The Jefferson Bottles and Counterfeit Wine

Would you know if you were drinking a counterfeit wine? Chances are, if you paid a lot for the bottle . . . probably not. The human mind can be a powerful thing, and there's something about shelling out a large quantity of dough that will make us say that even a terrible bottle of wine is "fantastic, rich, full-bodied, and aged to perfection." Awhile back I read a really interesting article in the New Yorker about the nature of counterfeiting within the wine industry. It was sparked by the sale of the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at auction - an ultra-rare bottle of 1787 Lafitte with the initials Th J. etched on the side. The TJ, yep, you guessed it, stands for Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and well documented oenophile. The bottle sold last year at Christies in London for a whopping 157 THOUSAND dollars.

That number in and of itself is pretty amazing, but the article gets really interesting when it points out that you can't even be certain that the wine inside the bottle is actually from 1787. The bottle could be real, the cork could be real, but the liquid inside could be anything from a good 20 year old wine to a bottle of Yellowtail. The writer then goes on to discuss the rampant problem of wine forgery, focusing on a few major players who are suspected of it, and sharing great jokes like the Wine Expert of Sotheby's mentioning that more bottles of 1945 Mouton were drank on the 50th anniversary (1995) then were ever made in the first place. If you're looking for a birds eye view of how twisted things can get when you pay exorbitant amounts of money for a beverage. I've added a link to the article on the website here:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/03/070903fa_fact_keefe?currentPage=all