Wine fraud: why no one talks about it

Luckily, for the reputation of certain highly praised wine regions, we have relatively short memories. But let me remind of the 2008 Brunello di Montalcino Scandal (commonly known as Brunellopoli) in which several Brunello wineries were investigated by the authorities under suspicion of having used grapes, juice, or must, from outside the Brunello DOCG in the making of their wines.

Typically, the whole affair screamed, whimpered, fell silent, and went away in relatively quick time. But it’s not the only case of this kind of wine fraud: the Georges Duboeuf company was fined €30,000 in 2006 for incorrectly labelling thousands of litres of generic Beaujolais Villages as something else. Plus ça change, right?

Now, consumer advocates should (and do) get quite angry about this sort of thing: this isn’t just a Chinese wheeler-dealer buying a few palettes of bargain-basement red wine and relabelling it as ‘Château Laffitte‘ (given that we already have the likes of a ‘Smith-Haut Lafitte’ you might wonder where marketing ends and fraud begins but that’s another topic), this is the actual estates themselves being implicated in potentially selling you what’s not on the label.

But anger, after the fact, is about as far as it goes. Most self-professed’consumer advocates’ do not wish to get tangled up in this arena. I don’t blame them just as I don’t really blame Robert Parker for not once mentioning the possibility of producer fraud in his lengthy August 2011 piece on fraudulent wines ‘In Vino Veritas’ – of course, the benefit of the doubt should always lie with the producer – but it does beg the question of why (especially given the professed lack of surprise in the wine trade about the Brunellopoli revelations) there is no desire among our crusading journalists to begin to delve into it.

Here’s why I think we don’t: I’ve got a potential story here in Spain. In a village I know well, one of the worst white grapes being grown (Malvasia) is selling at €0.50 a kg and although that seems a pitiful price, it’s actually a very good deal for a high-cropping, high-sugar, relatively bland grape – especially in relation to the likes of the ‘nobler’ Verdejo which is commanding about the same, if not less.

The reason for this unusual micro-economic situation is that ‘Galicians’ are buying the grapes from the viticulturalists at that price. Now, this could be a totally innocuous situation and the grapes might well be going straight to distilleries in Galicia; they may not. There are all sorts of theories.

But I wont investigate it. Why? Because if I do, and I find something nocuous, I run the risk of destroying the current price of Malvasia. And I’ll tell you right now that I would rather turn a blind eye to my neighbour than have him spit in that eye every morning. I want to be able to walk down the road without being worried of crossing anyone with a grudge against me, not least my friends.

That road can be as wide as two rows of tables in New York or London behind which producers are serving people tastings of their wines.