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Collector sold wine ‘made in his kitchen’
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One of the world’s top wine collectors is on trial in New York on charges of selling fake vintage wine that could see him jailed 40 years.
Indonesian-born Rudy Kurniawan, who has lived illegally in the United States since his asylum bid was rejected in 2003, was once considered one of the top five wine collectors in the world.
The court heard how he rose rapidly to the top of his profession thanks to his exceptional palate, capable of identifying and memorizing the world’s finest wines, and spent millions each year.
But prosecutors say his lifestyle was built on a lie.
They say he sold at auction and direct to collectors, ordinary wine that he blended in his kitchen “laboratory” and re-bottled to masquerade as vintage wines worth thousands of dollars.
“The entire house was a wine cellar, a wine factory,” FBI agent James Wynne, who searched Kurniawan’s California home during his March 2012 arrest, told the court.
The temperature was kept very low and one of the rooms was refrigerated, he said.
Bottles everywhere
He said there were bottles everywhere in the kitchen, drawers stuffed full of corks and labels, crates of wine in the dining room and a special area for taking pictures of bottles on sale.
Jurors were shown half a dozen large notebooks in which Kurniawan wrote comments on wine and blending formulae.
There was an email purportedly sent by Kurniawan to a New York restaurant on October 23, 2006 asking them to send empty bottles of the fine wine he drank.
“Don’t wash them, as they need them to look original for a photoshoot,” he is said to have written.
There was a follow-up email in which he complained that “all but two” were broken.
There were also run of the mill bottles on which he allegedly wrote in silver “40-50 DRC,” understood as shorthand for vintage Romanee Conti from the 1940s and 50s.
A bottle of Romanee-Conti can fetch tens of thousands of dollars at auction.
Kurniawan sat expressionless in court. He has lost weight during his 19 months in custody and his boyish face was hidden behind large black-framed spectacles.
The defense has portrayed a young man who desperately wanted to fit into the richer, older world of rare wine collectors.
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