Forget fake antiques, oil paintings, bank notes and diamonds, if you want to make a quick, fraudulent buck, and not get caught, then fine wine has a lot going for it. With a steady hand and some ingenuity, it is entirely possible to tamper with, or switch, labels, corks and capsules. Even the wine itself can be siphoned off, and replaced with an inferior version.

What those in the rarefied world of wine auctioneers and fine wine brokers may not always pass on to their newly wealthy, novice wine clients, who often cannot taste the difference between a fake and a genuine wine, is that more dodgy bottles have cropped up during the past decade than ever before. Some fine wine traders put the value as high as £10 million to £20 million.

The insatiable and escalating demand from wealthy wine collectors across the world for the most famous wines and vintages from prestigious estates with limited production has fuelled the rapid increase in counterfeit wine. Fraudulent traders have also relished the speed, ease and accuracy with which high-definition digital equipment can reproduce complicated, coloured wine labels that look identical to the real thing.

Most fine-wine traders agree that the bogus bottles that turn up time and time again are stand-alone, highly coveted Bordeaux greats such as 1945 Mouton-Rothschild and 1947 Cheval Blanc (£50,000 and £24,000 a case respectively, at auction) and Pétrus ’45 and ’61 (both around £50,000 a case), along with top years from the gilded sauternes estate, d’Yquem. The new Bordeaux era greats such as the tiny right-bank trophy wines, including Le Pin with its simple script label, have attracted the attention of crooks, too.

The latest billionaire to fall into the counterfeit wine trap was the American chemical engineer, William Koch, who went to great lengths to confirm his recent suspicions that the hand-blown, etched glass l784 and 1787 Thomas Jefferson bordeaux bottles in his collection were fake. Gamma radiation proved that the wine within pre-dated 1945, but could not get any closer. Antique glass specialists could, however, and they discovered that the etching on the bottle was made by a high-speed diamond drill, an instrument that clearly did not exist in the l780s.

Koch’s fake bottles were thought to have come from a bricked-up cellar in Paris, but the US, Italy, the Far East and China are well documented as rich counterfeit wine sources. Fakes as diverse as l995 Sassicaia, the cult Tuscan cabernet sauvignon, and Australia’s greatest red wine, the shiraz Penfolds’ Grange Hermitage, have been uncovered. The unpleasant truth is that with greed and deceit being part of human nature, if the wine and the price looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is.

jane.macquitty@thetimes.co.uk

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