How Did Wine Fraud Become Such a Big Business?

kind of naturally interested in the subject of wine. And so during this specific study, there was a researcher that was asking students to describe one glass of white wine and one glass of red wine. And these were both just sitting right in front of them. But of course there's a trick here, so they didn't know that the glass of red was actually just a glass of white wine with a little bit of food coloring. So I mean, I feel like I can already guess how this ends.

Like none of them knew was white wine they were drinking, right, and it uh. It kind of reminds you of that commercial from Pizza Hut where they served this pasta in Italy and they tried to rebrand themselves as Pasta Hut, and no one knew it was from pizza Hut. Oh man, that was so tricky, And I'm sure those sudies were equally scientific, but but you're right, like, not one of the fifty four kids could tell the white wine was white.

And as they were writing down their notes, they were looking for the features that you would typically find and reds, and even convincing themselves that they were tasting those notes and the drink. Now, honestly, normally, I don't like these kinds of studies because I don't love people feeling like they've been tricked, and especially with things like art or wine, where they're already feeling intimidated by the whole thing. And I feel like everybody should get to enjoy those things

without worry. But today's show is all about wine crimes, you know, the forgeries and frauds and the wine world, and it is a fascinating world. And the thing that's so interesting to me about these cons is that the people really really want to believe they're drinking or buying the good stuff, even when it's really smart people drinking a very obvious white wine and drops of food coloring or just placed in it. And that's what today's show

is all about. Let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend man guest Ticketer and on the other side of the soundproof glass decanting a bottle of what is that? It's Bartels and James man the Wild Island Wine Spritzer, and I think he ordered it on eBay. He was saying, that's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. I'm pretty sure that's just a bottle of grape soda that he put a bartls On

James label on. And uh, we know your tricks, Tristan, so you can't fool us, Triston. But today's episode is obviously about wine and wine crimes. But did you know that grape juice is actually a man made invention? So I didn't gave actually pointed this out to me. But just think about it, like if the juice from a bunch of grace was to somehow pool in the wild,

it would start to ferment on its own. So in order to make grape juice, we actually have to halt their natural fermentation process to stop it from being alcoholic. So there's no such thing as all natural grape juice, no matter what the labels tell you. You know, I've actually never thought about that, and that is a pretty benign case of of mislabeling. But there's so many other interesting stories of you know, many more nefarious examples, including

one of history's first wine crimes. And I know you were doing some digging into this, So do you want to give us the scoop? Yeah, definitely, I can do that. So wine itself is something that's been around pretty much forever. I mean, you can go back as far as seven thousand b C. And the Chinese were actually making wine from fermented honey and rice and fruit. The Phoenicians were getting in the act. They were producing and trading their

own versions throughout the Mediterranean. And for as long as humans have been making wine, there have also been those have been manipulating or counterfeiting it for their own game. And you can actually see this in ancient Rome. So the Romans complained about phony wine flowing through the country, and in fact, Pliny the Elder once wrote about the problem, saying, quote, not even our nobility ever enjoys wines that are genuine.

So wine forgeries have been this widespread problem from the start, which you know must have been really disheartening for Pliny the Elder. So so why do you say that? Well, he was also the Roman scholar who coined the famous phrase in vino veritas or in wine, there is truth, so he probably didn't appreciate people meddling with the wine or his aphorism. I like the fact that I think we've quoted Pliny the Elder maybe three times on this show before we got real Plenty here. We we love Pliny,

or at least quoting Plenty. But alright, so so fake wine was definitely flowing through Rome. But but how exactly did the scam work? So basically, counterfeiters would sometimes claim a wine was made from a certain kind of grape

or even produced in a specific region, that it really wasn't. So. For example, like the most popular wine and ancient Rome was fail Aian wine, which was made from grapes grown on the slopes of this and this wine was somewhat rare and pretty expensive, but before long there were all these local bars serving up a never ending supply of it at super cheap prices, And while plenty of people couldn't tell the difference, there were these people with more

discerning palettes like Pliny, who caught on pretty quickly. So I'm guessing though, that wouldn't exactly stop the counterfeiters. Though, no it didn't. I mean, wine forgers only became more common as time went on, which really prompted governments to

crack down on the crimes. So in London during the Middle Ages, you actually see tavern owners had to store their French, Spanish and German wines and separate containers and separate areas, so it would be harder for them to mix the wines or even to lie about where a certain wine came from. And if a bar keep was caught serving fraud wine like, the punishment was that they had to drink every single drop of it themselves. What

a harsh punish. I mean, I guess if it was fake wine, it probably didn't taste great, but that that really doesn't seem like that bad of a punishment. Yeah, I mean, I guess some of the wine could have been off or whatever. But Germany actually had a much harsher policy wine counterfeiters there. It could be branded or even hanged, and it depended on how much fraudulent wine they were selling and who they've been selling it to. Alright,

so let me get this straight. So in one country you could be looking at a punishment of having to drink some pretty bad wine, and then another country you might actually be hanged for the crime. I mean there was a lot of bad wine. Yes, must have been really bad so all right. So so then if we're talking about multiple places that this kind of fraud was

rampant all across Europe or what it definitely was. And during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there is even this group of so called wine doctors who started producing their own makeshift wines from chemicals and all sorts of random fruits like apples or even raisins, and then they try to pass the stuff off as this really prestigious wine from far away regions. And this actually became such a huge problem that European government started cracking down on it.

So you know, the British Parliament took a stab at it. They passed this Adulteration of Food and Drink Act in eighteen sixty. Alright, So did this just put a complete style up to the whole wine fraud business or what or not at all? I mean the added scrutiny and growing awareness of why fraud mostly just got criminals to think more creatively about the whole business. I did read about this amazing American wine scam that grape growers started

during Prohibition, and it was actually pretty clever. So at the time, the Volstead Act made it so that, you know, that grapes could only be grown if they were to be used for nonalcoholic consumption, like you know, eating on their own or made into grape juice or I guess, you know, non alcoholic wine. And so this left American

grape growers with two pretty bad options. They could either like rip out all their grapevines and plan a different crop, or try to sell the grape some other way and then just you know, kind of hope that there would be a constitutional amendment that would come along later. And so now some owners chose the first, of course, and that was the much safer option, and they immediately started

replacing their grapevines with orchards. But you have these other former winemakers who decided to try, you know, that the second option, and ultimately that's what actually saved the entire California wine industry. I mean, that's pretty fascinating, but it was grape juice that popular, Like, how are they still doing good business during this time? No, I mean, grape juice was not that popular. And so basically, the grape growers they would they they found a loophole. Actually, it

was perfectly legal to produce. It was so called non alcoholic wine that could theoretically be turned into real wine by the consumers. So the only catch was they had to make it clear that fermenting the wine would be illegal. So with this in mind, the vineyards started selling these quote wine bricks, and they were basically just these big chunks of grape concentrate that came bundled with a packet

of yeast. I mean, that's ridiculous. It's like the blue apron of wine or Hello Fresh who sponsored the show. So we're gonna go with that, that's right. The bricks also came with a warning label that warned consumers against, you know, combining the concentrate in yeast with water and sugar in a sealed pot and then and then letting that pot sit in a cooled cover for twenty one

day straight. And so it more than they should definitely not do that, or else they you know, wind up with an alcoholic beverage, even if it was a delicious alcoholic beverage, they should definitely not do this. It feels like very specific instructions on what not to do. Yeah, it's so subtle, right, but I mean it actually worked incredibly well for the grape growers and kept them afloat

during America's failed attempt at sobriety. And so wine concentrates like this had actually been sold pre prohibition for a little less than ten dollars a ton, but just four years into prohibition, the price had increased by nearly four thousand percent and they were selling for almost four hundred dollars a ton. And so it was this rise and profits that attracted new grape growers to Napa Valley, and

among them was Caesar Mundabi. You know, that name obviously sounds familiar to many people, and he was this Minnesota grocer who began his family's wine dynasty actually during the

heart of the prohibition era. That's amazing, and I actually love how the story really makes you root for winemakers, because that's not something that happens too often with wine crimes, right, I mean, especially nowadays where most wine fraud tends to be perpetrated among these high end wine collectors, and so it is a little tough to drum up sympathy when it's just like millionaires ripping off other millionaires. Yeah, I

know what you mean. So talking to wine frauds, did you hear about those counterfeit wines that supposedly belonged to Thomas Jefferson that went up for auction at Christie's in the nineteen eighties, I don't think so. So one of the bottles, which was a seventeen eighty seven Chateau Lafitte Bordeaux, was sold to Chris and Malcolm Forbes for a hundred and fifty six thousand dollars. And this is actually the most that a single bottle of wine had ever been

sold for at the time. So we're talking about the Forbes family, like Forbes Magazine and all of that empire, right, and for years this phony bottle of wine was actually the pride of the Forbes collection. Apparently, when Malcolm Forbes learned that he'd won the bid, he said, and this is a direct quote, it's more fun than the opera glasses Lincoln was holding when he was shot. And I have those two, Right, that's just such an insane statement.

And I guess when you're that rich, you're just looking for ways to spend your money. But the craziest thing is that the Forbes family didn't find out that they've been scammed until two decades after the fact. You know, to your earlier point, it is a little bit difficult to drum up sympathy when people are saying stuff like that. But I'm curious, so why did it take these two decades to figure out they've been scamped? Partly it's because

the story is just so believable. So Thomas Jefferson was famous for his love of fine food and wine, which you'd grown accustomed to during his time in Europe. Then, in fact, during his time in the White House, Jefferson actually spent over sixteen thousand dollars which is about three hundred thousand dollars in today's money, on wine, amassing a

private collection of more than twenty thousand bottles. So, I mean, all that kind of sets the stage right, Like, then you've got Forbes who hears the story of a well known German wine enthusiast who supposedly like found Jefferson's wine hidden behind a brick wall in Paris, and there was little reason to doubt him. I mean, the bottles even had the right eights and the initials T h J on them, and they were etched into the bottles, so it all seemed real and that makes sense. But but

how did the Forbes family figure out they've been duped? Well, the truth actually came out thanks to the efforts of a different billionaire wine collector, so basically the German forger, this guy named Hardy rodent Stock. He just wasn't content with selling one bottle that he discovered behind the wall. He also found four more bottles, which he sold for half a million dollars to William Coke and you probably

recognize that name. He's the lesser known but still super wealthy Coke brother who isn't as tangled up in politics. And for a long time Coke also believed his bottles were legitimate, but that changed in two thousand five when the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was preparing to exhibit his wine collection to the public, and basically the museum contacted the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, but none of the historians could actually verify that the bottles belonged

to Jefferson. In fact, all of the evidence that they had on hand pointed to the contrary. So what kind of evidence are we talking about. Well, Jefferson actually kept meticulous records on everything, you know, Jefferson being Jefferson, and this included all the wines he'd ever bought while in France.

And according to one of Monticello's senior historians, and here I'm just going to quote the note he wrote in his vast records of over sixty thousand documents, there was nothing that suggested Jefferson had ever ordered any of these wines. In the so called Jefferson bottles, there were about a dozen bottles, including seventeen eighty four and a seventeen eighty seven Chateau to Kim, a seventeen seven Lafitte or Margo. Most of them were seventeen eighty seven, a vintage Jefferson

never ordered in his life. Wow. So, I mean that is pretty compelling evidence, but meticulous or not, I mean, there's always the chance that Jefferson made a mistake in his records, right, Yeah, that's true, which is why Bill Coke actually leaned on a private investigator and a former FBI agent, this guy named Jim Elroy to get to the bottom of things. Alright, I definitely want to hear all this panned out. But before you cluisen, let's take

a quick break. You're listening to Part Time Genius and we're talking about the most famous wine crimes in history. All right, mango, So what happened with Elroy's investigation? I'm assuming he found a way to prove that the Jefferson wine was fake, right, So he did, but it was not easy. So at first he started looking for ways to prove that the wine itself didn't really date back to the eighteenth century. And the tricky part is finding a way to do it without opening the bottles. Right, Like,

you know, just in cases hunch was wrong. You don't want to mess up these wonderful bottles of wine. So this is kind of amazing. But Elroy found a solution in the research of this French physicist named Philip Hubert. And Hubert found a way to use low level gamma ray detection to date wine without actually having to remove it from the bottle. Wait, so how do how does that work? Basically, you try to determine if the wine contains any traces of caesium seven. And this is a

radio active isotope that doesn't occur in nature. So prior to the Atomic Age, this isotope just straight up didn't exist on Earth. But after the use of nuclear bombs, it was literally everywhere, including like the atmosphere, the rain, soil, grapes,

and eventually in wine. Alright, So so this test can't determine exactly when a wine was bottled, but it can at least tell you if the bottle was before or after what like the mid forties or so exactly, which would have been enough for Elroy, like if the bottles contained season one seven, then they couldn't have been bottled

in the eighteenth century. But Hubert's tests actually came back negative, which proved the wine had been bottled prior to the Atomic Age, though not necessarily as far back as Jefferson. Oh wow, so that's a pretty good curb also, so Elroy then had to come up with a plan B. So so what did he do? Yeah, Elroy went back to the drawing board and he started assembling this crack team of wine fraudc experts, including a retired Scotland yard inspector, a former m I five agent and even a master

glass engraver. And since efforts to uncover for on in the wine itself had failed, the team turned their attention to the other way to counterfeit one, which is just by messing with the bottle. And this is where the expert engraver comes in, because the team was actually able to prove that the etched initials on the bottle had been done with an electric dentist drill, which of course was not a thing in the eighteenth century. Wow, I mean, like it's so crazy that that was the deciding factor.

I mean, I'm kind of guessing they wish they'd looked closer at the bottle before they started doing all those seasons. Mean, as interesting as that is, because I'm guessing these physicists don't come cheap for that kind of investigation. Yeah, I mean, we didn't even get a detail there, because that part wasn't easy either. Like Elroy had personally flown to the French Italian border and he delivered the bottles in a bulletproof case and and then he barely carried out the

experiment a mile underground. And this was to prevent interference from atmospheric gamma rays like it was just way more complicated than taking a closer look at the glass. But in the end, Elroy was able to prove the bottles were fraudulent, and in two thousand six Bill Coke followed

the lawsuit against Hardy Rodenstock in New York. You know, the timing of all of this is also super interesting because it was around this same time, you know, you'd be looking at the opposite side of the country that probably the most notorious wine counterfeiter to date was just starting to come into his own. Yeah. I mean, I'm guessing you're talking about Rudy, right, Yeah, So this is

Rudy carneiloh one. And for those who aren't familiar with his story, Rudy was this mysterious young wine collector who made a name for himself in the l A wine scene. And this was in the early two thousand's. And I say mysterious because he sort of came out of nowhere

and nobody really knew much about him at the time. Now, this should have raised some suspicions in this upper crust and the wine circles there that he managed to infiltrate, but you know, most of his new friends chose to ignore the mystery just on account of his deep pockets. He would often pay the bill at these lavish dinners and wine tastings, you know, for all the other enthusiasts that were there, and he seemed to have this knack for tracking down these hard to come by vintages and

and to get them at these uncommonly good price. Of course, again, these folks should have and suspicious rudy, but they weren't. Yeah, I mean, he's sort of like that guy who made the room, Like nobody knew where he was from or how he got his money. But hey, he's generous and fun of me around, so why rock the boat with any questions? Yeah, I mean, that seems to be what was going on, and it was really all about the

wine for the people that he ran with. For instance, one of the group's rudy frequented was called angry Men, and they called themselves that because of how mad they would get whenever they took a nice bottle of wine to a party, only to find out that everyone else had brought the cheap stuff, you know, So that these angry Men dinners, all the guests would bring these really fancy and expensive bottles of wine, and everyone would just get schlaushed, and they would drink as much as like

two hundred thousand dollars worth of wine in a single evening. Two dollars that's insane. Yeah, I haven't drunk that much in one night ever. Yes, yeah, dropping those big bills. But you know, it wasn't long before Rudy got into the auction scene and and sort of became the go to guy for rare Burgundy, and he was buying and selling some of the finest wines of the twentieth century and making bank in the process. And his biggest payday came in two thousand and six when he sold almost

twenty five million dollars worth of wine in a single auction. Now, the previous sales record had been something like fifteen million, so we're talking a huge gain on that. But the writing was already on the wall. So a year or two later, a bunch of bottles of this rare burgundy

from the domain Ponsant wine House. They began to appear, with vintages dating between nineteen forty five and nineteen seventy one, and the head of this winery, Lauren Posas, found this to be exceptionally odd because his family hadn't started making this particular red wine until nineteen eighty two. So, knowing something was up, he launched his own international investigation into Rudy's shady dealings. Now, he did this mostly as a

way to defend the good name of Burgundy. As he later told a reporter, the fakes are like a piece of dirt on the name of Burgundy, and I wanted to wash it off. I mean, that's funny growing from a wine growing region, like the idea of dirt on it doesn't seem that bad. But I love his intensity and and his love for Burgundy. I mean, his family

name was on the line too. But around the same time Ponceaux was conducting his investigation, you look across the pond, You've got Bill Coke, who was launching another one of his own. So he'd been burned so badly on his Jefferson bottles that Coke started scouring his collection for other potential fakes, and he actually found dozens, I mean, many

of which had come directly or at least indirectly from Rudy. Meanwhile, more and more suspicious bottles were popping up at auctions, and this was drawing the attention of the FBI as well. So I've actually read about the raid on Rudy's condo back in two thousand twelve, and his whole place was

decked out like this makeshift factory. They found uh bottles of wine just soaking in the kitchen sink so the labels could be easily removed, and and there were all these like quirking tools and thousands and thousands of fake wine labels that he'd forged from this enormous laser printer. And you know, of course us they were all for really prestigious wines from Brigadi and Bordeaux. Yeah, that's right.

And maybe most damning of all, the FBI found all these intricate tasting notes that Rudy had assembled, so apparently he'd been taking cheaper wines, mixing them together, and then you know, putting them in these more expensive bottles, sometimes also altering the bottles to make them seem more valuable

as well. I mean, the worst part for him was that in a lot of cases, Rudy's formulas were written out for the different wines that he planned to counterfeit, so basically he was making these imitations of rare wines that he had tasted once before. But he wasn't exactly a hack like, he was really exacting about how to best approximate the taste of each one, so they did actually matched the label. Huh. I mean that's really interesting because I've heard that with rare old wines like this,

most people are pretty clueless about the taste. And sometimes you're dealing with wine from a hundred years ago, so nobody knows what's supposed to taste like. And they probably paid so much for it anyway, that they aren't in any sort of hurry to open it. Yeah. I mean, the care he showed was really unusual, and especially considering how unlikely it was that collectors would ever even open

these bottles. But in the end, Rudy's extensive notes and this condo full of equipment really shed some light on his overall plan. So by bidding high for wines at auction, Rudy had driven up the market values and and that really paved the way for higher returns when he later released all these counterfeit bottles back into circulation. All told, Rudy had flooded the market with an estimated fifteen thousand bottles of counterfeit wine over the course of about a

decade or so. So despite the fact that he was artfully blending these drinks, the FBI had to take him down and take him down hard. So two years after the raid, Rudy was sentenced to ten years in prison, which made him the first person in the US to ever be convicted of wine fraud. I mean that itself is crazy, right, I mean, the first person to ever be convicted of the wine fraud. So I know there's a little bit left to say about Rudy Kerney Allen's case, and I thought it might be fun to talk about

some of the more tail signs of wine fraud. But before we get into any of that, let's take another break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking wine frauds. Okay, So, so well, I do want to make sure we don't overlook an important detail that you mentioned about Rudy's case, which is that he produced an absolutely insane amount of bake wine, especially for a one man operation. And I want to say, you said it was like fifteen thousand

bottles that he manufactured. Yeah, it's I mean, it's a tremendous number. And that high volume is actually something that his supporters have pointed to his evidence that he couldn't have done what he did. And there's actually a fair amount of evidence that suggests Rudy wasn't acting alone. You know. For instance, according to investigators, Rudy had these two uncles who were supposedly notorious Indonesian bankropt Really that's amazing. Yeah, the story just gets better and better as you dig

deeper into it. They were pretty good at their work too, so they're responsible for about eight hundred million dollars and stolen funds, most of which has never been recovered. There's also a paper trail that shows Rudy wire tens of millions of dollars to his brothers in Hong Kong and Indonesia during the height of his scheme. Well, I mean, that would certainly explain where his money was coming from, as well as who might have been helping with his operation.

But still, you've got to think if his uncles are such well known criminals, you think that the FBI would have taken an interest much sooner. I mean, why did it take p I s to figure this stuff out? I mean, I'd wondered about that too, and it turns out that a big reason why his family's criminal connections went unnoticed for so long was that Rudy was using a fake name the whole time. According to one of Bill Coke's investigators, Rudy Kerney Owen is just a made

up name from two famous Indonesian badminton players. How great. Yeah, I thought it sounded familiar. It's just everyone knows Batman players. I mean, it's so random, it's actually kind of awesome. But I'm curious whatever hap into Rudy's fifteen thousand fakes, Like, are are they still floating around on the market? Well, a lot of them definitely are. I think only about a third of Rudy's wines had been accounted for it last count, and most of those have since been destroyed

at landfill sites. And all of this is done under the supervision of US marshals. And it's actually kind of a bummer when you think about how selective Rudy was about his blending. Yeah, I mean, the bottles definitely weren't worth what he was charging. But this wasn't stuff you'd find on the average store shelf either. I know, as you were describing the process, like it made me want to taste some of these wines, and it is such

a shame. Still, a lot of good has come out of these two big cases we've been talking about, because obviously rodent stock was kind of the precursor, and then you've got a Kerney owen, and both of those methods taught fraud investigators so many tricks for how to tell

an authentic bottle from a fake. And obviously it's no coincidence that Bill Coke was one of the pivotal figures and bringing this down, because you know, he really understood that the key to authentication was paying attention to the wine packaging and not to the wine itself. Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense. I was actually reading up on some of the more tech based solutions out there, and most of them have lower success rates than simply

looking for discrepancies and the labels or the bottles. You know. For example, there's this device that came out a few years ago called the Corvan system, and it's basically this fancy corkscrew that lets you extract wine from a bottle without having to remove the cork. So you just stick this thin hollow needle through the cork and then the wine is pushed into the holes on the side of the needle, and then it carries it through the device,

and lastly it's pumped into your glass. Wow. Yeah, and so so the whole idea was that the auction houses could use this tool as a way to let bidders sample the wine prior to the sale, you know, without having to open and then devalue the whole bottle. I mean, that's amazing, and it actually sounds amazing and theory. But you know, like we've already talked about, most people don't know what old wine is supposed to taste like, right, Well, yeah,

and that's not even the only problem. So according to Maureen Downey, who's one of the world's leading wine authenticators, counterfeiters are already using the core of n device to remove fine wine from the bottle and then just pump the cheaper stuff in in its place. So what was supposed to be like this revolutionary tool for verifying wines is now providing one of the easiest ways to create

fake ones. I mean, that's terrible and it must have been so frustrating through whoever came up with this ingenious solution, But you know, it is funny that the tool I've heard is most helpful for detecting counterfeit wine is actually like a super low tech one, and that's the jeweler's loop, which is the round magnifying device that jewelers used for I guess, finding imperfections and diamonds and rubies and whatever.

But with one of those, you can actually spot all kinds of inconsistencies, like you can find thumb prints on wax seals that should have been applied by machines, or other subtle differences like label colors, like the kind of details that point to inject printing over actually I guess like old fashioned ways of making labels. Yeah, that makes sense.

And I've even heard about some of the more glaring errors that could be spotted just with the naked eye, as long as you know what you're looking for, Like sometimes counterfeiters get pretty lazy and they wind up misspelling the name of a wine, or they may release a particular vintage and a larger size bottle than it was

ever actually sold in. But probably my favorite dumb mistake though, is this counterfeiter who tried to sell this supposedly very old wine, but he ended up putting it into bottles

that had a recycling logo on the bottom. That's incredible. So, I mean, it really seems that the best way to protect yourself against wine fraud is just to be super knowledgeable about what you're trying to buy, right Yeah, And I mean, I guess that doesn't seem like too much to ask, given the price labels that we're dealing with, and you know, the kinds of wines that that get counterfeited.

Not to mention how extensive the problem of wine fraud seems to be now right, and and nowadays there's even an option to outsource that attention to detail and how do you do that? So big name cases like Rudy's have actually shined a spotlight on just how pervasive the problem with wine fraud is. And you know Maureen Downey, who you talked about earlier, she actually estimates that the total value of all fake wine on the market is

about three bill billion dollars. I mean, that's just unbelievable, and over half a billion of that actually comes from Rudy alone. But other wine industry estimates say that at this point, around twenty of all wine and circulation is counterfeit. So I guess like the need for wine authentication is definitely there, and consultants like Downey have actually been stepping up to meet the challenge in lots of different ways, And one of those is through a website that Downey

here self started called wine fraud dot Com. I haven't actually been to the site. So it's just like an online guide for spotting forgeries, yeah, I mean, it has tutorials of like how to recognize fraud and and there's also like a gallery of legitimate samples of popular wine so you can actually compare the real things to any potential fakes in their collections. And on the paid version of the site, because there's always a paid version, users

can actually team up with experts to get their bottles verified. Well, that does sound pretty handy, and I guess if you're dropping a thousand bucks or so on the bottom of wine, you might as well pay a little extra to make sure that this thing is legitimate. Yeah, I mean, or you could just switch to beer. But good advice. But speaking of things to watch out where I I do think it's time to pop the cork on today's backed off, So let's dive in. M So I'm gonna kick this off.

Did you know that the French sometimes eat rats, and it's a dish occasionally served in Bordeaux, but you only use alcoholic rats who've been hanging out in wine cellars. Basically, you brushed them with lots of olive oil and shallots, and apparently they're grilled over wine barrels to get even more of that winey flavor. It's supposed to be delicious. I don't know. I think i'd probably need a few glasses of actual wine before trying that. But have you

heard about this wine called nineteen Crimes? So it's almost like Pokemon Go meets wine. So the nineteen Crimes refers to the British prisoners who were sent to Australia and each of them had been accused of one of the nineteen crimes of the time. I just read about this recently, but the crimes were things like impersonating an Egyptian and stealing letters and anyway. You could hold up a wine bottle to your phone and it tells you the crime stories.

So you get some delicious notes of history with each glass. And apparently the gimmick works because sales have been great. That's pretty cool. So there's this two hundred mile pilgrimage from Rome to Ortona in Italy called the Camino Descent Tomasso. UM. I don't know if you've seen this trend recently, but like walking these Comino pilgrimages, has has just seen this huge resurgence. But at the end of the road in Ortona,

there's something wonderful waiting for you. A wine fountain. It runs twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, and it's there specifically for thirsty pilgrims and also I guess tourists. But they do ask you to keep it to one glass, and according to Towny's quote, it isn't for drunkards or louts. All right, well, this is super short one, but did you realize there's a specially minimally fermented wine that gets used at mass occasionally, so it's

made for priests who are recovering alcoholics. I like that. So I don't think you and I were hip to the four loco trend, but lucky for us, we can still get in on this buck fast tonic wine. It's Scottish for logo, it's it's proved by monks and it's a fairly fient alcohol. By volume, so you know it's gonna get you drunk and drop for drop. It also contains approximately as much caffeine as six cups of coffee. It's basically a recipe for disaster and and people have

been quick to link it to crimes. Supposedly it led to over five thousand penny crimes and fights in a small region of Scotland over two or three years. But the funniest thing I've read about it was this review and Thrillist that said it's the scourge of the drinking class in the UK and the most polarizing thing to come for monks since the bowl cut. That's pretty great. I do have to admit that any fact off that includes the words Scottish for loco is something that deserves

a trophy. So so Mango, I'm gonna give you this one. Thank you, and that's it for today's show. If we've forgotten any great facts about wine or wine fraud, we'd love to hear those from. You can always email us part time Genius and how Stuff Works dot com. You can also call our seven fact hotline that's one eight four four pt Genius, or hit us up on Facebook or Twitter. Thanks so much, for listening. Thanks again for listening.

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