Pinot Noir: Inside the Criminal Gangs Making Fake Wine

While wine fraud has been around for nearly 150 years, it exploded around the turn of the century, with enterprising counterfeiters drawn by high margins and relatively low risk. Now, though, with the highest-end manufacturers upping their game, would-be forgers are looking at more moderately priced targets; they’ve even come for mass-market brands like Yellow Tail. For 1843, William Ralston uncorks the zero-somm game.

Other popular anti-counterfeiting techniques used by high-end wineries include manufacturing proprietary bottle shapes and micro-printing, where text and patterns are printed at a scale visible only under magnification. (I was shown a bottle of 2009 Le Pin, a fine Bordeaux wine, where the names of the winery owner’s children had been micro-printed repeatedly between two thin red lines on its front label.) Some wineries have adopted advanced security measures, incorporating features like holograms, individualised digital tracking codes and inks that change colour when tilted. Pétrus, a Bordeaux winery which produces only 30,000 bottles a year, uses inks custom-made by the same company that produces the ones used on American dollar bills.