Incident” in the famous fake wine event caused the integrity of the entire antique wine to almost collapse. The various wine merchants, wine critics, collectors and auction houses involved were the leaders in the industry at that time. It is said that when people demolished a house built in the middle of the 18th century in 1985, they discovered more than 100 bottles of Jefferson, one of the signatories of the Independent 198 years ago, including Lafite and Margaux. , Igan and Mouton Winery. At the auction held by Christie's, all of these wines were sold at high prices and sold to all corners of the world. The New York Times published a report titled "The Oldest Bordeaux?" Yes, Jefferson's wine? Maybe". It turns out that most of Jefferson's wine is gone, and the names of Jefferson's names on those bottles may have been hand-carved by a 21st century man. Of course, these wines did not exist in Jefferson's detailed wine purchase record. However, at the time people were discovered that the excitement and benefits of antique wines were blinded, and this made vinegar still unacknowledged in some cellars of billionaires. Of course, there were more incidents where fake wine appeared on the auction house. At the auction held in Chicago in September 1990, the 1947 vintage of Romanee Conti appeared on the catalog of Christie's auction company, but it was true. The situation was that the vineyard was transplanted with vines as a result of nodule schistosomiasis and no wine was produced.

Wine competitions have caused some wine collectors to be irresponsibly bought for a particular premium winery or brand of wine. In the Asian consumer market represented by Japan in the last century, the high-priced wines that can be found everywhere in the wild have created an unprecedented increase in the price of the entire wine market, which has led to the use of false invaders to create fake wines. A bottle of ten thousand yuan of wine has mushroomed in the market, and Asian consumers who have just been in contact with high-priced wines will not doubt the credibility of these wines. They are not hesitant to make purchases, resulting in high prices. Wine is far simpler and safer than making errands. At that time, several international conglomerates of counterfeit wines were born.

The simplest counterfeit method for bottled fake wines is to recycle those wine bottles that have been opened and bottled, tear off the labels on the bottles, and place them on the lower-priced wine bottles that have been torn off the labels. can. A skilled counterfeiter will use the wine produced by the same producer but with a lower grade and lower price (although it is not the same grade of wine, but the bottle and the packaging are products on the same production line). As a result, consumers can hardly distinguish authenticity from the differences in the details of seals or bottles. The fake wine from the Christie's auction that was mentioned at the beginning of this article is the same as the 1946 vintage of Echezeaux produced by the Romance Conti (DRC) winery. It is affixed to the bottle. Forged labels. In order to prevent counterfeiting, the DRC began printing wines on the seals from 1970 onwards.

The famous winery, Pak Chui, did not produce low-grade or sub-licensed wines, and the method of counterfeiting was to paste wine labels with higher-priced vintages on wine bottles in those years with poor quality scores. Especially those years of poor harvest, such as Bai Cui in 1992, RP score of 90 points, Bai Cui in 1982, RP score of 100 points, the gap between the 10 points reflected in the price of wine can reach 7 times or more . The price difference is so great, but for the average consumer, even if they bought the 1982 fake wine, it would be difficult to immediately notice that it was not 1982 but rather the 1992 vintage.

There was a series of fake wines from the 1990 Penfold Grange wines in Melbourne, Australia. Its characteristic is that the bar code of the original back label should be red, while the bar code of fake wine is black. This is due to the fact that the bar code for wines prior to the 1990s was red and changed from 1991 to black. However, since counterfeiters did not find the Granny wines of the year 1990, they copied the 1991 wines. This kind of information is very important to consumers and wine merchants.

Only fake wine can be identified through such information. To understand what kinds of wines are forged, and from which areas these fake wines have flowed out. If there is an institution or organization that can collect, summarize, and publicize these fake information, then it is not too difficult for anyone to identify fake wine. After all, having mastered the information, it is possible to identify the authenticity before buying or auctioning a wine. In particular, when the information about a fake wine is known to the general public, then everyone will be extra cautious about this wine and choose reliable importers and sellers to ensure quality. Unfortunately, so far no group or organization has provided such information.

Another way to identify fake wine is to peel off the seal and carefully observe the cork through the bottle. Most wineries, especially those of famous wineries, are engraved with the name of the winery and the harvest year. Observing whether the information on the cork stopper matches the wine label is one of the means to distinguish between true and false. Especially those fake wines that just change the label, this method is suitable. However, not all people will do so. This is because the price of wine with torn seals is much lower than that of full-blown wines, which is an injurious event for investors.

Some wine cellars and wine merchants will also tear off seals when they sell some vintage wines. Therefore, when buying wines, it is necessary to pay attention to the wine labels and seals of these wines and their impact on prices.

In the early 1970s, Bordeaux wine trade began to become popular in France. This quasi-speculative trading made the whole market extremely active, and the wine also reached an unbelievable and expensive price at the time. The temptation of huge interest has led to a large number of fake wines during this period. The culprit was not the small counterfeit workshop we had imagined. On the contrary, it was the five large-scale wine merchants headed by CruseetFils Freres. They disguised the ordinary table wines as AOC-class wines in the French AOC for sale. This led to the drastic drop in Bordeaux wine prices at the time and the price plummeted. This wine scandal happened to be shortly after the 1972 Watergate incident in the United States. It was therefore called the Winegate incident. The wine investment market has been falsified by the effects of fraud, scandals and the economic crisis. It can be seen that any investment is risky.

Since the technology of counterfeiters is getting closer and closer to perfection, when the seals, wine labels, and wine bottles are indistinguishable from each other, can wine tasting be used to taste authenticity? The average consumer may think that as long as the wine is opened for the wine expert to take a sip, it can distinguish between true and false. However, after the Winegate scandal occurred, the judge asked one of the wine merchants: "Why did you not drink the bottle of AOC-class wine when you were trying to drink?" The other person replied: "Who is this? ?"

Since the answer of a generation of wine merchants is the same, then we can almost certainly feel that drinking is not as simple as it seems. An outstanding wine expert not only has the sensitivity and memory of an amazing taste bud, they even have a telepathic response. Not only do you smell wines and taste the wines, they can even see the shape, structure and character of the drink. Researchers at Yale University in the United States have found that these populations account for a very small proportion of the population's taste buds are much denser than the average person - for them, the difference between wine and wine is as simple as a carpenter to distinguish different wood materials. Of course, even the most outstanding taste buds will be planted on the taste buds. When the so-called blind tasting is a wine tasting, the wine-tasting person does not have any additional information besides the glass of wine, and even the shape of the wine bottle is unknown. Sometimes it is possible to Immediately identify what wine is. Especially for newcomers, because there are not many ideas for understanding, they will not be misled by various details, and those professional tasters may not get the correct answer for four or five hours. The outstanding wine-tasting experts even think that pure blind products are boring bar games, and only lay people will pick up. Of course experts can tell the quality and basic information of wine. However, if the quality and basic information of the bottle of fake wine and real wine are similar, unless they are compared with real wine, it is easy to misjudge. The price of La Tache, another field produced by Domaine de la Romane Conti (DRC), is the lowest among the wineries, and the price of wine with Romani Conti can be 5 times different. If you try to separate the two, it is difficult for the owner of the winery to tell you.

With the continuous perfection and improvement of counterfeiting technology, the details of the techniques are increasingly sophisticated and ingenious, not only because of the forgery of labels, but even the forgery of corks and lead seals. The high technology has become the only way to solve such incidents. The French tried to use MRI to identify the grape varieties used in the wine. The University of Saviour in Spain used spectral analysis to compare the trace elements and the origin of the wine. The Italian wine merchants passed a small bar code reader. , can read the bottle label on the bar code in 10 languages. Many wineries that wish to preserve tradition are resistant to anti-counterfeiting measures. In 1957, Obiang used anti-counterfeiting techniques on the label, while Patus and Margaux used laser and etching techniques to make the days of counterfeiters difficult. In 1996, Lafite started to use lettering and embossed wine bottles, and the labels were visible with UV light.

In short, imitation of poor means of fraud, whether it is packaging or wine will be more easily identified, as long as there is a certain degree of wine knowledge consumers can do. However, if the counterfeiting measures are superb, and the use of genuine packaging in a messy manner, or wine fraud similar to that of real wine, will be difficult for both consumers and experienced wine experts. Therefore, when buying wine, it is important to choose a reliable wine seller, especially when the wine price is lower than the market price. Finally, actively collect relevant wine information, understand the source of the wine, not to buy wines from unknown sources.