[中英字幕] 葡萄酒醜聞｜Wine Scandals, by Konstantin Baum, MW

Hi, my name is Konstantin Baum. I'm a master of wine and today I'm going to talk about scandals. But not the UK's Partygate scandal or the Oscar's Slapgate incident. Instead, I'm going to focus on the biggest wine scandals. So let's scandalize. Is that a word? Anyways. Looking back at the history of wine, you will find quite a lot of different scandals. But I've selected three that really left a mark in the wine world. The first one is the so-called anti-freeze scandal. It is easy to forget nowadays that there was a time when producers in Northern Europe really struggled to ripen grapes. Some crafty or rather criminal winemakers came up with the idea of adding diethylene glycol to their wines in order to make them taste sweet without having to go through the arduous process of, you know, letting the grapes ripen. Diethylene glycol can also be used as anti-freeze and it can be poisonous if consumed in larger quantities. But for those wineries, it was an easy way to increase profits. This became common practice amongst a small number of wineries in Austria. And some of the tainted wine was also sold in bulk to bottlers in Germany. They managed to keep it secret for years. But the scandal unfolded when one producer who only owned a small tractor tried to claim a vast amount of anti-freeze as a business expense. That's so stupid. Really stupid. The reaction in the media was extreme and the story went all around the globe. It was on the first page of the New York Times. Glycol became the word of the year in 1985 in Germany. And Austrian wine was banned in several countries including the UK. The first time I saw a reference to the scandal was in the Simpsons episode The Cribs of Wrath when two French winemakers put anti-freeze into their wine and then made Bart drink it. Drink this. Oh, I know. Thanks. Do not worry. This is France. It is customary for children to take a little bite now and then. Yeah, but it's got anti-freeze in there. Drink it. As a result of all the unwanted attention, exports of Austrian wines dropped by 90% and also the reputation of German wines was really tarnished. The dangers of diethylene glycol were largely overstated as most wines didn't contain levels that could really cause death or even really cause any major health risks. The highest level detected in a wine was 48 grams per liter and that was in a Weltschriesling Trockenbeerenauslese from Burgenland. The happy end to the story is that the Austrian wine industry enacted very strict rules and has spent a lot of effort and time into rebuilding its reputation and they are today producing amazing wines all without glycol. Let's move on to another scandal that was even turned into a book and I think there's even a film on the way, The Jefferson Bottles. This is one of those scandals that really highlights how archaic the wine industry is sometimes and how crazy this world can be. Let's start with a question. If a German music manager with a questionable past would approach you offering you some bottles of 1787 Lafite that were also owned by Thomas Jefferson without disclosing his sources, would you spend six figures on them? Probably not. But this is exactly how the story starts. One bottle of this wine was submitted to an auction at Christie's in 1985 and it was sold for a record-breaking $156,000 to the Forbes family. But let's start at the beginning. The music manager was called Hardy Rodenstock and he became famous for locating the world's rarest wines. He had these exclusive and lavish wine tastings where he opened bottles from the best wineries going back to the 18th century and he invited tasters like Jancis Robinson and Robert Parker. He claimed that the bottles were discovered in Paris and that the inscription Lafite THJ referred to Chateau Lafite and Thomas Jefferson. I mean Thomas Jefferson was a wine lover so that part of the story checks out but the rest really doesn't. Experts from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation raised serious doubts about the authenticity of those bottles. And think about this. How many bottles in your collections have your initials engraved into them? Have you ever seen anybody do that in the whole world? I haven't. The Forbes family did not care too much and they stored the bottle in terrible condition so that at some point the shrunken cork just dropped back into the bottle destroying whatever was left of the wine. The story became interesting though when in 1988 the famous businessman Bill Koch bought some of those Jefferson bottles for his own collection. He filed a lawsuit in 2006 after realizing he had been defrauded and spent lots of money on private investigators. What followed were different trials and all of the accused claiming that they did not know what they were doing. What I can definitely tell you after diving deep into this topic is that Rodenstock had his hands on way too many crazy wines in large format bottles for them all to be real. Bill Koch's private investigators claimed that the bottles were probably old but that the engravings which were really important because they suggested that it was Lafite owned by Thomas Jefferson that they were added with a modern dental drill. So here you go. That's how you make the most expensive bottle of wine in the world. You might think that people learned from their mistakes and that the industry as a whole became more careful and less naive. But think again. Because here comes the story of Dr. Conti himself, Rudy Konyawa. What happens if you mix three quarters of old Bordeaux and one quarter of California Cabernet? In Rudy's lab there was the recipe for one of the greatest wines of all time, the 1945 Mouton Rothschild. He infiltrated the high roller wine collector scene and sold millions of dollars worth of unicorn wines. Wines that are really, really rare or that don't exist. They turned this whole story into a documentary called Sour Grapes. And I would really recommend watching it because it's fascinating how unsuspecting these millionaire friends of his are. So Rudy did not only drink expensive wines with his friends. He also made them in his home without anybody realizing it, creating recipes for classic wines. Most of Rudy's wines were sold through an upstart auction house called Acker, Merrill & Condit. That grew into one of the biggest auction houses in the world during this period. It might be surprising that these amateur wine collectors fell for this. But what is really stunning to me is that the wine industry did not catch on to him faster. Because Rudy wasn't some kind of mastermind who knew everything about wine. He actually made some huge mistakes. He sold 1982 Lepin, which the Chateau itself identified as fake. 8 magnums of 1947 La Fleur. Even though there were only 5 magnums made that year. He also sold some 1923 Georges Rumier Bonne Mare. But the problem with that is the Domaine only started making wine in 1924. It really hit the fan when he tried to sell a collection of Domaine Ponceau's Maurice Saint-Denis Grand Cru from the vintages between 1945 and 1971. Laurent Bonceau showed up at the auction and told everyone that they only started making this wine in 1982. When this became public, our friend Bill Koch realized that he had also bought wines from Rudy and sued him. Rudy was arrested in 2012. The images from his home are absolutely crazy. There's a whole library of different labels, corks and different bottles and tools to be able to manufacture great wines. And there were even bottles sitting in the sink ready to be relabeled and remade into the next unicorn wines. Rudy was sentenced to 10 years in prison and was released in 2020 and deported to his home country, Indonesia. The story could end here. But what is very much unclear today is how many of those millions and millions of dollars worth of fake wines that he manufactured are still in circulation. And are being sold and bought at auctions or through other channels today. These incidents did not really have a very strong impact on the fine wine market as a whole. And I really wish that producers and retailers work together in order to combat fraud and counterfeiting. Okay, this was a bit of a different video, but I really enjoyed researching those stories. And I hope you enjoyed listening to them. If you like this video, then please like it down here. Subscribe to my channel if you haven't done so already. My question of the day is, what is your favorite wine scandal? Let me know down below. I hope I see you guys again soon. Until then, stay thirsty.