Mike Steinberger, “What’s in the Bottle?,” Slate, June 14, 2010
This investigative report by Slate’s wine columnist, Mike Steinberger, examines the retailer allegedly at the center of a multimillion dollar fraud rippling throughout the rare wine world. Manhattan-based Royal Wine Merchants apparently provided its clientele with highly desirable wines that were later deemed fakes and traced back to Hardy Rodenstock, a supplier suspected of creating counterfeits such as “the so-called Thomas Jefferson bottles.” A lawsuit filed by one collector has since highlighted the connection between the two enterprises, revealing that “Rodenstock shipped 818 bottles of wine to Royal between 1998 and 2008.” According to Steinberger, “Many industry insiders… believe that the Rodenstock invoices prove that the rare wine business has indeed been polluted by fraud.”
Steinberger meticulously details the voyage of one fake vintage in particular – a magnum of 1921 Château Pétrus – which changed hands several times and left a glut of litigation in its wake. Although a court of law has not yet proven guilt, Steinberger questions how Royal obtained so many rare bottles in the first place and echoes “the deep skepticism” voiced by other key players in the industry. “It now appears that Royal dumped a lot of counterfeit wines on the market over the last two decades,” he writes, adding that one consultant who worked for Christie’s in the mid-1990s described the retailer as “the most consistent problem in the supply chain.”
Steinberger also suggests that Rodenstock and Royal courted the good opinion of wine expert Robert Parker to help move their stock. The journalist maintains that both outfits hosted several events attended by Parker, who sampled and publicly praised some of the false vintages later pawned off on unsuspecting buyers. As Steinberger concludes, Parker “may have unwittingly had a role in corrupting the fine wine market, which would be a bitter irony for a critic who claimed Ralph Nader as his inspiration and who has long presented himself as the consumer’s advocate.”
