GET REAL!!

April 25, 2008

I am not terribly certain what this world is coming to, or I have a good idea and I am loathe to admit it, but is nothing sacred any more?

My friend Toby Miller sent me an article from the trusted and vaunted MSN Money site which related the story that certain aged and revered bottles of old Bordeaux’s may be nothing more than cru bourgeois performing a drag routine to make unsuspecting auction patrons bid more, spend more, and have their friends ogle more. 

Here’s the scam: old bottles of wines, some dating to Thomas Jefferson’s era, have been popping up on auctions since the last time good ole’ Tom re-did the wallpaper in Monticello.

These bottles of Jefferson Wine capture outrageous prices at auction due to their link to our past, and there are many people out there with far too much money, way too much time, and more than a little ego willing to own a “piece of history”. 

Anyway seems new age-testing techniques are turning up more than just a couple of wines and wine bottles that, if authentic, would make the Founding Fathers the longest lived men in history. In other words, the wine bottles are fakes.

While the $500,000 price paid for these bottles may be a mere trifle for the guy who wrote the check, the fact that the bottles were not authentic casts a nasty light on everyone in the transaction prior to the signature affixed to the lower right-hand corner.

This unseemly development has caused auction houses and fine wine chateaux to seek a way that would eliminate this issue in the future. Not much to be done looking back, but why let this revolting set of circumstances continue on to haunt our children?

Sensing that there’s a buck on the table they have not yet claimed, Eastman Kodak and Hewlett-Packard have cornered the market on tracking down, and preventing, wine fraud.

Wafer-thin discs embedded in the bottle, or placed under the label, and counterfeit-proof labels are the two directions receiving the most attention. 

Either way, winemakers are looking at adding another $1 a bottle to assure authenticity. When you consider the price of a bottle of Staglin, that’s not a lot of money. Of course, my idea to wrap the neck of the bottle with a piece of duct tape and write on it, “The Real Deal,” did not receive a fair airing. Go figure.

At any rate, both the Kodak and the H-P approach will really serve the auction markets, since each require a “reading machine” to decipher the embedded codes. And as all you Early Adaptors know, the more limited the function of a technical product, the more expensive it is going to be.

Now, all of this discussion and research is to cure a problem that no one has any idea how big it is.

Counterfeiting overall is a huge national issue, estimated to cost U.S. businesses $200 to $250 billion each year, according to the FBI. Wine counterfeiting is estimated to be 5% of the issue as a whole. $10 billion dollars is a good chunk of change.

Normally it should be easy to determine the condition and the true age of a wine. What this all points up is that those bottles sold at auction because of their history, or their rarity, are never meant to be opened. Never. The wine is not the issue, then. It’s the package.

In those bottles you can look at the liquid, but you can’t tell the subtleties of the color and you can’t appreciate the nuances of the bouquet.

But you can stare at the label and feel the bottle and be put in touch with another time, at a great cost. You can savor the connection to a different era, and different standards. 

Or maybe you are falling love with the work of some guy named Manny who has a garage in Hoboken.