Who says Rudy can't fail?

originally posted by .sasha:
originally posted by SFJoe:
originally posted by Robert Dentice:

I am amazed that Acker manages to stay out of the fray.
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If the FBI is doing any sort of job at all, this will not be the end of the story. Although for most players in the markets, even culpable ones, it will be hard to prove things at trial.
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there is always Dr Lipton, no ?
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Good grief! Please keep me out of this, dotster. Even reading that link Robert supplied made me feel so sullied that I had to wash my hands. FSM save me from jeebing with crass boors like those.

On a more salacious note, I wonder if perhaps other long-suspected fraudsters will be snared if there's an ongoing investigation.

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by .sasha:
originally posted by SFJoe:
originally posted by Robert Dentice:

I am amazed that Acker manages to stay out of the fray.
Click to expand...
If the FBI is doing any sort of job at all, this will not be the end of the story. Although for most players in the markets, even culpable ones, it will be hard to prove things at trial.
Click to expand...

there is always Dr Lipton, no ?
Click to expand...

Good grief! Please keep me out of this, dotster. Even reading that link Robert supplied made me feel so sullied that I had to wash my hands. FSM save me from jeebing with crass boors like those.

On a more salacious note, I wonder if perhaps other long-suspected fraudsters will be snared if there's an ongoing investigation.

Mark Lipton
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My hope is that an ongoing investigation reveals many if not most of the bottles drank by Big Boy, et al, were supplied by Rudy from his personal stash of altered Rex Goliath.

Steinberger now has posted a second link, this one details Rudy's counterfeiting mechanisms.
 
originally posted by Tristan Welles:
Steinberger now has posted a second link, this one details Rudy's counterfeiting mechanisms.
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That's pretty damning. What a sociopath. Can we ask China to send us a better scion of a better rich family?
 
There's another facet of this whole arena which mystifies me. In the 80s, I worked at a now-defunct store in SF, Draper & Esquin. For those who don't know, a very large part of their business was buying lots of old wine sold through the UK auction houses. At that time, the US didn't allow such auctions here. I drank very well back then.

I wonder about the players who have collected very large amounts of high-end, old vintage Champagne (DP from 30s-60s, etc). In the time I worked at D&E and even before and after that time when I'd see D&E's mailers, I don't recall more than a couple of times, if even once, seeing any Champagne of that note offered. How did such wines in such quantities appear?
 
Let me state for the record that SFJoe gives me the third degree whenever I ask if I can keep an especially delicious bottle from dinner. That said, you can still find them on the top of my tv cabinet.
 
originally posted by Larry Stein: In the time I worked at D&E and even before and after that time when I'd see D&E's mailers, I don't recall more than a couple of times, if even once, seeing any Champagne of that note offered. How did such wines in such quantities appear?
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This is a good question and I'd like to see someone knowledgeable respond.

Although FWIW, I understood that one potential explanation was that when the people who owned these wines died in the 80s and 90s their descendants were less likely to want to keep them and more likely to want to sell them than in previous generations.

In addition, once you get a market and a trend going, demand can seek out supply (both legitimate and illegitimate). For the former, I'm guessing you also didn't see too many 1947 Vouvrays being auctioned at the time. That has also changed.

That said, I have no doubt that fraudulent wine has seeped in as well.
 
originally posted by Larry Stein:
There's another facet of this whole arena which mystifies me. In the 80s, I worked at a now-defunct store in SF, Draper & Esquin. For those who don't know, a very large part of their business was buying lots of old wine sold through the UK auction houses. At that time, the US didn't allow such auctions here. I drank very well back then.

I wonder about the players who have collected very large amounts of high-end, old vintage Champagne (DP from 30s-60s, etc). In the time I worked at D&E and even before and after that time when I'd see D&E's mailers, I don't recall more than a couple of times, if even once, seeing any Champagne of that note offered. How did such wines in such quantities appear?
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D&E used to have a wonderful Christmas catalog in which it printed its entire inventory along with all sorts of pictures and prints and a ton of wine miscellany. I have the 1981, 1982, 1983, and 1984 (the last one) catalog. Generally, 1961s were the oldest vintage Champagnes featured, but there were a few exceptions: The 1981 catalog features 1952 Krug in imperial pints ($75.00): the 1982 catalog features 1943 Pommery ($50.00); and the 1984 catalog features 1959 Salon ($110.00).
 
The pictures of his operation are incredible. So crude, like someone who hacks up cars, yet it generated millions of dollars.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
originally posted by Brad Kane:

I can't believe a NY sommelier was routinely shipping him empty bottles from high end dinners.
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I can. You come in and spend $50k on dinner, you probably get the staff to inconvenience themselves for you and not to think too hard about the consequences.

So where did Rudy throw his big dinners? Anyone have a Kapon archive?
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The restaurant was almost certainly Cru.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:

The restaurant was almost certainly Cru.
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The NYT would seem to agree, though they are very circumspect about his alleged recent activities in London, which are described in detail in the complaint.
 
The two men that I know of in the Bay Area with very large cellars of old French wines and who have been collecting wine for decades are Ben Ichinose and Wilf Jaeger. The latter stocks RN74's restaurant cellar on consignment.
 
Also, an interesting post in another place about the variability of packaging and the difficulty of proving falsity, all of which is fair enough. But in my biz, there are two kinds of error in diagnosis--the false positives, of which we have heard much--maybe they did use yellow wax in '99 when they bottled the vin jaune at Overnoy (until they ran out and did the last case with white)--so you might reject a real bottle for true variation. (Think of all those Coudert wines with different foils discussed elswhere.)

But what has been left largely undescribed is what is surely a vast (if unquantified) problem of the false negative. The case of the forger who uses real bottles or labels or foils, who is not obliging enough to misspell the address of the importer or the name of the vineyard, who pays Chris Coad and Sharon Bowman to check her typography and spelling. Surely someone manages to make fakes that fall within the reasonable bounds of plausibility and are not detectable even by clever lawyers from LA. Surely this must happen frequently?

I would imagine that most fraudsters care about the quality of their product and do thorough work, and that most of what we see is the outer edge of sloppiness.

Both false negatives and false positives are bad diagnoses, but the existence of one doesn't disprove the other.
 
Yes, it was an excellent post by Sarah.

My worry is, you know how many foil, necker and label variations there have been at Huet over the years? Tons!
 
If the history of art forgery--and even merely of art forgery that evokes at least suspicion--is any indication, false positives are numerous. The problem with the analogy is that the motive for wine counterfeits, I expect, is mostly only monetary. Great forgery, on the other hand, rises to the quality of great art and evokes other ambitions. Still, I expect enlightened monetary motive elicits sufficient care to create bottle indistinguishable in their appearance.
 
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