5 THINGS ABOUT COUNTERFEIT WINE.

Italian police have broken up a ring producing counterfeit Sassicaia wine, a variety considered among the finest in the world that sells for hundreds of dollars a bottle, authorities said on Wednesday. Here's a

breakdown.

1 NO ORDINARY RED

Bolgheri Sassicaia red wine comes from an area on the coast of Tuscany and has become one of Italy's best known fine wines since it appeared on the market in the 1970s. It began in 1944 when winemaker Marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta put 30 of the family's 7,500-acre Tenuta San Guido estate to work on creat

ing a Bordeaux-style red.

2 SMALLEST DETAILS

Officials from the Guardia di Finanza said the sophisticated counterfeit operation bottled inferior wine from Sicily in a warehouse near Milan, with meticulously reproduced labelling and cases that came from Bulgaria. “The bottles and the packaging were perfectly identical to the originals,” Dario Sopranzetti, a colonel in the financial police, told media. “Even the weight of the tissue paper was the same.”

3 A FAKER'S DOZEN

Two men, a father and son, have been put under house arrest and 11 others placed under investigation following an operation launched last year, when a fake case of the wine fell off a truck and was found on the roadside.

4 DEEP DISCOUNT

When police raided the warehouse, the counterfeiters were labelling cases under the rare 2015 vintage, dubbed the best wine in the world by Wine Spectator, the U.S. trade publication that runs a closely watched annual ranking. Sopranzetti said telephone intercepts suggested they were preparing 1,000 cases, which he said can sell for between 1,800 and 2,400 euros ($2,780 and $3,700) each, for South Korea. “From the intercept, we gathered that the counterfeiters were selling a case of 2015 Sassicaia for around 500 euros, or about 70 per cent less than the original,” he said, adding that the group had apparently been turning out 700 cases a month, generating around 400,000 euros ($600,000), but it was unclear how long the operation had been underway.

5 MAMMA MIA

Italy's luxury goods industry has faced a constant battle against counterfeiting. In a 2018 report, the OECD estimated counterfeiting cost Italian food and drink makers 4.2 billion euros ($6.5 billion) in lost sales alone.