Sober Advice To Stop Counterfeit Wine As Lafite Bubble in China Attracts More Counterfeiters

China counterfeiters produce more "Lafite" 

then you can ever find in the 

Château Lafite Rothschild cellars in France

Photo: Wikipedia about Château Lafite Rothschild 

No, Lafite is not a kind of Champagne. It has no bubbles inside. But the market for Lafite could definitely be called a bubble. One can find more "Château Lafite Rothschild" wine bottles in China than they are exported from this reputable French wine house to China. Therefore, Lucas Botebol of Zhongguo Wine estimated in October 2010 that 70 percent of the Château Lafite Rothschild in China is fake, read here. Because of the increase in counterfeit Lafite supply the prices have not dropped a Renminbi. A fortiori, prices for a bottle of Lafite 2000 have risen 574 percent between 2001 and 2010. So demand must be growing very strongly. And this probably attracts even more counterfeiters.


Some sober advice
You do not need to be an oenologist to realise that until you are a connoisseur, you might want to drink some lower cost wine that can be très agréable. And even if you are a connoisseur it could not be excluded that your taste palate is better attuned to some other wines. To cash in on the bubble is nice for the wine house, but to lose control of your product on the China market is very risky. Fortunately it is in the counterfeiters interest that they make the counterfeit Lafite not too bad. Drinkers should not become ill or worse. If some drinker of counterfeit Lafite would die, for example, than the counterfeit Lafite market will be dead too. To prevent counterfeiters with a more short term mind from bottling dangerous concoctions, the brand should try to regain control over the complete chain of supply.

Start a breaking the glass ceremony
If I were a wealthy wine lover I would like to be able to verify via my phone whether the bottle that is served in the restaurant is the genuine product. Also there should be a "waterproof" cork system that is very hard to counterfeit. And as a kind of grande finale, after finishing the bottle, the bottle should be destroyed with a hammer as a kind of luck bringing ceremony and preventing future counterfeiters from giving the bottle a second life. If the restaurant is not doing it by themselves, one should insist on it.

Hat tip to Sophie Pilgrim of France24, see here.

Terroir is a near-mystical French term for soil, micro-climat, direction of wind. It is an important term used sometimes to justify Geographical Indications, see the video below:

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On Counterfeit liquor and wine

People's Republic of China

During the massive IP enforcement campaign “Bright Sword” police cracked down in Beijing, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guizhou in 40 cases involving the production and selling of fake alcohol. China Daily wrote: “March 23 to 25, police raided 272 production and sales outlets nationwide and found more than 300 devices used for counterfeiting as well as over 13.5 million pieces of forged packaging materials, such as bottle caps, labels and boxes of well-known brands. Meanwhile, more than 30 tons of bulk wines and 13.5 million fake bottles, caps and labels worth up to 2 billion yuan (US$ 306 million) were also seized by police.” Read here.

Hong Kong
Special Administrative
Region

It is estimated that five percent of all wines in China are counterfeit. Is Chateau Le Tromperie on sale, instead of the label that is on the bottle? According to an article by Alexandra Lages for the Macau Daily Times: “Hong Kong’s expert Simon Tam recently alerted that the HKSAR newly-gained reputation as the wine-trading hub must be protected against fakes in the market. Tam said that the problem is not serious yet, but urged authorities to act fast.”

Macau
Special Administrative
Region

In China, Hong Kong and Macau wine drinking has only recently become en vogue. Thus not everybody has the knowledge yet of what taste a certain wine should have. If it smells like paint remover it is clear, but the difference between a bulk wine and some special wine can be more subtle. And it is well known that it is near impossible to find out before buying some vintage wine whether the bottle is real but its content might be not. There is a luctrative trade in real bottles. As Peter Shadbolt points out Chateau Lafite bottles can fetch 1,500 US dollar on the black market in China. He quotes Fongyee Walker, a Beijing-based wine consultant with Dragon Phoenix Fine Wines. Ms Walker makes it clear that gifting is bad for a brand. Because if someone receives a counterfeit wine as a gift and recognises it as a counterfeit, chances are that he or she in turn will give it to someone as a gift, etc. See here.

(Chateau La Tromperie= Castle The Deception)

Read Ms Lages article here.

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FEVS: "Mainland China Principal Counterfeiter Wine"

Dominique Schroeder has a good article about counterfeit wine for Agence France-Presse published in the South China Morning Post today.

"The mainland is "the principal counterfeiter", according to Renaud Gaillard, deputy director of the French export trade body, Federation des Exportateurs de Vins et Spriritueux de France (FEVS)."

However, Schroeder points out that unlike luxury goods groups such as LVMH, most vintners do not have the financial resources to fight fake goods. The ones who can pay lawsuits, which cost easily 500,000 euro, they do not want any publicity, because people might associate their products with counterfeit products.

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New Technology for Old Wines Against Counterfeit Bottles

"In China and Vietnam, you find more counterfeit than authentic bottles,'' Serge Tchekhov said in a phone interview with Elin McCoy of Bloomberg.

In order to fight counterfeit wines winemakers are considering to deploy new technologies such as RFID, now that holograms obviously are replicated too easily by counterfeiters, see Genuine Fake Holograms From China here.

Tchekhov now works with Swiss wine-security company Algoril. Before he was working as wine expert for a commission to fight counterfeiting, set up by France's offical printing company Imprimerie Nationale, under the Finance Ministry in 2004. Its study showed counterfeits accounted for about 9 percent of the global economy.

Read McCoy's article about new ways to guarantee the authenticity of wines here.

Unmentioned in the article but even more important, however of a much smaller scale, is the problem of authentic bottles with fake wine. Technology that shows whether a bottle has been opened or not should guarantee this is not the case. Otherwise only a connaisseur might taste the difference.

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