I. “Dr. Conti”

On the evening of April 25, 2008, the wine auction house Acker Merrall & Condit held a sale at a New York restaurant called Cru. In contrast to the tedium of most wine auctions, Acker sales were bacchanals. They were normally held in restaurants, and many extravagant wines would be uncorked and consumed during the course of the auctions. Acker’s 36-year-old president, John Kapon, who was known to be the hardest-working and hardest-drinking man in the wine business, would join in the revelry while wielding the hammer. He would often have multiple glasses of wine arrayed on the lectern, and the effect as the night wore on was to simultaneously ratchet up his use of expletives and accentuate his tendency to butcher French pronunciation.

Wine helped lubricate the flow of money: early in the auction at Cru, two bottles of 1959 Dom Pérignon rosé that had once belonged to the Shah of Iran sold for $42,350 apiece, setting a new rec­ord price for champagne.

Later that night, Kapon was to sell a collection of wines consigned by a friend of his, Rudy Kurniawan, a 31-year-old Indonesian who lived in Los Angeles. Nicknamed “Dr. Conti” because of his affinity for Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Burgundy’s most famous estate, Kurniawan had started buying massive quantities of wines around 2003; at one point, he was reportedly spending $1 million a month. Kurniawan also sold lots of wine: at two Acker auctions in 2006, he had unloaded wines worth an astonishing $35 million. For the auction at Cru, which he had flown in to attend, he was putting up 268 bottles from three esteemed Burgundy producers: Domaine Armand Rousseau, Domaine Georges Roumier, and Domaine Ponsot.

Shortly after the auction began, a man named Laurent Ponsot, the proprietor of Domaine Ponsot, took a seat at one of the restaurant’s tables. He had traveled to New York from Burgundy to prevent the sale of all 97 Ponsot bottles on offer that night because he believed most of them were counterfeits. The consignment included one bottle of 1929 Ponsot Clos de la Roche, a grand cru (Burgundy’s highest designation) that the domaine did not produce under its own label until 1934. There were also 38 bottles of another Ponsot grand cru, Clos Saint-Denis, from the years 1945 through 1971. But the winery had not started making Clos Saint-Denis until the 1980s. Something was very wrong.

Although Ponsot and Kapon had discussed the questionable bottles by phone in the days leading up to the sale, Ponsot had not indicated that he would be coming to New York. The wines were due to be sold halfway through the auction. But just before the moment arrived, Kapon announced to the audience that all of the Ponsot bottles had been withdrawn. “I guess there were a couple of inconsistencies there,” he said, “so we had to pull them.” Peter Hellman of the Wine Spectator caught up with Kurniawan and asked for a comment. “We try our best to get it right,” he said, “but it’s Burgundy, and sometimes shit happens.”

And sometimes it happens to the wrong person in Burgundy: outraged by what he regarded as the theft of his family’s name and an assault on its wine-making heritage, Laurent Ponsot left Cru that night determined to find out where the phony bottles had come from. His quest for answers became a four-year crusade that would take him all around the world and ultimately to a meeting with the F.B.I.

On March 8 of this year, Kurniawan was arrested by F.B.I. agents at his home in Arcadia, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, and charged with multiple counts of wire and mail fraud, notably in connection with the attempted sale of the bogus Ponsots. According to court documents, when agents entered Kurniawan’s house, they discovered a counterfeiting factory, with scores of bottles being converted to knockoffs and thousands of fake labels for the most prestigious wines from Burgundy and Bordeaux. It appears now that Kurniawan may have sold millions of dollars’ worth of counterfeit wines and scammed some of the world’s biggest collectors. It is potentially the largest case of wine fraud in history and may have left the market for rare and old wines irredeemably corrupted.

II. Burgundy Mania

The issue of fake wines broke into the headlines a few years ago with the so-called Thomas Jefferson bottles, a clutch of old Bordeaux that a German collector named Hardy Rodenstock claimed had belonged to America’s third president. Bill Koch, the brother of the notorious Charles and David Koch, bought four of these bottles in the late 1980s. After learning in 2005 that they were almost surely fake, he sued Rodenstock and launched a multi-million-dollar campaign to combat what he believed was a flood tide of counterfeits.

Beginning in the early 2000s, demand and prices for the rarest wines shot up rapidly, as did the potential payoff from selling fakes. In 2000, wine auctions worldwide grossed $92 million; by last year, that figure had quintupled, to $478 million. The buying frenzy was driven in large part by young collectors in the United States. In contrast to the more buttoned-down Thurston Howell types who had once dominated the auction scene, these new players were distinguished by their insatiable acquisitiveness and eagerness to flaunt their trophy bottles.

No one moved the market more than a twentysomething West Coast collector named Rudy Kurniawan. He first surfaced on the wine scene in the early 2000s. He was reportedly the scion of a wealthy ethnic-Chinese family from Indonesia. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, in 2006, he explained that Kurniawan was an Indonesian surname his late father had given him to protect his identity. He said that his family had business interests in Indonesia and China, but refused to elaborate.

Kurniawan told the Times that his first sip of fine wine had come at a restaurant in San Francisco in 2000. He couldn’t recall the name of the restaurant, but the wine was the 1995 Opus One, a pricey Cabernet-based red from the Napa Valley. Initially, his interest was limited to California wines. But soon after that taste of Opus One, Kurniawan turned his focus to rare French wines. He fell in with some of Southern California’s wealthiest oenophiles and became a regular in three exclusive Los Angeles tasting groups, one called the BurgWhores, another known as Deaf, Dumb, and Blind, and a third titled the Royal Order of the Purple Palate. Kurniawan’s circle of wine friends included Matt Lichtenberg, the business manager for Will Ferrell and Larry David, among others; Jefery Levy, a Hollywood director and producer; and Andrew Hobson, the C.F.O. of Univision.

You needed a fat bank account and a deep cellar to drink with this crowd, and Kurniawan, who wore custom-made Hermès suits and owned a Ferrari and a Bentley, seemed to have both. He became known for his remarkable generosity.

In 2007, he threw a 60th-birthday party for his mother at Mélisse, a posh restaurant in Santa Monica. Kurniawan rented out the entire place and supplied all of the wines from his own cellar. Among the guests was the actor Jackie Chan; at one point Chan stood on a chair holding a jer­oboam of Château Pétrus and shouted, “Rudy, you are the best!” Lots of collectors seemed to agree.

According to John Kapon, he and Kurniawan met at a wine dinner in Los Angeles. In October 2004, they and some acquaintances went on a four-day binge at Cru that became an emblematic moment for the brash new wine culture that had taken hold. By the end of the last evening, the group had consumed a murderers’ row of legendary wines—1945 Mouton Rothschild, 1961 Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle, 1971 La Tâche, 1964 Romanée-Conti, 1978 Guigal Côte-Rôtie La Mouline—and racked up a total tab that one participant said was more than $250,000. Kurniawan paid for the whole thing with his American Express Black Card. He also made a curious request of Cru’s staff: he asked that the restaurant send him all of the empty bottles. He made the same request on subsequent visits to Cru, and between 2004 and 2006 the restaurant sent him box after box of empty bottles.

With his soft, round features framed by gelled black hair, Kurniawan barely looked to be of drinking age. But he was now the world’s most prodigious wine collector, spending millions of dollars at auctions (and, it was rumored, also buying up private cellars). In 2006, having helped push prices to vertiginous heights, Kurniawan began selling enormous quantities of wine. In January of that year, Acker Merrall held an auction of Kurniawan’s wines that was billed as “the Cellar.” The 1,700 lots sold that weekend brought in a total of $10.6 million. In October, Acker held another Kurniawan sale. “the Cellar II,” as it was called, grossed $24.7 million, smashing the previous record for an auction of wines owned by a single individual by $10 million. These two sales, which included wines seldom seen at auction and in quantities that were striking, vaulted Acker to the top of the global wine auction market.

Kurniawan dazzled his contemporaries not only with the scale of his buying and selling but also with the acuity of his palate. By all accounts, he was a freakishly gifted taster—he had “a photographic aromatic memory,” as Paul Wasserman, Kurniawan’s friend and former business associate, put it. According to others, he displayed a keen interest in wine minutiae—details such as the way a winery’s label might have changed over the dec­ades.

But such fastidiousness wasn’t the norm with Kurniawan. Instead, he lived the life of a rich slacker. He often slept until the afternoon and was maddeningly disorganized, habitually arriving late for engagements and seldom paying bills on time. He also had eccentricities: Wilfred Jaeger, a Bay Area wine collector, says that Kurniawan had a habit of falling asleep at tastings; he would suddenly nod off for 20 or 30 minutes before waking up and resuming drinking. Kurniawan’s mother lived with him in Arcadia, and he sometimes brought her to tastings.

Wasserman, who met Kurniawan in 2002 and later managed a wine shop that Kurniawan bought in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles, gave the young collector an early education in the singular pleasures and intricacies of Burgundy. Wasserman, now 45, grew up in the Burgundy region of France, the son of the acclaimed exporter Becky Wasserman, a transplanted New Yorker who had become a beloved figure in the local wine trade. Kurniawan would call him regularly for buying advice and insights into producers, vineyards, and vintages. “He was avid for the information, and I was an excellent source of information for him,” Wasserman recalls. “I like mentoring.”

Although it uses just two main grapes—Pinot Noir for red wines and Chardonnay for whites—Burgundy is a dauntingly complicated region, with a four-tier hierarchy of vineyards, ownership of vineyards divided among multiple wineries, and multiple wineries bearing the same family names. This, coupled with the spotty quality of the wines in the 1970s and 80s, led American collectors to focus mainly on Bordeaux instead. The critic Robert Parker called Burgundy a “minefield.”

But thanks to a run of good vintages, some influential sommeliers and retailers, and the emergence of a new critic, Allen Meadows, Burgundy surged in popularity in the 2000s. A very affluent subset of oenophiles, prominent among them Kurniawan, were smitten with old Burgundies—wines from the 1960s, 50s, and even earlier. The price inflation for these wines was dramatic: in 1996, a bottle of 1962 La Tâche could be bought for around $400; by 2006, it was selling for $13,000. Some Burgundy enthusiasts were not content merely to drink the wines; they wanted entrée to Burgundy itself. Several bought wineries, others bought land. In 2006, Kurniawan invested in a company set up by wine-maker Étienne de Montille to help finance vineyard acquisitions. According to de Montille, Kurniawan failed for months to deliver the promised money. Finally, just when de Montille was about to give up, Kurniawan wired his contribution.

III. “Feeling a Bit of Glory”

Morey-Saint-Denis is a somnolent village at the northern end of what is known as the Côte d’Or, a narrow, 30-mile corridor that encompasses most of Burgundy’s finest vineyards. Apart from one church, two cafés, a small hotel, and a monument to the sons that Morey lost in two World Wars, the town consists of houses and wineries, all densely packed, all in varying shades of gray. Domaine Ponsot, which was founded in 1872 and produces 12 grand cru wines, is a sprawling compound set back from Morey on a hillside with a commanding view of the town and the Burgundian plains beyond.

Laurent Ponsot, in addition to being a gifted wine-maker, is one of Burgundy’s more colorful characters. Over the years, his pastimes have included mountain climbing, racecar driving, and stunt flying. A trim, energetic 58-year-old, he is disarmingly frank and possesses a wry sense of humor. These days, he intro­duces himself to visitors as “the head of the French bureau of the F.B.I.—fake bottle investigations.”

Ponsot’s battle against wine fraud began with an e-mail he received in mid-April 2008, from a New York lawyer and oenophile named Doug Barzelay, who wanted to know when Domaine Ponsot had started producing wine from Clos Saint-Denis, one of Burgundy’s 33 grand cru vineyards. The answer was 1982: that was the year a wealthy Parisian had bought an acre of vines in Clos Saint-Denis and asked Domaine Ponsot to farm the land and produce its wines. (Agreements involving sharecropping, known as métayage, are common in Burgundy.) Thus, when Ponsot learned from Barzelay that Acker Merrall was preparing to sell more than three dozen bottles of Domaine Ponsot Clos Saint-Denis from the period 1945 to 1971 at an auction in New York, he was understandably taken aback.

Ponsot brought me to see the Clos Saint-Denis vineyard when I met him recently in Morey. As we stood at its base, with the late-afternoon sun slipping behind the hills, he said that he had briefly experienced a flush of pride that his family’s wines had been deemed worthy of counterfeiting. As he likes to say, “You don’t copy Swatch. You copy Breitling and Rolex. I was feeling a bit of glory.” But that feeling quickly gave way to indignation. He considered the counterfeiting to be an attack on “the terroir and spirit of Burgundy.”

The day after the auction at Cru, Ponsot had lunch with Kurniawan. They were joined by Barzelay and Kapon. Ponsot says he wasn’t confrontational; he simply asked Kurniawan where he had obtained the offending wines. The collector told him that he had bought and sold millions of dollars’ worth of wine in recent years and couldn’t recall, but would check his rec­ords when he returned to Los Angeles. Ponsot left the lunch uncertain whether Kurniawan had simply tried to dump some fake wines that he had unwittingly bought or was a counterfeiter himself—whether he was, as Ponsot put it, “a victim or a predator.”

But even before the Acker auction, Barzelay had grown suspicious of Kurniawan. At the two “the Cellar” auctions, in 2006, a collector named Don Stott had bought a number of old wines purportedly from Burgundy’s Domaine Georges Roumier. In January 2007, Stott held a tasting of some of these bottles at his New Jersey home. Barzelay was there. So was Christophe Roumier, the winery’s proprietor. They sampled 11 Roumier bottles that Stott had bought from Kurniawan and concluded that six of them were counterfeits. Acker had offered a money-back guarantee for the “Cellar” sales, and it is believed that Stott ended up returning more than $500,000 worth of wine. A few months later, Barzelay and a group of fellow Burgundy aficionados held a long-planned Romanée-Conti tasting at the restaurant Per Se in New York. Most of the participants contributed wine. Kurniawan was there, and provided several bottles, all of which seemed authentic (Aubert de Villaine, Romanée-Conti’s co-director, was also at the tasting, and he expressed no concern about any of the wines). Kurniawan asked for the empties of the bottles he supplied, and in the days after the event, he pestered Bar­zelay to send them. Bar­zelay was puzzled by his sense of urgency: “I found it odd that he was this insistent. But ultimately, they were his bottles, and we couldn’t say no.”

The staff at Cru had also become skeptical. When some empty bottles that they had shipped to Kurniawan broke in transit, he was furious, which seemed like an over-reaction. Cru stopped sending him empties and in 2007 instituted a policy of smashing rare bottles after they were consumed. Around the same time, some wine professionals were surprised to learn that Kurniawan, in addition to his auction consignments, was also selling privately. One East Coast collector bought several million dollars’ worth of old Burgundies and Bordeaux directly from him. When those wines were later inspected by an appraiser, hundreds of them were judged to be fakes.

Wine counterfeiting can be done in a variety of ways. You can take a bottle of 1962 Château Lafite Rothschild and re-label it as the far more acclaimed and expensive 1959 Lafite. Alternatively, you can refill an empty bottle of ’59 Lafite with a lesser vintage of Lafite, a mixture of vintages, or a blend of Lafite and another wine—say, a Napa Cabernet. Or you can put an entirely different wine in the bottle. Old wines are especially tempting for counterfeiters: they generally command the highest prices and fewer people have tasted the genuine articles. Also, because uniformity in packaging is only a fairly recent innovation, counterfeiting old wines doesn’t require as much exactitude.

Decades ago, Burgundy labels were done with no particular concern for consistency. Hippolyte Ponsot, Laurent’s grandfather, signed his labels by hand. In the 1950s, Domaine Georges Roumier used two different labels for its Bonnes-Mares. Depending on the vintage, you might find the circumflex on La Tâche or you might not. Because collectors knew to expect such discrepancies with older Burgundies, and because record-keeping was largely nonexistent, they were less apt to question things such as missing or misplaced accents.

In July 2008, over a bottle of La Tâche, Ponsot dined with Kurniawan in Los Angeles. A month earlier, Kurniawan had finally e-mailed Ponsot the name of the person he claimed had sold him the fraudulent wines: it was someone called Pak Hendra, in Indonesia. Now, over dinner, Kurniawan gave Ponsot two phone numbers, writing from memory. When the wine-maker returned to France, he tried both numbers: one didn’t work; the other just rang and rang—multiple attempts never yielded an answer. Ponsot later learned that “Pak” means “Mr.” in Indonesian and that “Hendra” in Indonesia is a very common name.

However, Ponsot’s investigation yielded something intriguing closer to home: he discovered that Kurniawan had been buying large stocks of old négociant Burgundies. Up until the 1970s most producers in Burgundy sold their output in bulk to merchant houses, or négociants, which would bottle the wines and sell them under their own labels. There were some good négociant bottlings from the 1950s and 60s, but these were hardly the kinds of wines that Kurniawan was known to drink. So why was he buying them, and in such sizable quantities?

IV. The Hammer Falls

In September 2009, Bill Koch filed a lawsuit against Kurniawan, alleging that the Los Angeles collector had sold him counterfeit bottles through Acker Merrall in 2005 and 2006. In addition to asserting that Kurniawan’s real name was Zhen Wang Huang, the lawsuit claimed that Kurniawan had defaulted on $8.9 million in loans that Acker had extended to him beginning in 2006 and on a $3 million loan from New York’s Emigrant Savings Bank.

Three months after Koch sued Kurniawan, Laurent Ponsot was contacted by James Wynne, an F.B.I. agent in New York. Wynne, part of the F.B.I.’s Major Theft Squad and a specialist in art crimes, asked Ponsot if they could meet to discuss wine counterfeiting and Kurniawan’s attempted sale of the fake Ponsots. In February 2010, Ponsot and Wynne met in Ponsot’s suite at the Hotel Sofitel in Manhattan. It was the same suite, Room 2806, in which Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, would later have his fateful encounter with a chambermaid. According to Ponsot, Wynne questioned him extensively about his winery’s history and about the Ponsot bottles that Kurniawan had tried to sell.

As for Kurniawan, he had largely vanished from the wine scene after the Cru auction in 2008—or so it seemed. Then, on February 4 of this year, a Los Angeles attorney and Burgundy enthusiast named Don Cornwell posted some explosive claims on a Web site called Wine Berserkers. He alleged that Kurniawan had consigned a number of suspicious wines to an upcoming sale in London being held by an auction house called Spectrum. Spectrum denied that the wines had come from Kurniawan, but agreed to remove several dozen Domaine de la Romanée-Conti bottles from the auction at the winery’s request.

On March 6, Kyle Smith, a Los Angeles wine merchant, talked with Kurniawan by phone. Smith mentioned the London controversy, and asked Kur­nia­wan if he was worried. “Dude,” Kur­niawan replied, “if I had any concern, I’d be on the next flight home.” The F.B.I. didn’t give him a chance to pursue that option: two days later, Wynne and a team of agents arrested Kurniawan at his home in Arcadia. On searching his house, the agents discovered what they described as “an elaborate counterfeiting operation.” In addition to thousands of fake labels for wines such as Romanée-Conti, there were dozens of rubber stamps marked with vintages and winery names; a gadget for inserting corks into bottles; California wines whose labels bore handwritten notes suggesting that they would be passed off as Bordeaux; and dozens of bottles in various stages of being converted to counterfeits.

The government’s complaint against Kurniawan contained surprising details about his background. A native of Jakarta, he had been denied political asylum in the United States in 2001, and had been ordered to leave the country in 2003 after his appeal was rejected. He never complied with that order and had been living in the United States illegally ever since. (Nevertheless, he twice managed to obtain California liquor licenses.)

Court filings revealed serious financial difficulties. Not only had Kurniawan defaulted on the Acker and Emigrant loans, he had illegally pledged the same 18 pieces of art, including works by Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Robert Indiana, as collateral to obtain those loans. In addition, he had borrowed almost two million dollars from two unnamed wine collectors. The F.B.I. obtained e-mails in which a desperate-sounding Kurniawan pleaded with those collectors for help. “I real­ly need the money to be there tonight,” he wrote to one of them in 2007. “i really appreciate it and u are saving my life with this. Its that crucial!!”

Many of Kurniawan’s friends and acquaintances were shocked by the allegation that he’d actually been manufacturing counterfeit wines, and they were also stunned by the revelations concerning his financial troubles. He had sold $35 million worth of wine in 2006, yet just a few months later was begging for loans. Where had all the money gone? Was he a con artist from the start, or had he turned to wine fraud out of financial need? Those who knew Kurniawan were puzzled by another thing: could someone who was so disorganized, and foolish enough to have been caught with counterfeiting material in his house, real­ly have perpetrated a sophisticated, multi-million-dollar scam entirely on his own?

Laurent Ponsot does not believe that Kurniawan acted alone. On March 10, two days after Kurniawan’s arrest, Ponsot posted a comment on the Web site Wine Diarist. (In the interest of disclosure, it’s my site.) “It is impossible that Rudy had the knowledge on so [many] wineries,” he wrote. “Rudy has been advised by someone with extensive knowledge of a very complicated Burgundy. I know who it is, but in the current state of the investigation, I keep this information secret. Rudy himself should denounce his informants and his accomplices.”

Paul Wasserman suspected that he was being eyed by Ponsot as a possible accomplice. The next day, Wasserman posted an anguished comment on the same site. He denied any knowledge of Kurniawan’s counterfeiting activities, said that he had given the F.B.I. his full cooperation, and apologized to the wine community for “any unwitting role” that he may have played in the scandal by “imparting [to] Rudy any education that he could have used to counterfeit wines.” When I spoke with Wasserman a few days later, he told me that he and Kurniawan had fallen out at the end of 2008 and had been in touch only sporadically since then.

On May 9, a federal grand jury in New York indicted Kurniawan. The indictment described in greater detail his alleged method: he was refilling the empty bottles he collected with blends that he made from lesser wines. Although the indictment didn’t say this, those lesser wines presumably included the large quantities of négociant Burgundies that Kurniawan was buying. I met in France with a merchant who sold him a number of those wines. Many were from a company called Patriarche, which was said to have the biggest inventory of old wines in Burgundy. “Rudy emptied the cellar of Patriarche,” the merchant said. He let me see some of the invoices; they showed that Kurniawan had obtained hundreds of Patriarche bottles, with vintages dating back to the 1930s. Most of the wines were unremarkable, but some were grands crus from good years, and they probably would have made reasonably convincing fakes. “I think he had a certain respect for the product,” the merchant said. Contemplating Kurniawan’s possible conviction, he added, “You might say he was a gentleman thief.”

But it appears that Burgundy’s complexity may have been Kurniawan’s undoing.During the lunch the day after the 2008 Acker auction, Ponsot and Kapon briefly left the table, and Kurniawan asked Barzelay a question: did he recall an Acker auction in 2005 at which Kurniawan had bought a single bottle of 1947 Ponsot Clos Saint-Denis? Barzelay did remember: Kurniawan had outbid Barzelay’s friend Don Stott for the wine, paying $14,220. Bar­zelay says that it suddenly occurred to him that Kurniawan thought the bottle was a Domaine Ponsot Clos Saint-Denis. In fact, it was a Christine Ponsot Clos Saint-Denis. The Christine Ponsot label was a line of wines put out by a négociant, Émile Chandesais, and named after his wife, who was not related to Laurent Ponsot’s family. This confusion may have led Kurniawan to believe that Domaine Ponsot had been making Clos Saint-Denis as far back as the 1940s and that it was safe to produce those counterfeit Ponsots. If that is what happened, it is a mistake that now has Kurniawan facing up to 80 years in a federal penitentiary. (At his arraignment, on May 23, Kurniawan pleaded not guilty.)

V. Dumping Ground

For John Kapon, Kurniawan’s arrest raises uncomfortable questions. Kurniawan played a central role in Acker Merrall’s rise, and much of the discussion among industry insiders has focused on Kapon’s part in the scandal. When I spoke with Kapon recently, he insisted that Acker was among Kurniawan’s victims and that he had never knowingly sold fake wines. In a subsequent e-mail, he said that Acker’s acceptance of the phony Ponsot bottles for the April 2008 auction “was an embarrassing but totally innocent mistake.” He told me that he decided to withdraw the wines as soon as he learned that they were problematic, and that Laurent Ponsot was aware of this before he traveled to New York. Ponsot, for his part, says he wasn’t confident that the wines were going to be pulled and felt that he had to be in the room that night to prevent their sale.

Collectors on both coasts are known to be holding millions of dollars’ worth of wines procured from Kurniawan. It is feared that many of these bottles will be sold in Asia, where money is abundant and there is often less scrutiny. In recent years, Hong Kong has eclipsed London and New York as the richest wine auction market, and it has apparently also become a popular dumping ground for counterfeits.

There seems little doubt that the fine-wine business is awash with fraudulent rarities. Laurent Ponsot recently claimed that 80 percent of pre-1980 Burgundies being sold at auction nowadays are fake. For him, there appears to be no escaping the problem, nor any escaping Kurniawan. In February of this year, there was a dinner in San Francisco featuring Domaine Ponsot’s wines. Ponsot attended, and helped decant the bottles. As he prepared to open a 1971 Ponsot Clos de la Roche, he noticed a small sticker at the base of the bottle. It bore the initials “RK.”

FROM THE ARCHIVE

• Secrets of a California tech billionaire (Bethany McLean, November 2008)

• Who poisoned the vines at La Romanée-Conti? (Maximillian Potter, May 2011)

• The evolution of a fake Rockefeller (Mark Seal, January 2009)

• Con Heir: the other fake Rockefeller (Bryan Burrough, January 2001)

• The Wine Snob’s Dictionary (David Kamp and David Lynch, November 2005)