SYSK Selects: How Wine Fraud Works

I'm Josh Clark. There's Child's of w Chuck Bryant and no little bit even this Stuff you Should Know. Man, that coffee smells good? You want something? Have a sip? No, I'm fine, but just I just love that smells so nice, even though I don't drink much coffee. Oh yeah, I'm with you. You know, it's just a delicious smell. Sometimes I'll go to a department store and just walk through the fragrance s aisle and just smell the coffee samples.

Today open. Well, I thought you were gonna say you go through the lingerie and just brushed up against things after the coffee, So after the coffee, sniffing is done and I can't smell anything anymore. How are you? Thanks for outing me? Man, that's creepy. Yeah, I'm sure there's weirdos out there who do that. Are you kidding me? There's probably websites dedicated to it. Yeah, I'm fine. Good. Good?

Do you like wine? I love wine? How do you know, Chuck that the wine you're drinking it's actually the wine you're thinking it because nobody bothers to fraudulently rip off bottle of one. Not true. Yeah, there's a famous issue in the world of wine fraud watch people. Okay, um from Tesco, which is I think it's just a straight up like supermarket kim In Britain, I saw that. Actually, yeah, you're right. And there was a Louisia dough which normally

goes for about fifteen pounds. It was selling on sale for five pounds, but one of the guys who purchased it contacted some people who are into wine and said, I think this is phony because the label looks like it's a photo copy. So somebody was doing knock off Luisia dough which normally goes for not that much, and sold it to Tesco, who was in turn selling it. And this is a huge thing, and there's a big, big debate even still and just how widespread wine fraud is.

And it's really difficult to get to the bottom of because there's so many people who have their fingers in this fraudulent pot, whether wittingly or unwittingly, in either way, are unwilling to admit that it's as extensive as it is, or the people who are burned are making a bigger deal out of it than they are than it really is, because they have the money in the context to get CBS to do a story on how they got burned by buying some fake wine. So it's not entirely clear

how widespread it is. But there have been some really great, very famous, almost proven stories of outright wine fraud. But it's a pretty new phenomenon. Uh well, if you think ancient Rome is pretty new, let's hear it man. Well that's I mean there ever, since there was wine, people were making fake wine or trumping it up as something other than it was. So the newer practice, like you can divide it into two things. There was an ancient room they were doing stuff like this and adding like

lead to wine. To sweeten it while they were killing people. Uh. But then there's the new practice of like, hey, this is a Thomas Jefferson bottle of wine and you can bide it to Christie's auction for a hundred thousand dollars and it's really not that at all. Do you remember back in the eighties, Um, I think Reo Needy was adding like when you wipe her fluid or something. Yeah, it was at the at least an urban legend. More recently, there was something added to wine to make it sweeter

that was really bad for you. But I don't know, I can't confirm if it was that case or No, this was specifically re Needy in the eighties. And it again, it could have just been an urban legend because it's at the same time that there were spiders eggs in bubble yum. You know. Yeah, there was a lot of like a consumer uh panic. I think. Yeah, it was a golden age for urban legends. Yeah, agreed. Uh. And you know what we need to do one on wine period? Yes,

this is so us. Yeah, we'll do episodes on everything but the actual thing, and then we'll finally get to the thing. And we could also probably do a completely separate podcast on wine tasting, because man, that's a really bitter pill. Because there are some people who say there really is no difference in these wines, and there have been numerous occasions over the years where jerks have set up wine tasters to fail by just switching out wines

and saying, this is a really nice bottle. What's really crappy and they say, whoa, this is lovely. The tannins are really coming in. It's jammie and full, and they're like, you're drinking too buck chuck. Um. People love that stuff that it's a big bone of contention with wine drinkers and also people who like to poop poo that right and say it's all subjective and you're all just snooty and either really is no difference, but there really is

a difference. Well, okay, so there is a like you say, there's there's a big debate over that, right, um, But if you if you dive into the world of high end vintage wine collecting, it is very um it's like an aura borus, right, that snake that eats its own tail in that the people who are in charge of judging whether something's real or not are basing that on their previous experiences, which may or may not have been

in experience with the fraudulent wine. So even if you can tell the difference, if you've only been exposed to, say, fraudulent eight century wine, then when you are asked to judge a bottle of eighteenth century wine, you're gonna compare it to that, and if it's ultimately coming from the same counterfeitter, you will be like, yes, this is the real thing, because I've had that before and it tastes

like that. Well, yeah, And here's the other thing. Is there there is vintage, uh, appropriately aged wine that is tastes great because it has aged in such a way, and then there are these super old bottles that apparently tastes like canned asparagus. Is the note that it brings out, And these don't even taste that good. It's just the fact that you can own it and show people you don't even drink it. In most cases, you don't drink it. Jefferson Wine, you have it in your collection, so you say,

look at Michael Alec exactly. That's the whole point A lot of people are For a lot of people, that's the whole point it's just own this bottle. It's like owning a piece of Thomas Jefferson. You get to show off and and tell people how great you are, right exactly. So, Um, that's how a lot of wine counterfeiting has gotten away with because the people are never going to open the wine, So whatever tampering you did with the seal is never

going to be discovered. Um, they're never gonna taste the wine inside, so it could be two buck chalk or whatever we see the cork. Yeah, Um, and they're just they're just happy to have this thing and their status to be elevated to the point where they don't really want to know if it's a counterfeit so long as they can walk around and tell people this is Thomas Jefferson. Right, Well, we should go ahead and start talking about Bill Coke.

He is uh, one of the other brothers. He is not Charles or David Coke of the famous uh Republican Coke brother fame. Yeah, billionaire supporters of the Republican Party. Yeah. Yeah, she's saying that's like the nicest way to describe them. Yeah, it is. Uh. He is the brother, one of the brothers who got out along with another brother. Um, not another brother from another mother. No, they're all the same mother, right right, Okay, Yeah, he got out of the family

business and said, you know what, I'm a billionaire. I'm gonna what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start collecting really rare and expensive things. Um. One thing he has as a gun collection. He owns Custer's rifle, Billy the Kid's pistol. Does he yea, he owns the gun that killed Jesse James. Oh, I'm sorry, is Jesse James pistol? And that gun and that what was his name, Robert Ford? Yeah? And that boy was it really good? Beautifully shot as well WIDEPS rifle dot Holiday's rifle. He has a lot

of vintage guns. He has a lot of very famous works of art, like original Picassos and Monaise. As far as he exactly, he sounds like a big sucker to me. And he also owns, uh as this article says, several hundred bottles of what he calls moose piss. Yeah, that's what he calls it. He's he well, he's saying that for all he knows. That's what's inside. He got duped very famously, many many times. Yeah, and he has had many many lawsuits over the years that have come out.

Guy loves suing people. He does what he calls dropping subpoena is on people. Yeah, he sees people almost recreationally he drops a subpoena on their head. Yeah, what a guy. So he um. He bill Coke again very famously. He's probably the most famous victim of wine fraud because he sues everybody he possibly can who may or may not have sold them a fake. Really takes it personally, and he really goes after people. Um. And he did a lot of media about this too, so he's very famous

for this. UM. And he brought in some wine experts and said, here are thirty thousand, forty thousand bottles of wine that I have in my cellers. How many are fake? And they just took a random sample of three bottles kidding me, no, they said exactly. They're like, we'll bill you for this. Um. They took a random sample of three thousand bottles and it yielded a hundred and thirty fakes. So I mean he has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds by by extension, of fake bottles of wine in his cellar.

And that was actually that's about on par with what the average not necessarily uninitiated or uneducated wine buyer, but fervent vintage wine buyer would have that about four million dollars seller, about a million of it will be on fakes. And he supposed at he spent close to five million dollars on fake wine over the past quarter century, um, including some of those Jefferson's that we'll talk about. Uh. And a lot of this wine came from a man

named Rudy Uh Croniawe Oh, that's good stuff. Yeah, it's even better than I had in my head. Would you have? I like that? I think? And this guy was one of the most famous um really alongside another guy that we'll talk about, one of the most famous wine fraud discs, fraudster, fraudster, counterfeitters, counterfeiters of all time. Um. And he was sentenced to ten years in prison and supposedly was to pay close to fifty million dollars in damages, which is easily what

he made by selling fake wine. In two sales in two thousand and six, he made thirty six million dollars selling fake wine. What a jerk. And it's easy to sit back and the defense team even used this in court to say, these are rich guys, like, no harm, no foul, who cares very if you're ripping off the rich. And I even found myself kind of thinking that. But at the end of the day, who it's wrong. It's wrong. It's wrong. Sure, I mean like I wouldn't do it.

I wouldn't sell a counterfeit bottle of wine. Yeah, it's wrong, it's illegal, and it's it's gross. And just because you're ripping off the rich, it's not like he's Robin Hood and giving that then to the poor. You know, he was him. I didn't have the idea that he was doing that. Plus Um, Dave Rouse, who wrote this, made this point, but I take issue with it that ultimately vintage counterfeit wine fraud affects all wine drinkers because that

stuff trickles down. I don't think that's true. Because from reading this UM, there are two really great long form articles that this article was partially based on when was in The New Yorker, and one was on Vanity Fair,

and both of them were totally worth reading. Um. But just from reading those you get the impression that those are two very different worlds, that the world of like just regular wine appreciation and vintage wine collection form of Venn diagram that just barely overlaps, and that one really does not affect the economy the economics of the other.

So if there's a bunch of counterfeit stuff going on in the vintage wine world, it probably wouldn't drive up prices for the wine that you're buying that's, you know, ten years old tops. So I don't think that that's necessarily true his point that we all shoulder the burden that counterfeiters do because these two worlds are so divorced. But even still, like if you were a people are losing money and reputations are being built up and lost.

You know, I get that. All right, Well, let's take a little break and we'll come back and uh, we'll talk about the two ways that you can generally go about trying to fake a wine. All right, we're back. We're drunk on wine. It's so drunk. I wish what's your favorite wine? Uh? My favorite wines are big bodied California cabernets generally, like not a specific like wine maker. If that's what you're asking, I'm not gonna like, Yeah, there was no wrong answer. Yeah, No, Well what was

that funny? Because it made me think of fat bottom girls, that Queen song. Big bodied California. Yeah, it just potts in my head and I laughed like a goon. Yeah, I like really full bodied wines, zim Fidel's and Cabernets. Yeah, I think California is just they're doing it right. You know. They say Pa titzeras the Rodney danger field in the wine world. I've heard that. So if you're gonna go about faking a wine, um you uh, there are two

things you can do. You can either fake the wine inside a real bottle or you can fake the bottle with real wine. Yeah, and it's all real wine, you know, different vintage maybe yeah, but like it could be like a really nice nineteen seven wine that you say it's actually from nineteen fourteen or even one. I mean like it could be within a couple of years. It ends on whether it was a good year, good point or if the if there's a scarcity of it, that kind

of stuff. And actually Bill Cooke makes a pretty good point. His whole thing is he wants to have I think a hundred and fifty years of Lafitte or some some house like every single vintage that they released of every single variety over the course of a hundred and fifty years, which is extremely ambitious. And he said, it's easy to get the really prized ones because those are the ones

that like people saved and all that. He said, it's the mediocre years that are old that nobody bothered to say this, drank and throw away the bottle or or just didn't keep it. Those are the ones that he has the most trouble finding. Or they did skeet shooting. They just had the servants stowed up in the air and then shot him with shotguns. That's what they do.

Richie Riches. Uh, well, you make a good point too, because Colnie Allen, although he dealt in the super high echelon, he would also take a two bottle of wine and fake it to be like a thousand dollar bottle. Yeah, he did it both ways. He would he would take out he would take an old bottle, legitimate real bottle, put in his own mix of wine and cork it again and make it look like it had never been open.

Or like you said, he would take just say a forty seven Lafitte and mess with the label to make it look like a forty one Lafitte, which would be worth ten times that what the forty seven Lafitte would be worth. Right, and clearly, I also want to point out Lafitte is obviously the only fancy wine that I'm familiar with, because that's my go too. So if you guys are out there and you're getting the impression that I know what I'm talking about as far as wine goes,

you have been duped. Well, you're not a big wine guy. You're on record as such. I like wine. I'm I'm definitely not a wine guy exactly. Yeah. Uh, And I'm not wine guy either. I'm I'm at the very i'm wine guy in the their sense of the word. I like really good wines. I like going to wineries, but I'm certainly no like. I'm not saying I have some amazing palette. I can't pick out vanilla notes and things like that. I'm just like, man, this tastes really good

for up the bottle of it. And I tend to fall into that camp where I'm certain that there are people out there, literal tastemakers who can tell the difference between wine and I've had had wine that I didn't like before, I've had wine that I do like. Um, but I fall into the camp where I'm ultimately like it's it's whatever you appreciate. It's no hierarchy. There doesn't need to be. Um, you know, a two thousand dollar bottle is not necessarily going to taste as good as

a twenty dollar bottle. That that you The whole thing is just about individual enjoyment and a kind of snobbery associated with it to me just misses the point. Yeah, here's my deal is. I can really tell the difference between what I would consider a cheap wine and like a decent bottle or a good bottle. But that's where my taste level max is out. I can't tell the difference between a two bottle and at bottle. But if you gave me like a six dollar bottle, you can.

You can taste the difference it's between that and like a twenty bottle. Yeah, but even then, if that's what you like, that's what you like. I'm not. It's just not what I want, right, you know. Man, a lot of caveats there. So Um. We were talking about Rudy kay, yeah, and how to how to he faked wines and he he got real bottles correct in general, and made his own wine concoctions. Here's what this dude did right to

get to the point where he could even counterfeit. Yes, he got his hands on real stuff, and he ran up some serious, serious bar tabs while he was doing it. There's a very um legendary story of him hooking up with this guy who was the head of wine sales at a UM, a an auction house called Acker Meryll. They factor in big time into this guy's ascent and Rudy Kay's counterfeit ascent, not weddingly necessarily, but they they

let him used their reputation to build his own. But he did it by duping them by throwing like these crazy parties at like uhum at um restaurants and having like two fifty thou dollar tabs, picking up the tab himself. But then after everybody left, going to the staff at the restaurant being like, mail me every single one of those bottles, and they go, well, okay, it's your wine, but that's weird, not enough to make mention of it,

but it was odd to them. His big thing was that he did it at the same place over and over again, so they did start to notice. But while he was doing this, he was also collecting wine to really expensive vintage wine, and there was already a market for it, but it didn't look anything like the market that he built almost himself. He drove the value of vintage wine up, almost singlehandedly by buying up as many bottles of old stuff as he could. Um. And while

he was doing that, he was building his reputation. He was making connections, and he was getting his hands on legitimate wine that he could use to resell now that the market was up at a higher price, after he had already consumed it. It say like a party. Yeah. And one thing he was doing that tipped off some people early on was um like you were saying. He was buying off years of good vintages, great vintages, to where there was one guy who thinks Jeffrey Troy was

his name. He was a wine merchant, and he said he was buying these good bottles for French Burgundy, but they weren't great, they were off years, and it was just if he was a collector, it was just weird to buy these, uh, and to be adamant about buying these because he could get him for cheaper and fake them easier exactly, like he could just kind of smudge the year and all of a sudden it's a much more expensive vintage. UM. So he's he's driving the market up.

He's buying legitimate wine. Apparently he's taking out loans that he defaulted on to to build this reputation is um and so when the market hits he starts counterfeiting. And there was one story that actually was pretty prominent in the Vanity Fair article where he was apparently confused. He thought, and there's no way that any of us would have ever thought this, but he thought that a Ponceau close Saint Denis was the same thing as the Christine ponce

So close St. Denis. Right, he was way off. So it turns out that um, he figured that ponce Uh made this wine in Burgundy in the forties, because Christine ponce So close Aint Denis made this wine in the fourties. Turns out that the regular Ponceo, the very famous Ponceau family, made their close End Denis starting in the eighties. So he actually got found out because of this one mistake. This led to his unraveling, and he was going to auction or sell about like nine bottles of this stuff

that was overtly counterfeit. It had never existed, which also said a lot about the collectors at the time too, because they were coming and paying for wine that they never even heard of. It didn't exist strictly because these these people were attached to it. Yeah, it's pretty amazing,

it really is. And that's how he was able to get away with it for so long because that dinner, the guy Ponceau himself, um, the guy who was the proprietor of the vineyard, showed up at that dinner, flew from Paris to I think New York to be at the dinner to make sure that they didn't auction off those things because he knew they were counterfeit. And Rudy Kay still was left to just keep going for years

after that because because of reputations. Well, and like you said, he had built up this reputation, which is a big part of it. Um, you have to be a true con artist. You can't just go in there, uh and say, I've got all these Jefferson wines. I'm chuck. You know, you have to be known in the community, and it takes a long time, and they have to think of that right, Yeah, I have to think you have money, real money, which he did. No, he borrowed it all. Well,

I thought he came for money a ruse. Well, he had money at one point he borrowed on now, but then he made a lot, right, So think about this. I think he defaulted on a three or four million dollar loan, and then another one or two million dollar loan, and then he also borrowed privately from other like wine collectors that he knew. But even still, let's say he borrowed ten million dollars that he defaulted, he made tens in tens and tens more millions, thirty four million dollars

in one year just from two sales. Yeah, and he currently is appealing his conviction um on the grounds that, uh that when when he was arrested, he was arrested on his front porch. Then they searched his house and they said you can't do that. That they got the the search warrant afterward, and he said, well you can't do that. There should I should have never been searched. And it's looking like they're saying, now you know what

they had reasonable uh doubt? Uh yeah, exactly. So I don't think the appeal is going to go anywhere, but this is recently, it's like this year, I think he's still appealing. Yeah, but he got ten years right, ten years man UM, So he got caught and he got caught red hand, red handed. It sounds like UM and the people who were attached to him that helped build up this market definitely suffered uh some dings to their reputation, but are saying like, we had no idea, we trusted

this guy. We were duped too, and UM to their to their merit acker meryll Um offered like, uh money back guarantees on anything that was considered found to be fake and and paid up on it after one auction. Well, one of the guys Cocu is suing is uh, I can't remember his name, but he supposed supposedly he's like, I didn't know I was selling you fake wine, like I got duped, and he's saying, no, you knew. So they were trying to prove whether or not this guy

actually knew. And so that's that's another part of that debate where how widespread is is who knows what UM and who's like how far do you go back before you find the person who did it right. So we'll talk about one other person who allegedly did it right after this break. So, Chuck, there's another man, very famous man in the wine world. His name is Hardy Hardy roden Stock, but I don't believe that's his real name. His real name is what mine heart gooka. That's right,

what a name. That's his given name. But he goes by Hardy roden Stock and has since the seventies. And he to be a truly great wine counterfeitter, not only do you have to build up a reputation as rich and um willing to crack bottles of ridiculously expensive, um historically valuable wine at parties where there's wine critics and auctioneers and wine experts, um. But you also have to have a certain love for wine. I think Rudy Kay definitely loved wine. Yes, so they but they all have.

But yeah, and Hardy Rodenbach definitely does too. And apparently there's there's a big question about whether he is one of the better wine mixers on the planet. Yeah, because that's that's a real job, where like like someone will work at a winery and they'll take a little bit of this and a little bit of that and then all of a sudden, you've got there. Yeah, they're they're they're blend. Some blends are better than others. Apparently roden

Stock is a master blender. If he is in fact a counterfeiter, this article on how stuff works make it makes it sound like built coax hired, FBI gun closed the book and like it's done. But it's never been proven in a court of law that roden Stock actually, um was this counterfeiter and he still denies the allegations. Oh, the circumstantial evidence is pretty pretty substantial. Yeah, I mean, I think the only reason is because he refuses to come to America to go to court. Yeah, you know,

but there's no criminal prosecution. It's all civil as far as I understand. Yeah, I think that's the case. So he was a former music manager and um he I think they're making him. There's a book called The Billionaires Vinegar about this about the Jefferson Wines. Interesting that they're making into a movie with McConaughey. Of course. Oh yeah. Does he play Bill Coke or Hardy roden Stock. I don't know who he's playing, or does he just kind of like wander around days in the background, he's the

winemaker man. Uh yeah, I'm not sure who he's playing actually, but it was a big book and it was about the famous Jefferson wines. And basically the deal is Thomas Jefferson, as we all know, was way into wine, way into France. UM, a big Francophile, and he had either bottles in his collection or he had his own vintage as well. Um, Thomas Jefferson wines, and very famously Hardenstock was rooted out allegedly. I guess do we have to say that as faking

these Jefferson bottles. Um, he would force you know, you're supposed to spit out when you're drinking wine tasting he would he would I don't know about force, but highly encourage his guests to swallow so they would be drunker by the time he got to the real good stuff at the end, which is and again, so it's unusual to force your guests to drink rather than spit out

the wine at a tasting party. And then it's also unusual to bring out your best stuff at the end because everybody knows your palette is saturated and you can't really tell the difference anyway. Well, if you've ever been on a wine tour and go to like several wineries, you definitely at the last winery, you're like, give me a case. Right, is great? Yeah, So when he's throwing these parties in these tastings, again he's invited and very

smart to invite wine experts, wine critics, wine journalists. It's an event. It is an event. And again, all these people think that this dude is just this eccentric, extraordinarily rich dude who is literally opening to drink and share with them. He's wonderful. These these people who are peons compared to this man. He's such a great man because he's opened a seventeen eighties seven bottle of Thomas Jefferson's wine and he's given me a glass. I've got to

go right about it. I got to talk about how great Hardy roden Stock is. So it's very smart to have surrounded himself with the people he did. Yeah. So his story was that he said, um, he claimed that he found a batch of Jefferson bottles behind a brick wall in a Paris Parisian basement that he still hasn't revealed where this is a little suspicious. Uh. And then

so if you already got all the wine out of there, Yeah, exactly. Uh. And then he and uh he went and sold a lot of these two people like Coke and Christopher Forbes and other billionaires for um, hundreds of thousands of dollars per bottle. And I think they were like about a hundred and twenty bottle. Yeah, it's a ton of money. And um, they were fakes and it was all. It all came down to a little matter of punctuation, which

is hysterical to me that Thomas Jefferson bottles. Um. Well, first of all, he kept really meticulous records because he was so into wine. J did. Yeah, so on the bottles chuck it said, and it was engrave t H period, capital J period. Right, Supposedly Jefferson when he wrote his initials, it would be T colon capital J period. So that fatal flaw of the matter of punctuation is what gave him away. Basically. Yeah, well there's a larger question too.

So the idea that Thomas Jefferson would have his bottles engraved was based on a letter, a verified letter. Um. It was an order that Jefferson placed for French wine on behalf of himself. And George Washington, which makes these bottles even more amazingly awesome because they think, well, these came from an order that Jefferson placed, that we're also in George Washington's shipment as well, and that they they

they needed to be separated out by initials. But if you step back and you think they wouldn't go in and grave all the bottles, they just marked the crates that the bottles came in. This crate goes to George. This crate goes to Jefferson because he was ordering it by the case, not by the bottle. So the idea that the bottles would be engraved is also dubious in and of itself. But Monicello historians are like, number one, he this is wrong. The way that this is engraved,

That's not how he would have done it. And secondly, there's no records in all of we have the records for this era, and there's nothing in there about these vintages being in Monicello or being ordered by Jefferson. And then also um, once Bill Coke put his FBI dude on the on the case, it turns out that it's likely that this this engraving was done by modern instruments. Yeah, he hired a guy named an ex fed named Jim

McElroy or I'm sorry, Jim Elroy. And you know I kept on say macail roy too, I guess because of the maclroy brothers. So he hired this guy, paid him a lot of money, I imagine, to try and do some digging on this. And one of their first lines of defense was there's something called uh cessium dash one thirty seven, and that is UH a radioactive isotope that exists because it's a product of nuclear fission of uranium. So it didn't exist until we started doing that, before

we started launching nuclear bomb explosion tests. Yeah, exactly. Uh, now it exists, and you can actually test for this stuff, so if you find you know, it basically can date something back to night. However, in the case of harden Stock, he was smart enough at least to use wine older than n so that didn't really help him much. Yeah, and I wonder if he just surely he just lucked out. I don't know, because I wonder if that Caeson test was around when he did this, because this he supposedly

found him in eighty five and started selling him immediately. Yeah, who knows. Maybe he got lucky, or maybe he just was like, I need to use some really old, nice wine, yeah, to at least try and get away with it. So

again there's like and then there. One other part of the case against him was that he had a tenant once at his family's house who had an apartment near his in the house and in the basement, the tenant said that he saw like basically tons of empty bottles and um stacks of labels and all this stuff, which, to the it meant, well, this guy's forging wine. Right, that's a little more. That's probably what I would think. I hope you doesn't go by my recycling every Wednesday

here a wine counterfeitter, it could be. Uh. So there are a lot of there's nothing you can do about these these old um I mean, you can have people inspect them and try and verify them, but there's really nothing you can do as a like a full proof method. But really nice wineries now are doing. There are a lot of methods you can do now for future generations of wine fraud. Yeah, for the vintage stuff you're s o l basically, yes, you just have to really trust

where it's coming from. Probably hire an expert, and um, maybe stay away from rodent stock if you're Bill Coke, right, that's right. But there Yeah, like you said, the modern guys are using things like um R f I D tags, um QR codes that you scan and it takes you to a website or something. Microchips like you have in your doll Yeah, so you can track the actual bottle.

There's also like tamper proof um capsules, the that the wine is encased in the bottle's neck that when that's open, it changes color if it's ever been opened, and some actually alert the Internet or I guess back home at headquarters the Internet once it's been open. And there's another one that's pretty cool. There's this company that inserts a specific DNA marker into like the ink on the label that can't be counterfeit and that they can go back and later and be like, no, this is real. At

the very least, we know the labels real. And Rudy case case, he had a bunch of credit card charges for glue and labels and ink and he and he had a pretty nice trail of evidence behind him. Yeah, I'm sure it's not very smart with it. Well, I mean, if his apartment was just a counterfeiting factor, and then lastly checked the one of the pieces of evidence that a lot of people point to when they say that UM wine fraud is a big deal. UM is eBay. Yeah.

You can go on eBay and spend a hundred bucks on a empty bottle that, if it weren't empty, would go for a thousand or ten thousand or whatever. And the idea behind it, of course, is that somebody's filling it up and putting it back on the market as a counterfeit. Why would someone sell that that reason to make a hundred bucks on a ten tho dollar bottle of wine? Some people love money, I don't know. It just seems like a lot of just people who buy that kind of wine. I don't picture them going on

eBay and running auctions over it. Makes you wonder also if like those are people who they're like, they're just working at a restaurant, and well, that's what it sounds like to me. You can take that home and put it on anybay. The servant throws the uh, you know, cleans up after the dinner party. Yeah, that's what I figure. What's going on? And apparently a lot of restaurants now because of guys like Rudy Kay and uh Hardy Rhodes. Rodent Stock now um smash vintage bottles once the wine

has been ordered and drunk with. Well with the shotgun in the skeet shooting, I got one last thing. Supposedly there were only five magnums of ninety seven Fleur produced uh between two thousand and five and two thousand seven, eighteen magnums of ninety seven La Fleur were sold at auction. That's so easy to like, how can that happen? That's so easy to check when there's only five of something.

The argument is that either the guy who works at La Fleur and did in ninety seven and says no, there was only five magnums doesn't remember because the record keeping in like Burgundy is terrible back in the day um, or that the there's just no will. There's so much of a market for counterfeit wine and there's not enough pressure being put on the people who are actually selling it are allowing it to happen, that it's just whatever. And supposedly, now that America has gotten more and more savvy,

this counterfeit market is moving over to China. So where there's like a lot of wealth coming up and not a lot of wine education and people are just getting taken for rides. Man good stuff. Yeah, this is a good one man, good pick. If you want to know more about wine fraud, you can type those words in the search bar house to works dot com and I said search bar should chuck. What is it time for Facebook? Question? All right? Sometimes we pool questions from Facebook to answer them.

So what we're doing now? This is from Diane Martin, Diane F. Martin. UH Center podcasts are essentially what would be called literature reviews and research lingo. How do you decide which references to include an exclude, use any kind of quality indicators to this side what you will and will include, especially when they're deeply debated. There's a good question. Um,

we've talked about our research process. I think we tried to use peer reviewed journals and what I mean, if we find something on the internet, we try and double and triple check that information. I know, a big giveaway you always talk about as if it's the same exact thing printed a bunch, that's usually a sign that it could be bogus, like riding a danger field, being in the scale and the movie The Scout. Uh, but it still bears mentioning. Sure, you just have to mention it

with the caveat. We don't find it credible, but it's out there because it doesn't. It exists in some form of fashion. Uh, scientific journals, medical journals, I mean peer reviewed. It's just a great way to go if you can get your hands on it. I remember this great article called like why is science behind a paywall? About the basically the cart the science publishing cartel. But if you can get your hands on pure reviewed stuff, that's the

best stuff to work with. Agreed, go ahead. Another question, Yeah, Chuck for me? This from Shane Elliott. I knew I think he meant no because question will find a special place in Chuck's heart. What are your favorite types and kinds of beers? And why do you brew your own beer? And somebody else said recently on Twitter that you said in the beer episode that you were going to get into homebrewing. Did you ever? So that's a two part

question for you, Chuck from Twitter and Facebook. Well you're a beer guy too, I like, I do not brew my beer, but on the record, is really liking I P A S and o. There's a backlash going on now why because there's so many of them, and people are like, there's other kinds of beers in the world. I pas tastes like soap. I love. I love anything that's super hoppy. Yeah, I do. I just that's what I like. Our friend Dave dropped by from Sweetwater Sweetwater

and brought us some hot hash. I haven't tried it yet, have you know? But his all that stuff is good. Sweetwater does a great job. And we've always both kind of agreed that uh uh Sierra Nevada Palele is one of the great all time great, but there's so many great ones. Bells too hearted. I love man, that might be the best ever. Yeah, and that plenty of the elder we got sent some of that that was delicious.

Um Oh here in Athens, Georgia. Creature Comforts tropically have not had that one delicious um Orphee is Brewing is here in Atlanta, and they make a sour that I tried that was really really good. I'm not into the sours. Have you tried it sours? Yeah? Yeah, I don't like it. I love it now. I don't give it so weird that I was like this is kind of good. Yeah, it was weird in a good way, because sometimes weird can just be novel and you're like, okay, I tried that,

it's done. This is I mean, I like it. Yeah, I don't like wheat beers. Um Belgium whites not a fan. All right, there's your it's her fish bowl. Now I'm thirsty, Jackson Blig. Other than Atlanta, what are your top five favorite cities each? Geez, New York, San Francisco, Seattle. Do they have to be American cities? Yeah? Uh in that case, then I'll throw in Paris and uh London. Look at me? Well, fancy things, I know. Uh, let's see. I love Hiroshima, Japan is a really neat city. So is Kyoto. I'm

gonna make those tied for one though. Of course New York. Um, let's see you are? I like DC a lot too. Yeah, that's a great time. Um Rome, Italy is surprisingly neat. Surprisingly, what are you getting? I mean it's a major cities, yeah, and it's packed with people, so you would think like, hey, it's a city, sure, but it also has I mean, like you just walking along the street and all of a sudden you're walking next to like a three thousand year old wall that's not even part of a museum.

He just built up around it. Yeah. Did there'd be like a fountain on a corner, like somebody's peeing in that's a thousand years old. It's it's a very neat city in that regard. Um, I like, uh where else? Um, that's all I can come up with right now. Oh you know what, I don't have to go off fancy pants like Charleston, South Carolina one of my favorite it's a great place for food. Savannah. Yeah, I like Charleston. Yeah yeah, they're similar to me. Yeah, Charleston is a

little more refined, but also a little more modern. Yeah yeah, yeah, I don't. It's not fancy pants to like cities overseas, no, I know. But when once his Paris, you're like, yeah, but Paris is awesome. It is. It's a great time in London. When's the last time you're in London, like twenty years ago? Okay, you should go back because London is like a brand new city. There's something to do at all times. Now. They have cabs, which was apparently like the big thing that changed there. Um, And it's

just an awesome, little town beautiful. Well maybe we can go there on a tour. Yes, let's uh, well, that's your turn for the question. Uh. This is from Gus M. Parker. Why did Josh grow his hair? Gus, there's a simple answer that that's a good question because I can't because I realized that I have hair, and I'm going to live it up while I got it. I'm gonna go with Gary Rickleman. What is the best flavor of pop tart? Hint, there was only one correct answer. That's not true, Gary.

I think what the answer you're looking for is brown sugar and cinnamon. It's a good one. There's nothing wrong with blueberry or strawberry. Strawberry is really good as frosted straws as long as it's frosted. That's the key. Like there's another key. And here's a tip for you that don't mind clogging your arteries. Pop it out of the toaster. I know you don't want to get a stick of butter and rub it on the back of the dry side and then around the edges of the other side

and just thank me later. I have not tried that, and I actually heard that before from Jessica Simpson when she was pregnant. Oh really, apparently just went berserk on the buttered pop tarts. Never heard of that. You got time for one more? Yeah, we got time for a couple of morning This an unusual one from Michael Snively or Snoopiley, one of the two, probably Snively. If the

Bryant and Clark were units of measure, what would they measure? Oh? Man, mine would probably oh I know what mine would be as some uh sweat level, like units of sweat per square inch or something that's a good one. Mine would measure the distance between any one place and awesome. Oh wow, whoa how is that? That's good? Thank you? All right? I got one more. Chelsea Hamilton's what's the most rewarding thing? That stuff you should know has brought to you or

allowed you to do. We've done a lot of really neat things that were very thankful for. But I'm gonna just say the live shows because they're so much fun. There are a lot of fun and it's fun to go to cities I've never been to, and it's fun to meet people and get out of this little room. Uh, this is very rewarding and very fun. I'm going with Chuck s answer at right. Uh well, thanks to everybody for those Facebook questions. UM. If you ever want to get in touch with us on Facebook, you can go

to Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know. You can also tweet to us at s y s K podcast. That's our handle. You can send us a good old fastioned email to stuff podcast the House, Stuff Works dot com and as always, joined us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works for more podcasts for my heart Radio because at the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcas tests, or where ever

you listen to your favorite shows. H m hm