SAINT-EMILION, France (AP) — An FBI agent recently showedArnaud de Laforcade a file with
several labels supposedly from 1947bottles of Chateau Cheval Blanc, one of France’s finest wines. To
theSaint-Emilion vineyard’s CFO, they were clearly fakes — too new looking,not on the right kind of
paper.But customers may be more easily duped.Regardlessof his skill, the counterfeiter had ambition:
1947 is widely consideredan exceptionally good year, and Cheval Blanc’s production that year hasbeen
called the greatest Bordeaux ever. The current average price paidfor a bottle at auction is about
$11,500, according to truebottle.com,which tracks auctions and helps consumers spot
fakes.Counterfeitinghas likely dogged wine as long as it has been produced. In the 18thcentury, King
Louis XV ordered the makers of Cotes du Rhone to brandtheir barrels with "CDR" before export
to prevent fraud.But it isgetting more sophisticated and more ambitious, particularly as bottleprices
rise due to huge demand in new markets, mainly in Asia. Afterdecades of silence, producers across the
$217-billion industry arefinally beginning to talk about the problem and ways to combat
it.Theastronomical prices paid for fine wine these days makes the bottles"more than just a luxury
item," said Spiros Malandrakis, senior analystof the alcoholic drinks market at Euromonitor, a
research firm. "Theybecome a currency in themselves. And as with every currency, at somepoint,
people want to find ways to manipulate that and make more money."SIZING UP THE PROBLEMExpertssay
it’s impossible to know the size of the counterfeit market.Partially that’s because many sales happen
privately and because it iswoven into a legal market, unlike, say, cocaine trafficking. Many
knowncounterfeits likely go unreported because the victims are embarrassed —and chagrined to lose their
investment. Industry insiders, meanwhile,have long ignored the problem collectively as producers were
afraid ofscaring customers.But many experts agree on one point: thequantity of rare bottles from
illustrious vineyards being auctioned isjust too high to not include fakes."I think it’s pretty
obviousto everybody that there is a relatively large amount of counterfeitwines from these top wineries
that is on the market," said LeonardoLoCascio, founder of Winebow, a leading U.S. importer of
wine.MaureenDowney, an expert wine appraiser and authenticator who founded ChaiConsulting, says it is
important not to overestimate the problem,guessing it is still probably a very small proportion of the
global winetrade, but she added that many producers think that recent publicity onthe problem means it’s
been solved.Not so, she and others said. In fact, it will likely simply get more sophisticated and even
harder to track and estimate.China’scase is a good illustration of the evolution of
counterfeiting.Initially, criminals took advantage of the country’s twin weaknesses:consumers who were
new to wine but had the money to buy it for show.That led to flagrant fakes, whose labels simply piled
on the names — ornear names — of as many famous vineyards and locales as possible,claiming, for example,
to be a great Burgundy wine from a famousBordeaux chateau.But in the past two years, as more
Chinesebecame connoisseurs, there has been an explosion in Asia of more refinedcounterfeits, says Mark
Solomon, who co-founded truebottle.com.Expertsfear this problem will only continue to grow and won’t be
confined toAsia, as technology makes it possible to make better fakes and steadilyrising auction prices
make it worth the while."It’s kind of anarms race" between the increasing sophistication of
the methods used toauthenticate bottles and the increasing sophistication ofcounterfeiters, said
Solomon.FIGHTING BACKOn the frontlines of that race is Bernard Medina, who is the director of a lab
runby the French Finance Ministry in Bordeaux devoted to sniffing out fakewine. He recently laid out at
least 15 bottles when journalists came tovisit that ran the gamut from the silly to the serious. Some
wereoutrageous amalgamations, like the bottle that had "Luxembourg" on thelabel and
"produit de France" below that. Others were trying to giveconsumers just a soupcon of glamour:
Chatelet Cheval Blanc, anotherattempt to copy the illustrious Chateau Cheval Blanc. Most of thebottles
were picked up in China by French customs or fraud agents andwould easily be sorted out.But Medina also
sometimes receivesbottles from chateaux in the surrounding area, which is home to many ofthe world’s
best wines. These are suspected fakes but so well done thateven the owners aren’t quite sure if they
might be real.Medina’slab runs a series of tests on bottles that come their way: measuring theisotopes
of certain elements can determine generally which country awine comes from, measuring the trace
radioactivity in a bottle canbroadly determine its age. Wines that claim to be from before theinvention
of the atom bomb, for instance, should have no cesium-137. Bycontrast, bottles from the 1960s, when
nuclear tests happened almostweekly, show a noticeable spike in cesium.The lab also makes itsown wines
from grapes collected about every 30 miles (50 kilometers)across Western France. Each of those wines
then serves as a referencepoint for a given year and micro-region.None of these tests isdefinitive, but,
taken together, they can generally sniff out the fakes.Medina warns, however, that over the past year he
has been seeing fewerof the gross counterfeits and expects criminals are focusing on harderto spot, more
lucrative fakes.For instance, counterfeiters buy upold, empty bottles from the best vineyards, so the
wine would pass atest that sampled the bottle’s glass or inspected the label. A recentsearch on eBay
showed several old, empty bottles were for sale,including a 1958 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, a 1928
Chateau Margaux and a1971 Romanee Conti — all of which are some of the most counterfeitedwines.Several
wineries are laser-engraving their bottles withunique serial numbers. Other wineries are experimenting
with hologrammedor bar-coded stickers placed half on the bottle, half on the capsule —the foil that
covers the cork — that serve as id tags and will shred ifremoved. The Bordeaux winegrowers’ professional
association has createdan app, called Smart Bordeaux, that it bills as the "Shazam for
wine."Point your cell phone camera at a wine bottle’s label and the app willgive you information
about the wine and contact details for the winery.Smart Bordeaux is also keeping a database of labels
that appear to befakes.CODE OF SILENCEHindering the industry’s ability toshake out the forgeries is the
wine industry’s secretiveness. It is adiscrete business, conducted quietly among a relatively small
number ofpeople who know one another. When a bad apple worms its way into thatcircle, many it seems
would rather swallow their losses than rat outtheir "friends" and admit their own
ignorance.Bill Koch, thebillionaire businessman whose cellar includes 43,000 bottles of wine,says he has
upset that order by becoming a vocal crusader against fakes.He started collecting wine about 40 years
ago and has bought some ofthe most sought-after wines in the world, including bottles thatpurported to
be part of Thomas Jefferson’s private collection.Thosewere the first bottles Koch discovered were fake,
but the experienceled him to hire experts to sniff out the other forgeries. They havefound 500 to 600
counterfeit bottles, for which he paid between $4million and $5 million — and the experts aren’t yet
finished."There’sa code of silence in the entire industry," Koch said, but his lawsuitsagainst
the auction houses where he bought fakes have threatened that.Ashave high-profile cases like the FBI’s
against Rudy Kurniawan, who isaccused of selling $1.3 million worth of counterfeit wine — and believedto
have put many more millions of dollars in fakes on the market."Ithink the ostrich strategy, hiding
yourself and saying we’ll figure itout later, is not satisfying," said Fabien Teitgen, who is in
charge ofwinemaking at Smith Haut Lafitte in Bordeaux. "The best is to speakabout it openly and to
say what we’re doing and let the consumers knowwhat means there are to verify that they have the right
product."Notall wineries feel that way. Some, at the very highest levels of winemaking, have told
Koch that their wine is "too good to be faked."Downey says consumers also have to get smarter,
choosing a reputable merchant and resisting "deals.""Spending $5,000 on a $7,000 bottle
is not a bargain," said Downey.Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rightsreserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten orredistributed.