Fake French Wine Scam with $16,000 Bottles Uncovered in Italy

With rare wine prices on the rise, scammers are capitalizing with some good, old-fashioned wine fraud.

By Sammi Caramela

Imagine spending $16,000 on a fancy bottle of French wine… and it was actually Italian. Quelle horreur! (I usually just grab the cheapest bottle with the cutest design, so this is truly beyond me.)

On Wednesday, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, Europol, revealed that it had uncovered and shut down an extensive, decade-long wine fraud operation, as The New York Times reported.

This scheme involved producing wine in Italy, falsely labeling it as French, and secretly distributing these purported high-quality French wines to unaware dealers globally. Six people were taken into custody after a raid, where investigators seized counterfeit Grand Cru wines, forging materials, bottling equipment, and a substantial amount of cash.

With rare wine prices on the rise in the last decade, more fraudsters are apparently capitalizing on the opportunity to scam high-end wine buyers.

“We are seeing a lot more collector fraud today than we have ever seen,” said Rebecca Gibb, a Wine Master and author of Vintage Crime: A Short History of Wine Fraud.

Gibb said the trend began in the 2000s when “lots of people who knew nothing about wine started to see this as a potential addition to their portfolio.”

These victims, of course, aren’t the average Jane or Joe.

“The people who are committing these crimes, and the people who are the victims of these crimes are generally middle-to-upper-class white males,” Ms. Gibb said. “I think people struggle to be sympathetic to the victims of fraud who have got this sort of money to drop on a bottle of wine.”

With a thriving online wine market, it’s even easier to run these types of scams. And while authorities are attempting to seize counterfeited bottles across Italy, Gibb believes this issue will likely remain—especially for wealthier targets.

*Sips my $16 Pinot grigio.* Damn, that’s crazy.

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