The shocking truth about adulterated wine: it was delicious

In 2012 the esoteric world of wine connoisseurship made the news when the FBI raided the Californian home of an Indonesian national called Rudy Kurniawan. They found a factory for creating fake wines with bottles, corks, labels and even recipes. According to Rebecca Gibb in Vintage Crime, Kurniawan’s counterfeit Mouton Rothschild from the legendary 1945 vintage consisted of two parts Cos d’Estournel, one part Château Palmer and one part California cabernet. Now tell me that doesn’t sound delicious.

The book takes the reader on a highly entertaining tour of wine fraud from ancient times up to the present day. Gibb is a Master of Wine but wears her erudition lightly. Perhaps a little too lightly at times, leading to sentences such as: ‘Socialism and trade unionism gained more followers in the last third of the 19th century than a Hollywood A-list celebrity on social media.’ I also wish Gibb would trust the reader a little more. We don’t need to be told that The Simpsons is ‘one of the longest-running American television shows, as well as Time magazine’s best show of the 20th century’. I suspect the hand of an overzealous editor. But at its best Vintage Crime is an eye-opening account of how wine fraudsters have been pulling the wool over our eyes for centuries.

The book is full of brilliant details, such as that the Cruse headquarters in Bordeaux, the site of one of the biggest fraudulent wine scandals in French history, is ‘now home to a company specialising in unblocking toilets’. There are some good puns too: that chapter is entitled ‘From the Quai to the dock’. In the 1970s, the Cruse family was selling cheaper southern wine as Bordeaux, but historically adulteration has tended to break into the public consciousness only when people started dying.