Risk register · entry
Q-F · FraudRudy Kurniawan wine fraud
The most trusted palate in rare Burgundy. The bottles came out of his own kitchen.
The fifth quadrant, where the thing was never real. The tell is that the story is too clean.
Why this quadrant
The bottles were never what the labels said. Kurniawan blended cheaper wines at his home in Arcadia, California, poured the mix into old bottles of rare Burgundy and Bordeaux, sealed them with corks and labels he made himself, and sold them at auction and privately to collectors. Buyers were paying for provenance they could not check: the wines were decades old, estate records were thin, and the seller was the most trusted palate in the market. The tell was in the catalogue: Domaine Ponsot Clos Saint-Denis from vintages the estate never made. That is Q-F: the asset never existed in the form it was sold.
The record
- Kurniawan ran the counterfeiting scheme from 2004 through 2012, from what prosecutors called, in effect, a counterfeit wine laboratory at his home in Arcadia, California.certain
- On 7 August 2014 he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, ordered to forfeit $20 million and to pay $28,405,502.50 in restitution to his victims.certain
- A jury convicted him in December 2013, after a one-week trial in Manhattan federal court. He was also convicted of obtaining a $3 million loan by hiding about $7.4 million of other debts.certain
- He sold $35 million of wine at two Acker Merrall & Condit auctions in 2006 alone, plus millions more at other auctions and in private sales.high
- In 2008 he consigned Domaine Ponsot Clos Saint-Denis from the 1945 to 1971 vintages to an Acker auction in New York. Ponsot had made no Clos Saint-Denis before 1982, and the wines were withdrawn from the sale.high
- The FBI arrested him in March 2012. He was released to immigration custody on 6 November 2020 and removed to Indonesia in April 2021.certain
Sources
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