Is Hong Kong awash with fake wines? We seek expert knowledge

Even though Indonesian-Chinese wine counterfeiter Rudy Kurniawan is serving 10 years in a US jail for selling vast quantities of fake bottles at auction, many of them can still be found in collectors’ cellars or reappearing at auctions.

They continue to circulate even if collectors discover they are holding fakes because selling them is the only way they can reclaim the tens or hundreds of thousands of US dollars they have paid for them, says Maureen Downey, a wine authenticator who compiled reports for the US Department of Justice on Kurniawan’s sentencing hearing in 2013.

Downey, 44, was in Hong Kong recently to educate wine industry representatives on the problem of counterfeits – cheap wines dressed up to look like more expensive ones. She believes the city has become a dumping ground since the Kurniawan case came to light, as US collectors try to offload any fakes they find.

The San Francisco native, who set up winefraud.com in 2015 – a subscriber site for resources on how to spot counterfeits – says China is also awash with phoney wine. She cites intellectual property rights lawyer Nick Bartman’s claim that 70 per cent of wine imported into China is fake. Analysis of some confiscated wines has shown them to be devoid of anything that comes from a grape.

Downey also mentions oenologist Frankie Zhao, who claims 70 per cent of Chateau Lafite Rothschild in China is fake.