Inside the world’s greatest wine scam
BEFORE Rudy Kurniawan was 30, he had risen to become a kingpin purveyor of wines that were the rarest of the rare. Then, one Friday evening in 2008, he made a mistake that shattered his career.
It happened at a wine auction held at Greenwich Village restaurant Cru, a hangout for deep-pocketed winolas (shuttered in 2010). Auctioneer Acker Merrall & Condit’s catalog listed 22 lots of red wine from Domaine Ponsot, a Burgundy producer adored by collectors. Six of those lots were touted as Clos SaintDenis, one of the 32 greatest Burgundy appellations. They were being offered in vintages 1945 to l971, all mythic vintages in the region. Their estimated prices reached an eye-popping $70,000 per case. All had been consigned fromm what Kurniawan calledd his “magic cellar.”
There was just one problem, according to fourth-generation pro-oprietor Laurent Ponsot:t: His father had no accessss to Clos Saint-Deniss vines until 1982 — meaning those Domaine Ponsot vintages could not exist. “I did not ever want anyone to buy a wine which had my family’s name on it and be disappointed,” said Ponsot.
Taking an urgent call from Ponsot just a day before the auction, Acker president John Kapon assured thee winemaker that hee would withdraw all 222 lots. To be sure Kapon followed through, Ponsot flew from France and grabbed a taxi directly to Cru. He arrived a few minutes after I did — a fine featured man with cool blue eyes and selfdescribed “Jesus length” blond hair. Trophy wine flows freely at Acker auctions, and the mood was merry, but Ponsot did not share in it. He settled into a corner banquet and stonily awaited his lots to come up.
Midway through the auction, Kapon kept his promise, pausing the fast-paced action from the podium. “We’ve got a little unusual situation here,” he said. “At the request of the domain, and with the consent of the consignor, we’re withdrawing lots 414 through 434 [all the Ponsot lots]. I guess there were a couple of inconsistencies here, so we had to pull ’em.”
“F--k you,” yelled a collector who had traveled from Los Angeles to bid on the never-before-seen Ponsots.
MORE“f--k you” days were about to hit Wall Street. The subprime mortage market had imploded the previous year, and autumn’s massive meltdown was six months away. But year-end bonuses had been munificent, and too much money wawas jingling in too mamany pockets. Fancy old wine had become an alluring place to parpark it. Certain vintagtages of small propertiesties in Burgundy and BorBordeaux had been effecfectively extinct in the mamarketplace for decadcades. Only Kurniawan seeseemed able to still prprovide them. Their sosource, he told collectotors, was that gigantic “mmagic cellar” that he hahad secretly purchchased in Europe.
AAt the end of the auauction, I asked Cru’s wine director if Kurniawanu was presenent. He pointed to a slislightly built man hanhanging in a rear cornerner. He was casually bbut elegantly dressed. Normally, I identify myself as a journalist, but not this time. Better to let Kurniawan think I was one of those wealthy collectors.
“Hey, Rudy, what happened with those 22 Ponsot lots?” I asked.
His dark eyes, behind sleek black-framed eyeglasses, scanned me. I sensed he was looking for safe words. “Well, we try our best, but it’s Burgundy, and . . . s--t happens,” he said. And turned away. I scribbled those words down.
The next day, a tense lunch was held at Nougatine at Jean-Georges in the Trump Central Park Hotel. At the table were Kapon, Kurniawan, Ponsot and a Burgundy collector (and friend of Ponsot) named Doug Barzelay. “After the usual salutations, I asked the question I had in mind,” Ponsot told me later. “‘Where are those bottles coming from? Can you give me the source?’ At that moment, I saw Rudy looking down at his plate. He said, ‘I buy so many bottles, I don’t remember where I got all of them from.’ ”
That response did not sit well with Ponsot. “If I bought a Maserati, I would remember the details of that.” But Kapon defended his best client’s memory lapse. “It’s tough for Rudy to figure out where he bought something because he had so many sources. He was the biggest buyer of wine in this century.”
The truth was that Kurniawan did know the source of the “Faux Ponsots.” But he dared not reveal it.
A few days later, as I was writing about the affair for Wine Spectator, Kurniawan called me from his home in Arcadia, Calif.
“I will be working with Laurent,” he said. “My goal is that I just want to make the market healthy.” He declared his love for red Burgundy even more than Bordeaux. “I love how when Burgundy gets very old, it gets to be the color of the veins in an old lady’s arm.”
His voice oozed sincerity.
WHAT makes trophy wine such terrific fake bait? Unlike, say, an Hermès silk scarf or a Rolex, the buyer can’t do a reality check prior to purchase. The ostensible elixir is sealed in its bottle. Only upon uncorking can the buyer sniff and swallow to judge whether it’s the real thing. And that’s truly tricky. Neither taste nor chemical analysis can prove that the wine in the bottle is what the label says it is. Consider a legendary wine from the last century, 1945 Romanée-Conti. Only 608 bottles were made. Yet Kurniawan once sold six bottles of fake 1945 RomanéeConti to tech billionaire David Doyle. They were priced at $13,000 each. Had Doyle checked in with the winery, he would have learned that nobody there had any idea of where to locate even a single bottle of authentic 1945 RomanéeConti.
How had Kurniawan, an Indonesian national of Chinese ethnicity, managed to become a renowned wine guru and dealer while still looking young enough to be carded before he could raise a glass? Hugely in his favor was his tasting talent. Far more experienced wine buffs were amazed at Kurniawan’s ability to identify wines solely by the “sniff and sip” test. And what he tasted, he remembered. And then there was his generosity. By his mid-20s, he was known for pouring generously from his own real bottles of wildly expensive
wine at tasting events where other attendees were mostly wealthy and older. When Kurniawan offered the same wines for sale privately or at auction, these wealthy collectors were eager to buy. Only those purchases, in the tradition of “bait and switch,” were often not real.
And then there was Kurniawan’s tale of great family wealth back in Indonesia. He claimed that, in exchange for caring for his elderly mother, he was given a $1 million monthly allowance. He spent more than that on wine in some months. And Kurniawan never saw a dinner check that he didn’t pick up. In one four-night bacchanal for friends and clients at Cru in 2004, he footed the entire $80,000 bill. Curiously, he always insisted that the empty wine bottles (and they were many) be FedEx’d to his home in California. He claimed he wanted them for “photo shoots.”
The truth was darker. In an elaborate DIY workshop behind shuttered windows, Kurniawan refilled those bottles with a skillfully calibrated blend of old and young wines to mimic the original. What he had freely spent at Cru, as well as at other wine temples, mostly came back to him as revenue from those refilled bottles sold to his eager clientele. Overall, he conned deep-pocketed collectors into purchasing upwards of $30 million worth of his cannily made French fakes. Among Kurniawan’s victims were former Petco chairman Brian Devine, real-estate mogul Michael Fascitelli and uber-collector Bill Koch, one of the four Koch brothers.
Kurniawan claimed that his family controlled the Heineken beer franchise in Indonesia. He also claimed that he attended a Singapore high school favored by wealthy Indonesians. Neither claim, checked out by investigators sent to Asia by Bill Koch, turned out to be true. Kurniawan’s true origins remain unknown.
Among the thousands of bottles that Kurniawan forged were the Faux Ponsots. The debacle at Cru caught the attention of Jason Hernandez, a young assistant US attorney working under Preet Bharara in Manhattan. Hernandez is also a devoted wine lover. Working with FBI Agent James Wynne, he secretly gathered evidence of Kurniawan’s countefeiting activity, paying special attention to his credit-card purchases. Why, for example, had he spent more than $7,000 on Burgundy-tinted French wax? Old bottles were often sealed with such wax, and Kurniawan sold plenty of them.
Kurniawan, now 40, was arrested at home in March 2012. A jury of his peers convicted him of fraud just before Christmas 2013. He did not testify at his trial, but hhe did write a letter to the judge statining: “In this Internet age, my name wwill be linked forever not with great ththings or great deeds but rather with a crime that soiled the one thing I truly loved and was good at.”
Upon his release in 2021, Kurniawan, who had been living in the US illegally, will be deported to his hometown of Jakarta. This master con man of the wine world will nevern again pawn off fake wine in thithis country. What he might do once free in Asia could be another story.