Wine fraud

Crooks' modern techniques are sophisticated, and while the reality of wine fraud investigation is now accepted universally, the bad guys are invariably one step ahead. Safeguards developed over the last couple of decades concentrate on the authenticity of the cork, the label, the glass from which the bottle is made, and other material factors. The problem is that until it is poured into someone's tasting glass, the wine itself cannot be judged.

Master forger Rudy Kurniawan, just released after serving jail time for fraud, was found to have at the time of his arrest, a laboratory for counterfeiting bottles of phoney wine, even down to the paper for the labels. He would bribe restaurant employees to provide him with empty bottles of expensive wines.

The whole issue of fake wine is in danger of becoming the stuff of la-la land. A story doing the rounds focuses on how microscopic holes are drilled in the bottle of an expensive wine and the contents of the bottle then extracted. When the holes are sealed the bottle is filled with inferior wine, to be sold at the value of the original.

All believable so far, but let's give a thought to what happens to the original wine, syphoned off somewhere. How do the crooks sell this great wine if it has no original bottle or label? Or do they just have a weekly piss-up?