QotD: Fake rare wine

The extraordinary inflation of rare-wine prices — of which the Jefferson bottles are the most conspicuous example — has led in recent years to an explosion of counterfeits in the wine trade. In 2000, Italian authorities confiscated twenty thousand bottles of phony Sassicaia, a sought-after Tuscan red; Chinese counterfeiters have begun peddling fake Lafite. So-called "trophy" wines — best-of-the-century vintages of old Bordeaux — that were difficult to find at auction in the nineteen-seventies and eighties have reëmerged on the market in great numbers. Serena Sutcliffe, the head of Sotheby's international wine department, jokes that more 1945 Mouton was consumed on the fiftieth anniversary of the vintage, in 1995, than was ever produced to begin with.

Patrick Radden Keefe, "The Jefferson Bottles: How could one collector find so much rare fine wine?", The New Yorker, 2007-09-03