Roll Over Guy de Muapassant

It's like a modern day retelling of, The Necklace, Guy's well known short story first published in 1884. Maybe we're seeing the beginnings of wine journalism's version of reality shows.
First the news of the faked review in Wine Spectator and now Food & Wine writer Lettie Teague pulls a fast one at a dinner party all in the name of a good story. I wonder if her name is a nom de plume, because it sounds suspiciously close to the name of Monk's assistant in the popular USA-TV series.

Wine Scams: A Counterfeiter Confesses

F&W’s Lettie Teague—feeling glee, then guilt—explores the growing problem of wine fraud by attempting to dupe her friends with a fake bottle of 100-point Bordeaux.

By Lettie Teague

Almost every woman I know (including myself) has knowingly purchased a fake designer handbag at one time or another. I know it’s wrong—that counterfeiting can cost legitimate companies a great deal of money, and that it can harm the unwitting purveyors of fakes as well. For example, eBay was recently ordered to pay $60 million to LVMH, owner of the Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior brands, for selling fakes on its site.

Of course, fancy handbags aren’t the only luxury goods considered worth copying these days; as the price of fine wine escalates, so, too, has the quantity of imposter bottles on the market. The number has reached into the hundreds of thousands, as in Tuscany, where Italian authorities found quite a few Brunello producers making their fancy wine with cheap, non-Brunello grapes. (The government’s fraud-fighting tactics are quintessentially Italian: They began training policemen as undercover sommeliers.)

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Wine Nuked for Thomas Jefferson... a Job for the Pink Panther?

One of Britain's top rare wine merchants and nuclear scientists have jointly unveiled a 21st-century tool for unmasking counterfeit vintage wines.

The technique consists of zapping bottles with ion beams generated by a particle accelerator.

The beams are directed at the glass, not the wine, and can distinguish how old the bottles are and, roughly, where they originate.

"We compare the suspect bottles with those that we know come from the chateaux," explained Herve Guegan, a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Bordeaux.

"The chemical composition of glass used to make bottles changed over time and was different from place to place," he told AFP.

The Antique Wine Company in London, which asked Guegan's Centre for Nuclear Studies to develop the fraud-busting technology, handles more than 10,000 bottles of rare wines every year for thousands of customers around the world.

"We sell bottles every day for between $US2000 and $US10,000," said the company's managing director, Stephen Williams, noting that the exceptional grand cru can fetch up to $US100,000.

At these prices, "counterfeiting is something we have to be very diligent about," he said by phone.

France's most prestigious Burgundy and Bordeaux chateaux are notoriously reluctant to discuss fraud or its prevalence, but wine experts say it is a growing problem.

In a recent and spectacular case, American collector William Koch sued a German wine dealer, claiming four bottles - allegedly belonging to US President Thomas Jefferson - he had purchased for $US500,000 were fake. The case has yet to be settled.