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Vintage Crime: A Short History of Wine Fraud
How fakes, fraudsters, and grape crusaders have shaped the world of wine.
This novel take on the history of wine reveals that, whether by adding toxic sweeteners or passing off counterfeit bottles, wine fraud is abundant—and as old as wine itself. Vintage Crime will intrigue even the most sated of wine drinkers with its juicy tales of deception, raising interesting questions along the what counts as wine, why do we drink it, and what makes a wine truly authentic?
The world of wine prides itself on its aura of respectability, but it has always had a murky side. Packed with engaging vignettes, Vintage Crime brings to life famous enthusiasts and crafty con artists from ancient Rome to modern-day California. It also introduces us to lesser-known industry the scrupulous merchants, honest growers, and cutting-edge scientists who have led the fight against fraudsters. Author Rebecca Gibb holds the rare, sought-after distinction of Master of Wine, yet she writes in an engaging style that doesn’t require any prior wine knowledge, skillfully synthesizing popular wine histories for amateur sleuths and armchair sommeliers alike.
A portion of book royalties will be donated by the author towards finding a cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
This novel take on the history of wine reveals that, whether by adding toxic sweeteners or passing off counterfeit bottles, wine fraud is abundant—and as old as wine itself. Vintage Crime will intrigue even the most sated of wine drinkers with its juicy tales of deception, raising interesting questions along the what counts as wine, why do we drink it, and what makes a wine truly authentic?
The world of wine prides itself on its aura of respectability, but it has always had a murky side. Packed with engaging vignettes, Vintage Crime brings to life famous enthusiasts and crafty con artists from ancient Rome to modern-day California. It also introduces us to lesser-known industry the scrupulous merchants, honest growers, and cutting-edge scientists who have led the fight against fraudsters. Author Rebecca Gibb holds the rare, sought-after distinction of Master of Wine, yet she writes in an engaging style that doesn’t require any prior wine knowledge, skillfully synthesizing popular wine histories for amateur sleuths and armchair sommeliers alike.
A portion of book royalties will be donated by the author towards finding a cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
281 pages, Hardcover
Published October 10, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
October 17, 2023
This book is exactly what I wanted it to be! As an amateur wine student taking my WSET 3 I wanted a book that talked more in depth on wine regions and history but in a way that was readable. Some of the village names mentioned had me diving back into my study books. It’s so wonderful to have a book that is as interesting to read as it is informative. For 10 days I would arrive at work (a restaurant) bugging my coworkers about the new things I had learned about fraud in the wine industry. Would definitely recommend this if you want to know a little more about what’s in your glass.
December 2, 2024
I wanted this to be better? I think a large part of the problem is that it's written more in an informational/thesis style than an investigative one. It's one of those books that the information itself is interesting, but the way it's presented is more like a textbook with how dry it is, just presenting the facts and dates and not structuring them in any sort of narrative (or when it tries, jumps around far too much). Add that to the structure of the book sorting the chapters chronologically, rather than linked by themes (fraud of adulteration, fraud of labeling, etc), and it's the sort of book that I don't know that I could recommend to anyone but the most interested in wine minutiae.
February 25, 2025
Exciting and well-researched. It was an engaging read, and I learned lot about the history of wine and the many things people have done to it to make it both tastier and more profitable.
January 28, 2024
For as long as there has been wine people have been putting things in to it. Some times it has been harmless additions to improve it, whether other wine, herbs, or even just ice. Sometimes they have been less harmless, like lead or anti-freeze. Despite the brevity of Rebecca Gibbs new compact history of wine fraud all such adulterations come within her province.
In a series of short and entertaining chapters where we are transported from ancient Rome (where herbs and spices needed to be added to wine to make it even remotely drinkable) to a New York City court room where, in 2010 Rudy Kurniawan was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for a truly audacious fraud which involved mimicking some of the worlds most rarest wines.
Wine is an ideal commodity for fakery and deception. The weather, the harvest, the barrel, the aging, and even the bottle and the cork mean that no two bottles of wine can ever be truly alike. Who is to know if an unscrupulous wine dealer adds a dash of water here, sugar there and even a little cheap red from the riviera. Indeed, to some extent such additives are permitted, in the right circumstances.
Where the story comes alive though is when your crafty vintner reaches for the lead or the anti-freeze to sweeten a tart vintage. As regulators have tightened regulations (poisoning your customers being seen as bad form in this age of health and safety), and the price of fine wines has exploded, wine fraudsters have turned to imitation of wines. It is hard not to be impressed at the gumption of Hardy Rodenstock turning up with case after case of wine which supposedly belonged to Thomas Jefferson and not being able t0 tell anyone where he found them. Or Kurniawan, imitating the worlds finest wines from taste alone.
Gibb has a tendency to be distracted and dive of into ill advised digressions. The chapter on the Winegate scandal of the 1970's comes with with the tedious account of the Watergate scandal. Aside from being contemporaneous and having a participant who described himself as "the Nixon of Bordeaux" the two scandals are completely dissimilar.
Likewise, I couldn't probably have done without the entirely unsubstantiable discussion about whether plumbism caused by lead in Beethoven's wine was responsible for this deafness and then his death.
These excursions into the irrelevant are not without cost. They often include annoying mistakes which really an editor should have picked up on. For example, Baron Leroy wasn't flying a fighter jet in 1918 and the phylloxera epidemic which decimated European vineyards in the late 19th Century didn't start in Hammersmith with the entomologist who first identified the insect.
Kurniawan now does tastings of his imitation wines. If you have the money and the inclination you can compare a La Tâche 1937 or a 1961 Pétrus with an imitation. Apparently people tend to prefer the fakes. But wine fraud isn't all high end. In 2022 an off licence in Birmingham was found selling knock off Yellow Tail Shiraz at £7 a go. The fake wine trade seems to be doing as well as it was 2,000 years ago. Adulteration and fakery it seems is a crime that is as old as wine.
In a series of short and entertaining chapters where we are transported from ancient Rome (where herbs and spices needed to be added to wine to make it even remotely drinkable) to a New York City court room where, in 2010 Rudy Kurniawan was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for a truly audacious fraud which involved mimicking some of the worlds most rarest wines.
Wine is an ideal commodity for fakery and deception. The weather, the harvest, the barrel, the aging, and even the bottle and the cork mean that no two bottles of wine can ever be truly alike. Who is to know if an unscrupulous wine dealer adds a dash of water here, sugar there and even a little cheap red from the riviera. Indeed, to some extent such additives are permitted, in the right circumstances.
Where the story comes alive though is when your crafty vintner reaches for the lead or the anti-freeze to sweeten a tart vintage. As regulators have tightened regulations (poisoning your customers being seen as bad form in this age of health and safety), and the price of fine wines has exploded, wine fraudsters have turned to imitation of wines. It is hard not to be impressed at the gumption of Hardy Rodenstock turning up with case after case of wine which supposedly belonged to Thomas Jefferson and not being able t0 tell anyone where he found them. Or Kurniawan, imitating the worlds finest wines from taste alone.
Gibb has a tendency to be distracted and dive of into ill advised digressions. The chapter on the Winegate scandal of the 1970's comes with with the tedious account of the Watergate scandal. Aside from being contemporaneous and having a participant who described himself as "the Nixon of Bordeaux" the two scandals are completely dissimilar.
Likewise, I couldn't probably have done without the entirely unsubstantiable discussion about whether plumbism caused by lead in Beethoven's wine was responsible for this deafness and then his death.
These excursions into the irrelevant are not without cost. They often include annoying mistakes which really an editor should have picked up on. For example, Baron Leroy wasn't flying a fighter jet in 1918 and the phylloxera epidemic which decimated European vineyards in the late 19th Century didn't start in Hammersmith with the entomologist who first identified the insect.
Kurniawan now does tastings of his imitation wines. If you have the money and the inclination you can compare a La Tâche 1937 or a 1961 Pétrus with an imitation. Apparently people tend to prefer the fakes. But wine fraud isn't all high end. In 2022 an off licence in Birmingham was found selling knock off Yellow Tail Shiraz at £7 a go. The fake wine trade seems to be doing as well as it was 2,000 years ago. Adulteration and fakery it seems is a crime that is as old as wine.
June 28, 2024
This book is an outgrowth of Rebecca Gibb’s Master of Wine dissertation on the 1911 Champagne riots. Gibb became the 384th Master of Wine in 2015. Since then only thirty-two more people have earned the title which started seventy years ago. She is a long distance swimmer and her bare arms in the dust jacket photo seem to bear this out. She also dedicates the book to sufferers of a particular form of muscular dystrophy. No backstory on that.
The very first sentence of this book, in all caps no less, is:
This is a fake wine book.
That can be taken to mean a book about fake wine or a fake book about wine. I prefer to think that the fakery relates to the subtitle, A Short History of Wine Fraud, specifically the word “fraud.” Initially in ancient Rome, adulteration would have been a more precise term since most of the wine tasted abominable and was sweetened with lead, sugar cane from the West Indies being still some way off. In more recent modern times lead has been replaced with anti-freeze, as the press sensationally claimed. Actually only one ingredient of anti-freeze was used and it mostly kills small children and younger. The last time this happened in the United States was 1937. It has occurred much more recently in Bangladesh, Nigeria and Panama with children’s medications.
After a couple of chapters along this line Gibb jumps to France after the downfall of the ancien regime and the flowering of bourgeois culinary tastes including wine. This chapter has the most clever title in the book, “An Enlightened Drinker?”, the idea being that the customer was looking for quality but it was still the Wild West out there.
Gibb then moves on to the Champagne riots that sparked her interest in the first place. I don’t recall now who the rioters were, either the original Champagne vintners who didn’t like the outlying regions horning in on the action, or the outlying vintners resenting government regulations that cut them off from the lucrative champagne gravy train. Eventually in 1936 the current regulations promulgating the appellation system covered the entire country.
Gibb feels that the appellation system may now have run its course, a protectionist guise for the status quo that frowns on innovation. Considering what the land now costs, it’s understandable that an owner, especially a recent parvenue, would want to sit on the land's laurels. They looked down on vin ordinaire or table wine but then along came the "Super Tuscans” which ignored terroir and blended different grape varieties to optimize taste. "Red blends” seem to now take up a lot of shelf space in the supermarket, I find. And even the experts can’t tell the difference in blind taste tests.
After all this Gibb gets into the actual wine frauds, first with widespread shenanigans that laid the Austrian, German, Italian and Spanish sectors low in the 1980s and -90s, then the actual frauds committed by fraudsters. If you aren’t in the habit of paying $1,000 or more for a bottle of wine and we don’t open our markets to wine imports from China, where the Bordeaux wine council estimates as many as 30,000 bottles of fake wine are sold each hour, I think your chances of being scammed are slight.
Still, if you have doubts about your 1945 Lafite, you can have your bottle tested unopened for cesium-137. (The French Centre for Nuclear Studies is conveniently located in Bordeaux if that helps.) Pre-1952 and -1986 grapes shouldn’t show the effects of atmospheric nuclear tests or the Chernobyl meltdown.
Once I realized I wasn’t personally at risk, I relaxed and enjoyed some schadenfreude while reading about the misadventures of one of the Koch brothers and a Forbes (magazine) fils. Of course, they were rich enough not to be embarrassed and pursued their matters in court but only after much trepidation during which the statute of limitations had ran out.
One of the strangest proof reading oversights I have even read: a World War I pilot repeatedly referred to as a “jet fighter pilot.” Pages 156, 198 and 199 also have typos. I’ve often noticed that the typos crop up near the end of a book, as if the proofreader, having found few or none up to this point, assumes there are no more.
I’ve shared a few of the details that I find delightful from this book. There are many more. You will love this book if you are curious about wine.
The very first sentence of this book, in all caps no less, is:
This is a fake wine book.
That can be taken to mean a book about fake wine or a fake book about wine. I prefer to think that the fakery relates to the subtitle, A Short History of Wine Fraud, specifically the word “fraud.” Initially in ancient Rome, adulteration would have been a more precise term since most of the wine tasted abominable and was sweetened with lead, sugar cane from the West Indies being still some way off. In more recent modern times lead has been replaced with anti-freeze, as the press sensationally claimed. Actually only one ingredient of anti-freeze was used and it mostly kills small children and younger. The last time this happened in the United States was 1937. It has occurred much more recently in Bangladesh, Nigeria and Panama with children’s medications.
After a couple of chapters along this line Gibb jumps to France after the downfall of the ancien regime and the flowering of bourgeois culinary tastes including wine. This chapter has the most clever title in the book, “An Enlightened Drinker?”, the idea being that the customer was looking for quality but it was still the Wild West out there.
Gibb then moves on to the Champagne riots that sparked her interest in the first place. I don’t recall now who the rioters were, either the original Champagne vintners who didn’t like the outlying regions horning in on the action, or the outlying vintners resenting government regulations that cut them off from the lucrative champagne gravy train. Eventually in 1936 the current regulations promulgating the appellation system covered the entire country.
Gibb feels that the appellation system may now have run its course, a protectionist guise for the status quo that frowns on innovation. Considering what the land now costs, it’s understandable that an owner, especially a recent parvenue, would want to sit on the land's laurels. They looked down on vin ordinaire or table wine but then along came the "Super Tuscans” which ignored terroir and blended different grape varieties to optimize taste. "Red blends” seem to now take up a lot of shelf space in the supermarket, I find. And even the experts can’t tell the difference in blind taste tests.
After all this Gibb gets into the actual wine frauds, first with widespread shenanigans that laid the Austrian, German, Italian and Spanish sectors low in the 1980s and -90s, then the actual frauds committed by fraudsters. If you aren’t in the habit of paying $1,000 or more for a bottle of wine and we don’t open our markets to wine imports from China, where the Bordeaux wine council estimates as many as 30,000 bottles of fake wine are sold each hour, I think your chances of being scammed are slight.
Still, if you have doubts about your 1945 Lafite, you can have your bottle tested unopened for cesium-137. (The French Centre for Nuclear Studies is conveniently located in Bordeaux if that helps.) Pre-1952 and -1986 grapes shouldn’t show the effects of atmospheric nuclear tests or the Chernobyl meltdown.
Once I realized I wasn’t personally at risk, I relaxed and enjoyed some schadenfreude while reading about the misadventures of one of the Koch brothers and a Forbes (magazine) fils. Of course, they were rich enough not to be embarrassed and pursued their matters in court but only after much trepidation during which the statute of limitations had ran out.
One of the strangest proof reading oversights I have even read: a World War I pilot repeatedly referred to as a “jet fighter pilot.” Pages 156, 198 and 199 also have typos. I’ve often noticed that the typos crop up near the end of a book, as if the proofreader, having found few or none up to this point, assumes there are no more.
I’ve shared a few of the details that I find delightful from this book. There are many more. You will love this book if you are curious about wine.
July 17, 2025
My review for the Law Society Gazette is published here: https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/reviews/...
I would add that anyone who was under the illusion that wine from the old world such as France, Italy and Spain, and the even-older world such as the Lebannon or the Magreab, has been made to traditional methods for centuries with minimal changes beyond the use of mechanization in larger vineyards, is in for a rude (bottle?) shock when reading Gibbs’ book.
I still find it hard to understand how someone with the commercial acumen of Bill Koch was fooled in the first place – and I suspect he would acknowledge and agree with my confusion.
I would add that anyone who was under the illusion that wine from the old world such as France, Italy and Spain, and the even-older world such as the Lebannon or the Magreab, has been made to traditional methods for centuries with minimal changes beyond the use of mechanization in larger vineyards, is in for a rude (bottle?) shock when reading Gibbs’ book.
I still find it hard to understand how someone with the commercial acumen of Bill Koch was fooled in the first place – and I suspect he would acknowledge and agree with my confusion.
June 14, 2025
As a lover of wine, I have been curious about fraud and deception in the wine world. When we select a bottle to open and enjoy at a restaurant, have many customers know what is really ion the bottle?
I generally rely on the restaurant staff or pick a wine which I have previously enjoyed.
Rebecca Gibb has highlighted crimes worth millions of dollars. There is intrige in the book although she doesn't come to major conclusions about the perpetrators.
It you are a wine lover, I recommend this as an interesting read. Maybe not gthe best book to share with your local friendly vigneron!
I generally rely on the restaurant staff or pick a wine which I have previously enjoyed.
Rebecca Gibb has highlighted crimes worth millions of dollars. There is intrige in the book although she doesn't come to major conclusions about the perpetrators.
It you are a wine lover, I recommend this as an interesting read. Maybe not gthe best book to share with your local friendly vigneron!
October 27, 2025
Bit of a tough read, 50% of the book concerns ancient wine adulteration and nobody really cares, then we have the already well known cases from France, Austria, California. The whole is written drily and with a minimal humour. The champagne riots were new to me, not much else. Frankly if you have read the "newspapers" these last 15y you know this stuff. Missed opportunity
February 4, 2024
Interesting humorous way to consider the history of wine
January 1, 2025
Too brief for what it was trying to do but a fun starter
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews