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And the stock down on Wall Street today as both the DOW and the S&P 500
closed at all-time highs.
If I told you that you could turn your love of wine into an investment return...
We've seen prices go up higher than they've ever been.
...could you forget gold and invest in vino?
And the bottom line is, if you want to own a fine or real wine collection,
the time to buy is right now.
Did you sell 1961 Château La Fleur?
I can taste the Chardonnay on the palate.
Did you sell one or more 1961 Château La Fleur magnums?
I thought it was a little forward.
Who inspected these bottles?
I've got elderflower, perfumed, juicy...
Bright and leafy.
This is the whole "power of suggestion" thing, right?
Did you have any reason to suspect that the wine was counterfeit?
Wine is alive.
It's not a beverage.
It's not a tool. It's not a table or a plate or a car.
It's alive.
You can see how the branches of the vines are all twisting, tortuous.
It's very traditional.
It's an ancient pruning process, hardly ever used any more.
We call it 'cup pruning'.
Over time, the branches have grown and now they look like statues.
It's phantasmagoric, especially now, in the fog.
But it's also a part of our history.
I am Laurent Ponsot.
Winemaker, vigneron, in Burgundy.
I was born above a cellar in this village in Morey-Saint-Denis,
in a family that is owning this winery since 1872.
You feel here what I call "the spirit of the vines."
As soon as I started to breathe, I had the smell of wine.
And I can say that I had some blood in my wine, not wine in my blood.
The spirit of Burgundy wines is unique,
with the name on the label representing not only a wine,
but a culture and history.
What people are seeing, feeling, behind the wine has no price.
At 1,600, $1,600, order bidder 1053.
Lot 982, Romanée-Conti. '72.
Two bottles, wow.
9,500, 10,000.
$10,000 bid now for these at 10,000.
At $10,000, give me 11,000.
At 10,000.
$10,000 now, for 10,000.
11,000 these now for 11,000.
Give me 12,000.
11,000.
$11,000 I have now at 11,000, it's in the orders.
Boom for 1019.
I guess the auction scene really started in the 90's, in the dot-com boom.
Everybody was making money.
There developed this culture of very wealthy collectors
gathering at these auctions to see and be seen.
To be seen bidding.
The prices started to really escalate.
5,500 go 6,000, 5,500 last call.
At 5,500.
Pass then at 5,500.
1987...
I started to get these emails.
It was strange, I couldn't really figure out where they were coming from.
They described these evenings
where these guys, very wealthy collectors,
were drinking like 1945 Romanée-Conti, and 1955 Petrus.
You know really, really expensive wine.
I eventually learned that these emails were coming from John Kapon,
the head of the auction house Acker Merrall & Condit.
OWC, 12 bottles of 1990 Romanée-Conti.
They do not make 12 bottle OWCs any more.
I think this in fact was the last vintage in this...
Kapon's notes were very colourful.
He had these unusual descriptors.
Trying to make the whole tasting note more interesting
and developing new metaphors.
This culture kind of reached its apogee
under the auspices of Acker Merrall & Condit
and this group called the Angry Men,
all of whom had nicknames
like Mr Angry and Big Boy and Hollywood Jef.
We missed the tequila party last night.
But, you know...
-I think it was worth it. -It was worth it, yeah.
I drank a lot of that 1907 Madeira last night.
-It was... -It had a lot of layers, that wine.
Yeah, I mean, it was it was coconut, it was nutmeg, espresso.
Yeah, it was really exciting, wasn't it?
I think the '88 has so much acidity.
It can be incredible.
But it's more a hit-or-miss vintage than...
The '88 has a huge amount of acidity.
No, that's absolutely right.
'96, though, is the vintage to buy.
For anyone out there, buy '96 champagne all day.
If you can't afford that, buy '02.
If you can't afford that, drink fucking beer.
The best way to taste high-end wines is with a group,
because there's power in numbers.
-Thank you. -...unique taste of it.
Wines are really, really expensive, and so our group meets eight times a year.
Each time one member hosts and does the wines from his cellar.
You guys drink too much together.
You don't hold back!
Where the "Angry Men" name came from
is you get invited to a wine dinner
and you bring a really nice, a great bottle of wine, okay?
And everybody else brings shit wine, bad wine.
And so you get very angry and...
It was men who didn't want to be angry any more
and everybody had to bring it, you know, you had to really bring it.
Thank you very much.
My entry into Burgundy was Rudy Kurniawan.
There was an Angry Men that Rudy had invited me to,
and that's where I met that whole gang.
Their dinners were always over the top. Crazy.
Breaking it out with like 100, 200 grand worth of wine in a night.
It was pretty extraordinary.
What these guys actually had, is what Americans call "fuck you money."
"Well, I got a $3-million bonus,
"I'm going to take a million of that and blow it."
And that's their "fuck you money."
They're going to do whatever they want with it.
They don't care, there's no consequences.
And it's a kind of money that most human beings never experience.
Here she comes.
The fine-wine world, it's really mostly men.
Especially when I was younger,
I'd walk into the tastings and everybody would immediately ask,
you know, whose date I was.
But I had an important job. I ran a major auction house in New York.
I bought like $50,000 worth of champagne in the last auction,
for one of my clients 'cause his daughter's getting married.
It was 2000 or early 2001.
We were doing auctions
and I started being aware of this kind of,
you know, skinny, geeky young guy that liked wine.
...for 2,600.
At the time he was somebody that was bidding on Pahlmeyer Merlot.
Pahlmeyer Merlot sticks out in my mind with Rudy.
You know, a high quality wine,
but, you know, it's got one zero, not four zeros.
Now 16, 17, $1,800,
1,800 for the single bottle of La Tâche, 1985.
1,800, $1,800 bid. At 18...
What was really strange was 18 months later
he reached out to me on the telephone and said that he wanted to meet with me
because he wanted to be a player in the auction scene,
which I found kind of odd
because he had just been a geeky kid drinking Californian Merlot.
-Hey, what's up, Rudy? -Hey, what's up, man?
-How are you doing? -How are you, man?
-Very well. -Good, good, good.
I brought some wines for us to drink. Can you help me with this?
His breadth of knowledge seemed to be pretty extraordinary.
He actually taught me, you know, almost everything I know.
He was a real cult figure and everybody talked about him.
My friend.
He had this mysterious background. Where did he come from?
Part of what created his mythology
was he had an extraordinary... Who has an extraordinary palate.
The best palate of anyone I've ever met in my entire life.
Any wine, from California to France, any type of wine, any vintage.
Rudy was extremely, insanely,
unbelievably correct on all the wines.
The art of blind tasting,
it comes naturally, but you have to make an effort.
You know, you really have to work at it.
You taste wine blind, you identify the wine,
and you know, that's the badge of honour for a sommelier.
You do a little swirl and just see if there's anything with the alcohol.
Looking at the legs, how slow or fast they fall.
Smell it, and then it kind of just tingles off senses to your brain.
And then you look through your rolodex in your mind
of all these different wines you've tasted.
And I'm thinking, "What could this be?"
I think a wine palate is very similar to athletic ability.
Sorry.
Wine tasting is a lot about knowing the vocabulary
and being able to express, using that vocabulary,
to other wine tasters what it is that you're experiencing.
I totally get that peppery citrus that you're talking about.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I met Rudy.
Tony!
-Tony, what's happening? -What's up, Tony?
I met him at a tasting. I was very, very impressed.
He identified almost all the wines blind.
He must have learned by drinking an enormous amount of different wines.
That's the only way to learn.
You always wondered why and how.
That's why you know.
You know, 18 months and now I have, what,
pretty much like 3,000 bottles of wine, you know.
We're going to make a booklet, you know, yeah.
Rudy's Adventures.
I met Rudy first in 2004, I believe.
There was a luncheon for one of the producers
and we quickly became friends.
He was very warm to everyone.
I really liked the guy.
It's fun because there's a lot of wines today that I haven't tried.
We hung out a lot and went to wine dinners.
-How you doing today? -Good, man.
Tired, but good.
-Long trip? -From 5:00 a.m. in the morning.
Long trip.
Fourteen hours drive.
-Where'd you drive from? -LA, man.
LA, man.
The people in this town, excuse my language, are full of shit.
But not with Rudy.
Just wakes me up, you know.
Nothing he did was short of real class, warmth and graciousness.
You like... You like everything so far?
For my birthday he gave me a bottle of, I think a Pol Roger '49 champagne,
which is incredible.
-What do you have right now? -Colgin, interesting.
-Yeah? -Very different from the Herb lamb.
Yeah?
I don't know if it's 100% Cab because... Like a Meritage.
He was just a lover of wine. Is a lover of wine.
I keep talking in the past because it's still very strange.
He never said something to me that I could look at and find was untrue.
But he didn't ever say that much.
I was a reporter and I was curious about the auction market,
and I sat there at the back of Christie's and I noticed a very, very young man
spending a lot of money surrounded by people that I knew
were movie producers, clearly the focus of everyone's attention.
That's a story.
Who is this guy? And why is he spending this kind of money?
And what does he want to do with his wine?
Today I can't, today's overbooked. Tomorrow, call me. I might...
It took months to get him to sit down and have a cup of coffee with me.
I've got to go in five minutes.
I have a big Burgundy tasting.
-Let me move around before... -Go ahead! Go ahead! Go ahead!
I'll talk to you soon.
Let me have the honour to try my wine.
It was like another month or two
before I got him to sit down and actually have an interview with me.
He proceeded to serve some of his great wines.
Oh, my God, this is... It's corked.
No.
He lived with his mother in Arcadia
and the people around him would say
that his family owned the Heineken distributorship
for all of China.
Fabulously wealthy,
and he was on a million-dollar-a-month allowance for his wine,
and when I asked Rudy about this stuff he said, "I don't talk about my family",
and he wouldn't tell me anything.
I sort of assumed he was a rich kid looking for something to do.
The auction houses were giddy.
No one had ever spent that much money that fast.
It was ruining the quiet little club that the old guys had.
I've been collecting for 38 years I guess.
So, I've got, you know, lots of DRC labels
and they're all categorised by particular domains or groups of domains.
There's Ponsots in here. I've got mostly from the '80s.
That's some major wine, yeah, that's his, one of his best.
Sometimes you only get to taste them once in your life
if you get to taste them at all, so it's kind of fun.
I was introduced to Rudy by John Kapon
at an Acker auction event over in Beverly Hills.
I want to drink Burgundies.
That's me, of course, you know.
He said, "Well, you're a Burgundy collector, what Burgundies do you like?"
And I said, "Well, my favourites are probably Roumier, Rousseau
"and DRC,- Romanée-Conti."
You got that right, my friend, you got that right.
Right after that he said, "You should buy wines with me",
he said, "I buy cellars and collections in Europe all the time."
And then I remember Rudy asked me,
"What's the oldest Roumier you've ever had?"
And I said it was a 1969.
And I told him I'd been lucky enough to find a couple at auction,
that they're real hard to find.
And then Rudy said,
"Well, you know, in the last year I've had
"1945, 1949, 1955
"and 1962 Roumier Bonnes-Mares."
He picked the greatest red Burgundy vintages from that era.
I was just flabbergasted.
I'd been looking for them for 25 years.
Burgundy is unique on the planet.
The band of slopes, we say, which is 70 kilometres long and 1 kilometre wide,
and composed by 1,250 different appellations.
There are a lot of grapes this year
...but we won't see how it turns out until the harvest.
Heaven, they say, is above us...
...but I believe that in Burgundy it is down below.
Down below in the cellar and in the roots of the vines.
We are just 11 metres below the ground level here
and we are really with two feet in the history of Burgundy.
See here are tiny roots, from vines, which are probably here since 200 years.
The vine is sucking, so to say, the rock.
Going up on the hill on the other side of the street,
the vines will not find the same mineral elements
and they will never find the same taste and aromas.
The most important for me is what nature gives.
We are only a tiny element of the chain.
If one element breaks, the chain is broken and you cannot reach the glass of wine.
Wine is the expression of place,
and Burgundy is the ultimate example of this.
It's a wine for obsessives.
Someone who really knows their stuff
can tell you the difference, blind, between something that was grown here
and something that was grown 40 feet away.
-It's really good. -Look at where the fill is.
Fucking incredible.
This is probably insane.
This is where I go crazy.
This is my crazy... This is my crazy spot.
I get nervous and my blood pressure goes up.
It's the ultimate existential art form.
It's living in a bottle. It's alive.
And then you drink it and you absorb it into your body.
It's art that becomes part of you, literally.
Well, that's Ponsot, who's a great producer.
-Hey, Carl. -Hello!
How you doing, babe?
I'm good.
A lot of good shit here.
You have a few drinks and then you come here and spend 100 grand on wine.
This is the place.
This is the place, yeah.
They're very, very reasonably priced.
Where can you get a '61 white for 600 bucks?
From 1961?
This is crazy time.
-Jef? -Yeah.
1990 Romanée-Conti.
This is maybe one of the greatest bottles ever made of wine.
Right here.
-20 grand maybe? -20 grand.
-He knows his prices. -20 grand for the bottle.
And you want this.
If you like wine, you need this, you want this.
But you have to decide, do you want this or do you want a Prius?
Yes, exactly! Trade it for a Prius.
When we drink wine we don't look at the price value, you know.
We look at what we get from the wine. The excitement, you know.
The passion, the way they make the wine and everything.
It's not about the price of the wine, you know. Some people...
Rudy was very generous with everybody.
I had some of the greatest Romanée-Contis with him, you know,
I will ever have.
Put on your best Burgundy face.
Who wants to drink wine?
At the time when all this was happening, there was a huge demand for old fine wine.
As a whole, Burgundy very quickly went from affordable to unobtainable.
I guess you can call it the Rudy era.
It's very fine sediment, so stand them up and then put the ice.
The economy was booming back then.
...standing up, not leaning down.
There was such tiny quantities of Burgundy worldwide.
There wasn't enough to satisfy the thirst.
It was all about liquidity and it continues to be.
Any time there's tremendous volatility in a market,
and all asset classes move the same.
Dave, your go-to cellar's pretty good.
You've got some good stuff in here.
So many of my friends in finance collect wine
because when you watch stocks all day on Bloomberg, right,
and then you can see auction prices move,
there's a certain pride to getting a good buy.
Today there is no relation between the prices and what is in the bottle.
When I sell a bottle at €100,
I see this bottle when it's released at 1,000.
How come?
At $2,600, I ask the bidder against the room.
-Sold at... -Dude, I just opened a bottle on Thursday.
-Yeah? -Now I feel bad about opening it.
It's a 1,000 a bottle.
Can I refill it and put the cork back?
It was clear to me in very short order
that he had revolutionised the wine market.
Prices were skyrocketing.
I thought it was a pretty smart little racket.
He was cornering the market in a lot of these wines.
What a clever thing to do.
If you have a lot of money, go in, buy up a lot of wine,
drive up the prices, and then start selling at the new high price.
There was one other guy there who was always bidding furiously against Rudy
and that guy was the representative for Bill Koch.
Collecting has to have an emotional meaning to me.
Part of it is the detective story of tracking it all down.
I've collected impressionistic art, I've collected samurai swords,
silver coins from Greece, have some antiquities,
have some sculpture.
And I've collected wine.
Do you want to see my wine bathroom?
The bathroom is generally a bathroom,
but I thought I'd be more fun to make it interesting,
so we put wine crates here, wine labels, corks on the ceiling,
and then if you look over there, there are wine bottles on that wall.
My secret wine opener. Wine opener.
Not wine opener, cellar opener. Come on in.
I've been a little bit obsessive about buying wine in the past.
I have in total 43,000 bottles.
With super fine wines you can taste the love the vintner had in making it.
And that to me is almost a religious experience.
You know, we collectors like precious things.
Love is extremely precious.
What price can you put on the love of your wife?
What price... Well, if you're getting a divorce, you can, but...
Here's one bottle of Jefferson wine.
1787 Lafite, Th.J.
I'll set it down on the table.
We'll line them up.
The reason I wanted to buy four bottles of Thomas Jefferson wine is very simple.
The mere fact that Thomas Jefferson owned it
and held it in his hand, et cetera, et cetera, that's part of history.
Here's another one. 1787 Mouton, again Th.J.
Look at this bottle.
Isn't it beautiful in and of itself?
1737 Lafite, Château Rothschild.
The faker didn't know his wine history very well
because the Rothschilds didn't own Lafite in 1737.
Unfortunately, I paid $100,000 per bottle.
The rogues' gallery.
Well, the first time I think I found a fake wine
it was because of the weight of the bottle.
There was a bottle of Petrus on the back of the table
and I reached to grab it,
and when I lifted it up I almost threw it on the ceiling 'cause it was so light.
-This has a '75 seal on it. -Yeah.
-But it's a 1929. -Yeah.
That only started with the 1930 vintage.
You're looking for anomalies.
Is it in the right glass? Does the cork have the right stamp?
Is the cork properly aged? Is the paper correct?
Yeah, everything's pixelated here.
I wonder what the sediment in here is?
If these things have allegedly been together for the last 60 years,
they need to look like it.
That is one hot mess.
If the capsule looks like hell, and the label looks pristine,
that doesn't work.
You know, that's got a 95-year-old's face on a teenager's body.
You know, you always want to be careful with these online auctions
because you never know the provenance.
They just want to sell.
Really it's hard.
This bottle's corked, man.
No, I'm just kidding.
I love doing that shit.
At the time fake wine was just starting to be talked about,
Rudy was quite the expert on fake wine
and when I asked him about it, he said that he bought so much fake wine
that he'd had to become an expert on it.
No, they won't tell you if there's something wrong with it,
but sometimes if they doubt the bottle, they put the picture of it,
-so you be the judge. -Okay.
Look at the picture, you want it, you take it, you know.
Is there anybody out there looking at conditions and...
Tell them about Acker auctions.
Acker's great man, we love John.
He and John Kapon were meticulously going through all of his wines
to catalogue everything and sell some off.
John Kapon was the son of a very nice family-run wine store in Manhattan.
Shopping for anything during the holidays can be simply maddening,
and shopping for wine is no exception.
I'm here at Acker Merrall and Condit,
the oldest wine store in America, located in New York City.
Acker Merrall wasn't a big house,
they were a store that got into the auction world
and then Rudy really made them.
John really turned it into a fun thing.
He was the first one to like, break it out.
It was like a giant crazy party with an auction.
At the same time he was doing that, Rudy came along, with this incredible cellar
and they kind of helped each other.
When Rudy was drinking California Merlot,
Acker Merrall & Condit was in last place of all the auction houses.
When Rudy sold $35 million worth of wine through Acker Merrall & Condit
in two sales in 2006,
Acker Merrall became the number one auction house in the world.
He is the CEO of Acker Merrall & Condit.
This year he has auctioned off more than $100 million,
the first wine house to do so.
John Kapon, joining me, so you can't whine about that revenue, right?
Get it, "whine."
John, you're going to leave now, aren't you? All right.
Well, it's been a pretty crazy year...
"There's not much that can be said about this collection
"outside of the fact, it is one of America's greatest.
"This is a collector that actually inspects his wine."
To see all the magnificent wines in there,
I said, "Man, this is a wine collector's dream."
I felt like maybe I ought to buy the whole bloody cellar.
You know, the auction is a complex transaction.
I mean, you get a catalogue, it's 300 pages long
and you have two weeks to make up your mind.
You may win, you may not win. Some people...
They were selling massive amounts of wine,
and, you know, I don't know how John could have inspected every single bottle
when he's selling $30 million worth of wine.
The fakers like to fake the very hard to find,
very old wines 'cause you give them a much higher price.
One night my bulldog investigator, Brad Goldstein,
found that I had just paid 25,000 for one 1921 magnum of Petrus.
In 1921 Petrus made no magnums.
You gotta go, big guy.
You gotta go. You wanna go, you wanna go get Mommy?
Come on. Come on. Come on.
Bill kept saying to me, "I want to know how deep this problem is in my cellar."
Where are the Ponsots?
Where are the Ponsots? I don't see them.
We had to find experts who knew about corks.
We hired a guy who knew about labels, capsules, glass,
and even looked at the glue, you know.
On an 1858 bottle we found Elmer's glue.
And Elmer's glue didn't come in until sometime in the '70s.
Here, see if you can spot the inconsistencies there.
You know, the more we learned, the larger the epidemic became.
I have over 400 bottles that are proven fake,
for which I paid $4 million.
I think what spurred Bill on
was when the auction houses told him,
as they say in French, "Tant pis", you know, "Tough luck, buddy.
"You bought it, you bought it as is, you're stuck with it."
For some reason, you know, Freud can answer why,
I just hate being cheated.
In the wine business there's a code of silence.
I'm not taking this.
We were fairly certain that some of the wine bottles that Bill had purchased
from Acker Merrall were, without a doubt, counterfeit.
Let's keep it out of the way.
He tasked me with finding out the information on this Rudy Kurniawan.
I was given video of Rudy in early 2000
doing what was going to be a food show on wine.
I almost fell out of my chair when I first saw these videos.
Dude, I just opened a bottle on Thursday.
Now I feel bad about opening it.
Can I refill it and put the cork back?
The motivation behind the investigator
is to show the elegance of the hustle.
This is the catalogue of the auction in April 2008 in New York.
The page to present Domain Ponsot.
And when you see the pictures here, there is a 1929 Clos de la Roche.
Ponsot started estate bottling in 1934.
So, first of all, in the catalogue it was already wrong and fake.
Everything here also is fake.
This wax we never used.
We never sold any wine to Nicolas.
We never had this vintage printed outside the label here.
And Clos Saint-Denis, Clos Saint-Denis, Clos Saint-Denis,
'45, '49, '66, and '71
and we started to produce the Clos Saint-Denis in 1982. So...
And here you have the 99 points from the expert.
And the expert is JK. John Kapon, this is the auctioneer.
So, how can the expert be such a good expert on wine
which costs $50,000 to $70,000?
Because he earns 20% on it.
When you find a fake wine,
it's a dirt on the integrity of Burgundy and I wanted to wash it.
So, two days later I jumped into a plane and I flew to New York.
I wanted John Kapon to withdraw everything.
The stock market is now down 21%.
Dow traders are standing there watching in amazement
and I don't blame them.
This could be the most serious recession in decades
and that means life as most Americans know it,
is about to change, in some cases, dramatically.
Bear Stearns had collapsed the week before the auction.
So, there was some question about, what was going to happen with the market.
This particular auction was just a wild affair.
We were all really, really buzzed on really expensive wine.
Things got so raucous,
halfway through the auction, you know, Kapon is banging his gavel saying,
"Shut the fuck up, guys."
You know, I mean this is not... This is not Sotheby's.
7,000, 7,000, 7,000.
I'm looking for 7,500.
I happened to recognise a guy who came in and sat at the back of the room,
and he was not part of the merriment.
He was sort of like Banquo's ghost.
Suddenly Ponsot stood up, and there was silence.
He said, "Withdraw my wines", and everything... John, like,
was at the podium.
It was a bizarre moment.
Kapon announced the entire 30-odd lots were being withdrawn.
Parcel executed. Do they want two cases?
At the end of the auction I met Kapon
and I was asking who are the owners of these wines.
The next day I met Rudy Kurniawan for the first time.
We go to Jean-Georges.
I had no idea of what would happen.
He was just the owner of the wine, that's it.
My two options was, he didn't know,
or he knew and he wanted to sell it, and this is not nice.
But that's, that's... No matter what...
After "hello" and so on, I said,
"Look, now, you have to tell me where the wines are coming from."
He's not going to have food?
You bought these wines, you should know.
I buy a lot of wines and...
"You know, we buy so many wines, I buy so many wines", said Rudy,
"that I don't know where they come from, I have to check."
That's why I love wine, you know, wines, you can never tell.
You can never tell.
I had the idea that Rudy was doing a lot of dinners and parties,
trying to have every client as a friend.
So, I said to myself, "I'm going to do the same with him.
"Let him think I will become his best friend and then he will maybe talk."
We had assembled a team of international talent
who was actually a former CIA agent.
Sorry, guys.
Percy, you're looking for food, I got nothing for you.
Percy, get outta here.
We had received some information about his immigration status.
This is the 2003 US Department of Justice
removal proceedings for Rudy.
He was living in the United States with a warrant out for his arrest.
Are you going... Have you done any travelling lately?
No.
-To the wine countries? -No.
He did.
At that point in time, his student visa had run
and if he leaves the country, he'll never get back in.
You're not a big traveller? You don't like travelling?
I like travelling. I love travelling.
Like putting a sugar addict in a candy store.
No, I love travelling. I love travelling.
One of the letters to Homeland Security
had the name of the business
that Rudy and his brothers used
to obtain visas to the United States.
We took that letter and went to this location,
Jalan Gajah Mada plaza.
It's a series of small shops in Jakarta.
One is like a hardware store.
It's like a hardware store.
I have been insisting on emails and he said,
"Okay, well, I didn't find out yet, but I promise I will give you that."
A month and a half later he gave me a name.
"I found out I bought the wines in Jakarta and it has been sold by a Mr Pak Hendra."
This is the only information he gave me.
I flew to Los Angeles and I invited him to dinner.
Again, very quickly I ask him,
"Now, Rudy, face to face, eyes into eyes, tell me the truth.
"Who is this Mr Pak Hendra?"
He's a great guy.
Great... He has a great palate,
been drinking for the last 20, 30 years.
And he took his cell phone and he wrote two numbers in Jakarta, so I was happy.
Then we had nice dinner.
Great food, great wine, great people, great ambiance.
Perfect. Can't ask for more.
The next day I tried to call the two numbers.
One was a fax machine and the other had no answer at all.
We had heard Rudy had just met a French vintner
and gave him two phone numbers and the name of an individual
who was his source.
I immediately had our former CIA officer run them.
The first number came back to an airline, Lion Air,
the largest airline of Indonesia.
Not a big wine collector.
And the second number came back to a strip mall, Jalan Gajah Mada,
and I said...
We knocked on every door,
none of the people in the locations had ever heard of
Rudy Kurniawan or his father.
Everything with this fellow just kept coming up fake.
Have you heard about this big wine fraud?
That someone faked wine from these vines?
No.
Someone counterfeited bottles of Clos de la Roche...
...and then sold them for $20,000.
When I came back to Europe from this dinner,
it was time to focus on my harvest, and, you know, I'm a winemaker.
Okay, I don't look like a winemaker, but I am.
I started to investigate again at the end of the harvest.
Then I decided to go to Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taipei.
I wanted to know who is Pak Hendra.
And this one is a roll.
A cheese roll that kind of looks like a spring roll.
On top we will use a fresh rosebud for decoration.
When you serve the sauce, please use the spoon.
You have to put it in the middle of the plate with the meat.
And let the sauce flow nicely.
I go very often to Asia and I know very well Asian people
and I have to tell you that the wealthy people from Jakarta
are coming to Singapore and Taipei to have fun.
So, I knew a lot of these people from Jakarta and I would ask,
"Do you know a Mr Pak Hendra?"
Finally I found out that "Pak" means "Mr"
and "Hendra" is like "Smith."
So, this is the most used name in Indonesia.
So, I would ask, "Do you know a very rich family importing beer
"that would have a son in California that would love wine?"
Nobody knew about a family like that.
So, who is Rudy?
No, not at all, he bought them at a high price.
But he often sells them for a lower price, the idiot.
He's a good friend then?
I love him!
He didn't talk so much about his wealth,
but he didn't have to because it was obvious.
I chose this wine tonight because I have a lot of it.
I wanted to taste it again.
I met his mother, who is a wonderful lady, and I met his brother.
And your brother, you know, in the last two months he's been here
eight, 10 times alone.
He doesn't want to go back.
He was very business-like, very nice.
But Rudy was very outgoing and just the opposite.
I've got to cut down a little bit
on drinking and eating like this every week.
I spent three Christmases, Christmas Eves with he and his mother.
She was very old, she did not speak English
and he was clearly taking care of her.
-We always exchange. -We always exchange.
Dar seemed very much like the big brother who was running the business back in Asia
and giving Rudy an allowance.
From my point of view,
he looked up to his brother and his brother could say,
"Hey, if you screw up, then I can cut you off."
That's the perception I got.
Dar didn't strike me as a criminal.
What's your favourite Al Pacino movie?
Scarface!
My name is James Wynne. I was an FBI agent for 30 years,
26 of which were spent investigating cases
involving the theft of art or art fraud.
I've read the Idiot's Book on French Wine.
That's how I started.
My background is financial
and this in a lot of ways is a financial crimes investigation.
One person described Rudy as having a never-ending reservoir of needs.
He ran like $16 million through his American Express account.
Rudy had a number of very nice cars. An Italian sports car, a Mercedes, SUV.
He had purchased a mansion in Bel-Air, California.
He was buying contemporary art, he had a Damien Hirst, he had some Warhol.
All of these trappings go into creating Rudy.
He was like the Gen X Great Gatsby.
You put me in big trouble, man, I'm on diet.
The persona established by Rudy was that he was a trust-fund baby,
very wealthy, sent to the US to care for his mother.
Was earning an allowance from his brother who was running the family companies.
I was unable to establish any of that as being true.
Based on my review of years of bank records,
I see no evidence whatsoever, that he was receiving trust-fund proceeds
from his brother.
I always said that, we always said that.
The right wine, the right food.
Let's toast, let's toast.
What emerged for me was how desperate Rudy was for money.
He's putting people off, putting people off.
He has a deadline, he's supposed to pay someone
and he's procrastinating because he doesn't have the money.
It's almost like a shell game,
he's borrowing money from here to pay over there.
All the activity involves wine transactions
and/or loans and advances he was receiving
from clients of one of the auction companies.
Do you see wine as a good investment?
It's a great investment,
I mean, historically it's been one of the best investments,
on par with gold and...
Acker, like a lot of auction companies, offer advances in anticipation of sales.
The beautiful thing about wine is that people actually drink it,
so there's less bottles every day or every week
of some of the world's greatest wines.
So, it naturally, kind of, puts pressure on pricing automatically.
This was a way to beat out other auction companies
that might be competing for Rudy's business.
At one point, you know, Rudy was obligated to Acker
for almost $10 million.
Sir, raise your right hand, please.
Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth
and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
-I do. -I do.
Thank you.
Can you please state your name for the record?
Rudy Kurniawan.
Let me cover some ground rules just so that you know.
-Have you been deposed before? -No.
So, it's important that you speak audibly.
Okay, sorry about that.
Because the court reporter's trying to write down what you're saying,
so he can't write down nods of the head, he needs words.
-Do you understand that? -Yes.
Mr Kurniawan, who inspected these bottles?
Well, we basically have...
We basically drank a lot of these bottles with a lot of different people,
including critics, experts,
auction houses and whatnot.
We tried to press Rudy for the source of his wine.
We were looking to build our case and file against him.
John doesn't want to take it, it could be fake, it could be counterfeit,
but he's not sure, I'm not sure.
I don't believe so.
So, I agreed to take them back, which is the right thing to do.
He wasn't defensive, he was guarded but, you know, friendly.
He's a "hail fellow, well met" kind of fellow.
-Do you speak French? -No.
-Do you write French? -No.
Just merci.
Never definitive, nothing concrete.
You know what, that guy, told me nothing.
He owes everybody money, and John Kapon is no longer,
at least publicly, selling his wine.
And that's when I started to see, you know,
lists fly across the country from different brokers and whatnot
because Rudy was trying to find other ways to sell, and he did.
This is another fake one.
After the Ponsot auction in 2008
nobody wanted to deal with Rudy's wines, everybody knew there was a problem.
But in 2009, Christie's, of all people,
sold wine for Rudy in a series of auctions for him under his own name.
You know the auction houses had gone from having high reputations
to having apparently sold tens of millions of dollars' worth of counterfeit wines.
In 2012, on top of all this,
I got a hold of a Spectrum and Vanquish catalogue.
They had brand-new labels, they had the pink wax.
We all looked at them and all said,
"Yeah, absolutely, this is Rudy's wine."
Spectrum wouldn't withdraw them and they wouldn't disclose that it was from Rudy.
At that point, I went and published a warning.
Boy, did this go viral.
There were a number of different labelling issues
that were basically called to our attention.
One of them involved a strip label for an importer, Percy Fox,
that had a misspelling of his address.
Sackvilee street with two "E"'s
and it should have been with an "L" and an "E".
FBI agents came here and were talking pretty seriously.
I could tell by their line of questioning that they were zeroing in on him,
they were serious about it.
I said, "You're barking up the wrong tree."
Rudy could never do what you think he has done
because he just doesn't have the capacity to do it.
And after they left, I went to the phone and I called him.
As a friend, I thought I should warn him.
I remember his very words.
I said, "The FBI were just here, Rudy, and I think they're really seriously...
"I can tell,
"the last time they came, they were just asking.
"This time, there's something serious going on,
"and I just want to let you know."
And he said, "Don't worry, dude, I have everything under control."
Those were his very words.
"Don't worry, dude, I have everything under control."
I don't think there was any reason to think he knew we were coming.
We meet on the morning of the eighth, somewhere around 5:00.
The plan was to approach the house, set up a perimeter,
knock and announce and place him under arrest.
We pulled up,
agents went to their designated positions,
and they proceeded to knock and announce,
and knock and announce, and knock and announce,
and yell, and yell,
and there was no answer.
The team leader said, "Get the ram",
and I thought, "Oh, no, this is going to be a long day".
And then the door opened,
and it was Rudy,
and he looked like he had just gotten out of bed.
When you walked in the house,
the first thing you saw was wine everywhere
in the living room in a huge wine refrigerator.
I was stunned,
I mean, I could've been knocked over with a feather
when I saw what was in the kitchen.
In the kitchen sink there were two or three bottles soaking.
The labels were being soaked off the bottles.
There were two or three bottles sitting next to the kitchen sink,
waiting to be labelled.
There was a cork extraction device, there was a re-corking device.
There was in effect a mixing station
of somewhere around 20 bottles sitting in the kitchen,
all sorts of California wines.
And there were notations.
Change the year, the vintage, change the size.
Remove a serial number.
We found bottles that were unlabelled
that had handwritten notations, like formulas.
There were labels and labels and labels,
thousands of labels, banded like US currency.
The thermostat was set at like 63 degrees,
and in this million-dollar house,
they use space heaters in the two bedrooms where they slept.
In a store room there were racks and racks of wine,
and on the treadmill there were 18 waiting to be labelled.
There was a stencil, there were old wooden crates throughout the house,
there were boxes with real labels, like a library.
There was everything you'd ever need to make fake wine.
As an FBI agent, if I had listed the 10 things
that I would like to have obtained from a search,
this was 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 to infinity.
I don't know what all that stuff was doing there.
It's very odd, right?
I can't picture... They didn't find printing presses,
they didn't find... They just found stuff.
They found no stuff to make wax caps, nothing that...
no means of production, just stuff.
So, what's that stuff doing there?
Is he looking at it, is he giving it to someone?
Is someone giving it to him to look at? I don't know.
I could not believe.
I couldn't believe it.
That can't be Rudy.
Being a very close friend of his, I got calls.
And then I saw the pictures.
He was the last...
He is the last person I would ever suspect
of being able to do any kind of intensive arts and crafts.
-I left you a message, just so you know. -No, I didn't get it.
-The number that I have for you, I called. -It's still there, but I changed...
I just changed to a new phone you see.
He is ADD.
He doesn't have the attention span.
Life is good, life is good.
Life is good, man.
It's a time-consuming, laborious thing to do and he could...
He could never do that.
I just could not see him doing it, and still don't see him doing it,
and I still don't believe he did it.
No way.
I think part of what he started doing was...
Doing some reconditioning.
If you want to take everything they're saying as true
for the purposes of argument, and again I'm not stipulating that,
but if you want to take everything they're saying as true,
we're talking about wine here.
-Oh, my God. -'91 Ridge Monte Bello.
Don't you want it?
Here's a wine over here, something that people have tasted,
that they're saying is the best ever.
Well, if you can make something taste like that,
why not recreate that experience?
And I think that's what happened.
They tried to make that sound like it was alchemy.
You know, like he was mixing and matching and contriving.
But that's not what I think it was at all.
I think Rudy just really digs wine.
-This is... -Where is Rudy?
We're all insecure.
My God, that's it, man.
And if we're the new kid in the group, we're really insecure.
And especially if everybody else in the group is older,
if everybody else in the group is richer,
you want to live up to whatever the expectations are.
The only government evidence
was relating to something that would have been a couple of bottles
at a time perhaps being made in the kitchen sink in Rudy's house in Arcadia.
I don't think that you could have created the number of bottles they claim
that were counterfeit doing that, so they have a problem with that.
This bottle,
1985 Côte Rôtie La Mouline,
is from the famous...
The famous crazy wine auction.
The Cellar auction where all the shit happened, Rudy's auction.
The cellar was Rudy's cellar
and you will see this is very real.
So, this is an example of 90% of Rudy's wine that he sold that is real.
It's fantastic as everyone's going to see.
Yeah, this one is real.
So, he did sell mostly real wine, I think.
He had an incredible palate and he was also very generous.
Oh, my God, this is so good.
It's rare and perfect.
Do you want to use a fork 'cause it's on camera?
-No, I'm just going to do with my hands. -Yeah, go for it.
-Let's do it. -Here we go.
Thank you very much.
Hi, Matthew!
-How are you, babe? -Everything's good.
-How are those wines? -Fucking awesome!
Were you just walking down the street drinking wine?
-No, we took a car here. -Okay.
We are not able to drive right now, so we had a driver.
This is one of the wines that Rudy sold.
Try this, please.
It's outstanding.
-It's as good as it gets. -It does taste really good.
Thank you so much. Christian.
So, this is a bottle that Levy bought from Rudy.
It's real.
-He bought it from... -How long has this been open?
About two hours.
-It's garbage. -You don't like it?
You think it's fake? Really?
I know this wine very well. It's not even close.
It doesn't have the life,
it doesn't have the verve and the vivacity and the dimension of a La Mouline '85,
which is almost like, if you had a really rich
BLT with the egg on top.
That's how that wine tastes almost.
This?
I mean, it tastes like, you know, skunk juice.
So, that's very interesting.
How much of the Rudy wine do you have?
I don't know.
Six bottles or something.
He has 6,000 bottles.
There is a kind of collaboration between the forger and the dupe.
People kind of want to be fooled.
They really want to own this very rare bottle of wine
that maybe doesn't even exist any more
and so, you don't really want to know that it's a fake.
If you believe that Rudy Kurniawan
was just trying to recondition the bottles and give them nicer appearance,
then you probably believe that in a few weeks
a man with a white beard is going to come down your chimney
and leave a case of 1945 Romanée-Conti under your tree.
I became interested in this investigation
when I met Jim Wynne, the FBI agent assigned to it.
I sensed right away that there was going to be an actual charge that could be made.
We certainly had overwhelming evidence.
A connoisseur of counterfeiting, master of label making, cork stamping...
He had been purchasing things like extremely large quantities,
thousands of dollars, of wax.
He was ordering paper that was known for its antique properties
that can be used to make labels.
He was collecting dozens and dozens of empty bottles from restaurants.
I always keep my empty bottles. You know that.
And people ask me why.
I actually put the date and the place that I had where,
you know, and who I had with.
Kind of simple notes at the back of the bottle.
Rudy's explanation was that he was creating a museum of some kind,
or he was doing a photo shoot of some kind.
He was scanning labels into his computer
and then he was printing them on a huge printer that was in the house.
What I'm doing is forensically looking at the wines.
After having scanned through and catalogued
all the evidence from Rudy's computers,
what I can say is this is definitely Rudy's
because here's the template that made it.
There are notebooks upon notebooks in evidence of Rudy's tasting notes.
One of the really interesting pieces of evidence I thought was a half-bottle
that had writing on it
and he had M-45 and he had a formula.
So, that was 1945 Mouton,
and he had his first formula that he had blended and he didn't like that.
He had that scribbled out and then on the other side
he had another formula for M-45 that he liked better.
So, I think that it was a lot of trial and error and it was a lot of blending.
He would take these old wines that he had tasted once.
He found other wines that had similar characteristics
and he'd just mad scientist it.
What he would make was generally
a very convincing imitation of what it said on the label.
It's easy to dismiss all this and say, "These guys are sniffing and swirling,
"and it's all a crock of shit and you could, you could fool..."
Well, the fact is most of these guys you couldn't fool them most of the time.
That's what's interesting about Rudy's fraud
is that hardly anybody could have done it.
He was a bit of an artist.
Here this one which is dirty on the side and not in the middle.
It was well done, actually,
but too much well done because there is nearly
a line between the dirt and the non-dirt.
My theory is easy.
To fake one bottle you need one hour,
if you have the labels the wax and everything.
Just to eliminate the original label, the capsule,
and then clean it, put the new label on it,
dirt it again, put the wax and everything. It takes one hour.
When you know that one of the big sales
was 15,000 bottles, or something like that,
if you multiply the number of bottles by one hour,
15,000 hours, so it's impossible.
I mean, technically, it's impossible that he could do it...
He could have done it on his own.
We know that some of the paper came from Indonesia.
His brothers were in Indonesia.
We knew that there was money going to his brothers in Indonesia.
It was pretty evident to us that this was kind of a family affair.
-Are you independently wealthy? -What?
Are you independently wealthy?
No, I'm broke, man.
No, I'm trying...
I scam people and drink their wines.
When we spoke to witnesses and when we conduct our investigation,
one thing that was pretty consistent was
that no one really knew the source of his purported wealth
and no one actually knew his background.
His legally registered name is Rudy Kurniawan,
but he has operated under different names.
He operated under the name Lenywati Tan, or Lenny Tan,
which is actually his mother's name.
To answer your question, I come from...
I come from a wealthy family, a good family.
No, that's not what I asked.
The names for Rudy Kurniawan and his brother Dar Saputra,
those are both the names of famous Indonesian badminton players.
His father gave him that name because it is an Indonesian name.
Rudy was of Chinese descent
and there was a period of time when there was a huge amount of even danger
to people of Chinese descent that were living in Indonesia.
The family was reasonably well to do
and involved in a number of business interests
and they've been successful.
They're fairly reserved in terms of talking much about the family.
I come from a wealthy family, a good family.
This guy, he's recreating himself.
It's like he was in the witness protection programme.
It's probably going to take him a while to really taste the wine,
you know what I mean?
In Indonesia, everybody is given an identity card
and we were able to pull his passports,
and we knew that his father's name was Makmur Widjojo
and that his mother was Lenywati Tan
and then we knew he had a brother Dar and he had a brother Teddy.
Then we were able to find their Facebook pages.
They weren't hiding their conspicuous consumption.
Who backed him?
Where did his money come from?
Who created him?
Well, you should introduce the menu.
We started receiving information through sources
in the banking community and in the business community in Jakarta
that there was a link between Lenywati Tan's brothers
being involved in the largest bank heist
in the history of Jakarta.
The Supreme Court hasn't been able to extradite the bank robber Eddy Tansil.
But there have been sightings of Eddy in China.
One of them is Eddy Tansil, who's still a fugitive in China.
Eddy broke out of prison and escaped after stealing all the proceeds of a bank.
The fugitive misappropriated $565 million
that he obtained through credits from Bapindo bank.
And the other brother, Hendra Rahardja, had a bank,
Harapan Santosa, and he walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars.
He just stole it and then fled to Australia.
Hendra Rahardja is accused of Indonesia's biggest corporate fraud,
defrauding $670 million.
This is really painful you know for us, for all the clients of the banks.
I saved my money for about 30 years.
One of the properties that Hendra Rahardja
claimed to own was Jalan Gajah Mada.
And I was like,
"The coincidence, is just, you know",
I don't believe in coincidences.
Our governments and the people of Indonesia
call on all Rahardja's family members
and associates to come clean and surrender themselves
to account for their grotesque crimes.
Do you have any indication as to where the money might be?
Is it in bank accounts or is it in property or...
Well, I don't want to signal our shots in that regard,
but we do believe that there are assets overseas.
I'm going to meet somebody at 12:30 in Westwood, so, I could...
I don't know if Rudy was benefitting from Eddy Tansil
and his mother's family's thievery.
Maybe that's why the backstory was created
when he came to the United States.
Once this guy was a rock star in the world of rare expensive wine
and now Rudy Kurniawan is on trial for fraud here in New York
accused of making millions selling counterfeit wines to unsuspecting...
I don't want to be away from the trial.
When Rudy will be in front of me, eyes into eyes,
I want to let him know that I know what he has done
and it's not a satisfaction that someone goes to jail.
But this is so important for Burgundy.
If Rudy, at the end of the trial, is free,
I can't believe in anything any more in life.
Maybe I will become a monk.
I'm worried, I don't know what will happen.
I am in America, I'm French
and I have to make my testimony in English.
It makes me a little nervous.
"He turned his home into a wine factory",
said prosecutor Joseph Facciponti of the defendant
and created what he called his "magic cellar".
He decided to plead not guilty.
Sometimes, certainly in the area of financial fraud,
there are defendants who basically don't want to accept reality.
They choose not to acknowledge it.
When I got into the room I found him a little slimmer.
He lost weight in prison probably.
It's never something you can like when you see someone on the ground.
The Sherlock Holmes of French wine.
Laurent Ponsot's crusade to sniff out the fraudster
who was faking his vintage wines
began about five years ago and ended here
at Manhattan's federal district court this week.
At a certain point of my testimony,
our eyes, for once, get in touch,
and he smiled to me and he made me a little sign
with his head and smiled to me.
I found it bizarre, but in the meantime nice.
The first person ever to be convicted
for selling fake wine in the US
will spend the next 10 years bottled up in a jail cell.
Fraudster Rudy Kurniawan will also pay $28.4 million back to victims.
Hi, what's your reaction to the trial today?
Very surprised, stunned, I think.
We did not expect the judge to impose a sentence of that length.
Rudy has apologised to the New York judge saying,
"Wine became my life and I lost myself in it",
an obsession that will be hard to pursue from behind bars.
I've had organised crime cases with dead bodies for less time.
That's the truth.
Dead bodies, less time.
The harm that was actually done in this case does not justify
the kind of sentence that was handed out.
It just doesn't.
Like he didn't profit from the crime as much as other people did.
And the people who profited the most from his crime
are living large and drinking great wine and they're not in jail and...
Others have suggested
that there are additional people that should be prosecuted,
but to bring a criminal prosecution,
it's not enough to say that they were negligent.
You have to prove they intended
to defraud someone by lying to them or making misrepresentations.
It's kind of like a game of musical chairs
and Rudy was the last one standing when the music stopped.
It is not the real end of the fakers.
If I go on investigating, I will find more people doing this,
but I'm going to stop.
I want to focus again on my job to produce authentic wines.
We're gathered tonight to play the final note in a symphony...
...of which I am honoured to be the conductor.
But a conductor is nothing without his musicians.
Each one of you has picked the equivalent of two thousand bottles.
Thank you for your patience, your work and your joie de vivre...
because together we have played music both harmonious and refined.
This is the largest wine seizure the US Marshals ever handled.
Behind you we have over 500 bottles
that have been deemed counterfeit from Rudy Kurniawan's private collection.
I have no doubt that it's going to take years or decades or maybe never
to fully filter out all of Rudy Kurniawan's fake wines.
It's impossible to identify every single person who has one of those bottles.
It's broken!
You know, more scrupulous collectors have just bitten the bullet
and they've written off a bunch of stuff.
John Kapon, to his credit has, you know, anything questionable
he has taken back and he's refunded a lot of people's money.
All right. Good.
But I think a lot of people probably don't want to know
that their cellars are full of fakes.
So, they're just... It's still out there, you know.
For the best of Chile and Argentina and the rest... 160!
They'll circulate.
If you buy this, you will almost certainly get laid.
All right!
You're going to start me, sir, but at what price?
$10,000!
I don't look at wine catalogues any more.
I throw them in the wastebasket.
$200,000!
This whole industry has a pomp and circumstance to it.
You're either a believer or an apostate.
Cheers, guys!
Want some beer? You want some beer?
Like, dare you say the emperor has no clothes?
It's just liquid, it's wine.
But it's become a commodity.
Some of the biggest CEOs of corporate America...
They all were duped by this guy.
The moral to this story in my opinion is that
when you leave things unregulated,
you allow the wolves to come in
and game the system and this system had been gamed.
When I first discovered this case of wine that he sold me was fake,
I was very hurt and I felt like a fool, too.
I felt foolish,
but the number of amazing experiences I had with him,
far outweigh any anger I could have.
So, I forgave, you know. I forgave that.
When I think about him and I think about him quite a bit,
I just cannot put two and two together.
I just can't because it's like talking
about black and white.
Vincent!
I have not tried, but I would love to see him.
One day, I hope, I'll be able to sit down with him.
I don't know. I'll just tell him, "What was this all about?"