How Rudy Kurniawan faked $30m of Wine

In the elite world of wealthy wine collecting. There's one name that stands out, a name associated with the biggest wine fraud and counterfeit operation in history. That name is Rudy Kurniawan.

Photo: Rudy Kurniawan. - Image source

The story of Rudy Kurniawan

Prefer to listen rather then read? The story of Rudy Kurniawan and his wine countfeiting “adventure” is something I’ve covered in the second episode of Nightcap - The podcast about myth and murder, lies and legends.

Early days

In the early 1990s, Rudy Kurniawan, an Indonesian of Chinese ancestry, arrived in California. For almost a decade he remained on a student visa, in 2001, he applied to become a citizen but was denied and ordered to leave which he never did.

Rudy Kurniawan was a mysterious man indeed. He slowly built a reputation as a wealthy and highly knowledgeable man throughout the elite wine collecting community of LA.

In the early 2000s he began making a name for himself on the Los Angeles scene. Socialising and rubbing shoulders with the higher class. Allegedly living of his Sino-Indonesian family, living large off handouts with a $1 million a month allowance. His stories changed but the on-going belief was his family made there wealth owning a beer company. One week that was Heineken, the other it was Guinness.

Rise to Reputation

What Rudy was most known for was his knowledge of wine. Hanging out at wine auctions and tasting events where collectors shared top bottles, impressing pretty much anyone with his vast knowledge of wine characteristics, flavours and regions.

He himself personally supplied expensive wine he brought to those tastings and generously shared. He also became a major player at the auctions, buying and selling some of the 20th century’s greatest wines. He bought so much Domaine de la Romanée-Conti he became known as “Dr Conti”

“In one auction at Acker Merrall & Condit in 2006, Kurniawan sold $24.7m of wine, beating the previous record by $10m. These were the days of the first dotcom boom, when Silicon Valley had more money than sense, a combination which has always been drawn to fine wines.” - Source

Photo: Rudy Image source

Doubts about Rudy

Throughout this time, Rudy became a major player. He was trusted and highly respected by the wine community. Wine critics would critique on Rudy’s recommendation, wealthy collectors would consult with Rudy before purchasing ambiguous bottles.

However, 22 lots of Rudy’s Burgundies from Domaine Ponsot consigned to another Acker auction were identified as fakes by Laurent Ponsot, the winery's fourth-generation proprietor. 

Rudy was questioned over where he purchased these wines. However, nothing came from it. You see, in the world of wine, producers don’t really want to cause a panic about fake wine, so it largely goes undetected. Not to mention this was Dr. Conti himself, Rudy the OG Kurniawan. Renowned in this small circle of elite wine collectors. He was “the man” no body would question Rudy on wine unless you want to make a fool of yourself.

Not to mention Rudy was supplying ultra rare wines that these collectors would of never been able to taste if it wasn’t for Rudy.

Most wealthy collectors want to spend big and drink famous labels, not necessarily ask questions or hear the answers. Guests at tastings don’t want to question “off” tasting wine. Auctioneers do not want to risk losing huge commissions by nitpicking mysterious bottles. Winemakers and wine collectors don’t like to talk about counterfeiting. Also, one thing not high on the FBI’s list of investigative priorities is billionaires getting snowed by wine forgers

However…

Bill Koch, an American billionaire who found fake bottles in his collection, hired private detectives and filed a lawsuit. Authentication experts saw more and more dodgy consignments emerging from these record-breaking auctions. Finally the FBI got involved

In 2012, the FBI came knocking on his door. Agents found a fake wine assembly line in Kurniawan's Los Angeles kitchen, including phony labels of some of the world's rarest wines, custom stamps and rare French wax used for sealing bottles.

You see, Rudy wasn’t just buying and selling fake wine, he was making the stuff! 

Blending cheaper wines to make almost identical looking and tasting wines and decanting them into fake bottles before sealing them up.

Photo: Rudys Kitchen Image source

How did he get away with it for so long?

The most expensive wines are so rarely drunk few can claim to be an expert on how they taste. On the occasions they are opened, it is usually courtesy of a generous host. It is poor guestmanship to throw assumptions out on any bottle that’s been generously opened. 

Sure, there are tasting notes out there that might tell you a certain wine is suppose to taste like blackcurrants and oak. But there are about 1000 other wines in the world that are suppose to taste the same. 

I could just as easily take a £10 bottle of wine that tastes like blackcurrants and a £20 bottle of wine that tastes like oak, blend them and tell you its a completely different wine that’s suppose to taste the same but actually costs £20k. No matter how experienced or knowledgeable you are, if you have never tasted that wine before (and even if you have) how can you tell me it's not that wine? You can’t.

Obviously blending wine is a craft in itself, one Rudy was an expert in. His palette was so advanced he could blend multiple wines of different regions and flavours to exactly mimic flavour, look, body and tannins of rare and old wines.

This is why wine counterfeiting is so easy. Telling apart fake jewellery, art or money can be done much more easily then wine There’s specific details about them that will tell apart the fake from the genuine. But liquid is different. Wine ages, wine matures, flavours change, colours change. Two of the same bottles of wine can taste different. So if the bottle is real but the wine inside is fake you have almost no way to tell.

And what you have to remember is that we’re not talking about £10, £20 or even £100 pound wine. We are talking about thousands and thousands of pounds. Bottles that cost the same amount as expensive cars. 

It also just so happens that the more rare a bottle is, the more expensive it will be. And rare bottles are not opened willy nilly at any old party. If you’re a wine collector with an extra rare bottle of wine. You’re probably never going to open it up meaning you will never even taste it.

It would be the pride of your bottle collection. You’re more likely to treat it as an investment. Something you can resell when times are tough.

And because you are never going to drink it, it means you will never know if its real or fake. That liquid inside that bottle could be nothing more than red wine vinegar and you will never know. 

On top of that, the more rare a wine is the less knowledge there is on it. Meaning the less likely anyone will know whether its real or fake. 

All this means, that the more expensive a wine costs, the easier it is to fake.

Wine producers side of things.

Then we get onto the side of things from the wine producers point of view. If you’re a wine producer, producing extra expensive wine targeted to 0.01% of the population. Then reputation is a big thing.

If it were to come out that someone is faking your wine, that knowledge is going to quickly spread to just about everyone in your target group. Seems so its such a niche group of people that probably know each other on a first name basis.

And if that comes out, they are going to be more discouraged to buy your wine. Just imagine it, “Hey, you love rare wine, we sell super rare wine at super expensive prices, would you like to buy some? Oh, and by the way, it could be fake. Just an FYI”

Which is why we don’t hear these stories more. As I’ve said in my first podcast episode of nightcap covering Absinthe. Wine producers are good at marketing. They are savage, they will happily squash any stories about fake wine and happily live with 90% of there bottles being faked if it gets the name out there and shows them in a good light.

There bottles being sold at auctions will get more people interested in them. So what if there fake? They don’t need to know that, after all, collectors will probably never drink them anyway. So wine producers would rather, as a collective, keep the lid closed on any “fake wine” rumours.

How did Rudy Kurniawan get caught?

So if faking wine is so easy, and wine producers are more than happy to let it slide. How exactly did Rudy’s story come to an end?

Well remember, Bill Koch, the American billionaire who found fake bottles in his collection and hired private detectives? He was a big influence on the outing of Rudy Kurniawan. 

In the world of wine we have what are known as “unicorn bottles” these are bottles that don’t actually exist. Such as a vintage (that being the year the wine was made) being on a label that pre-dates the actual vintage.

The detective Bill Koch hired was Brad Goldstein, a private investigator who prefers beer and clearly finds the whole wine scene preposterous. Goldstein had spotted a magnum (basically, a larger bottle of wine) of Pétrus from 1921, a time when they made no magnums. (That, is the unicorn bottle)

Photo: Rudys fake bottle labels Image source

Still as mysterious as ever

Even though the story of Rudy eventually did come out, we still don’t know much about him or his family. There was a documentary about the Rudy wine scandal called “sour grapes” The documentary traces his mother’s brothers, Hendra Rahardja and Eddy Tansil, back to an infamous bank fraud, where $800m was stolen and has not been recovered. Tansil is still at large, supposedly in China.

In 2007 alone, Kurniawan wired $17m to his brothers in Hong Kong and Indonesia. And although email documentation shows Kurniawan was often desperately short of money, he still lived in a mansion and drove a Ferrari.

The documentary also shares footage from before we knew what Rudy was doing, were it shows him drinking wine and joking about “Can we put the cork back in the bottle,” at lavish tasting parties where $200,000 worth of wine would be drunk.

And old friend of Rudy from his era of scamming says “I still don’t know whether Rudy got into wine and then saw an opportunity, or saw wine as the opportunity from the start”

Rudy could easily come from a wealthy family, he could have vast knowledge in the world of wine and joined this elite club of collections with the best intention before seeing an opportunity to scam. He could also have heavily researched the topic before planning his con. We just don’t know.

What do you think? Is Rudy a clever conman who hatched a long con? Or is he just an average wealthy businessman who seized an opportunity? Let me know in the comments below. Either way, he was a very clever man

Furthermore, It has been suggested that as many as 10,000 bottles faked by Kurniawan could still be in collectors cellars. That’s a lot of wine to fake by yourself. So was he working with a team of people? Surely he couldn’t of faked all the wine he did, thousands of bottles, by himself? He must of had help from somewhere.

Funnily enough people don’t seem to care to follow this up. Partly because a lot of people seen Rudy as more of a conman to celebrate. After all, if you’re sitting at home figuring out how to pay your rent, hearing about how these wealthy elite are pretentiously cracking open hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of wine at parties that they don’t even know are fake. Than good for Rudy, go on mate. Scam them. If they can afford to waste thousands of pounds on wine whilst the rest of us struggle then who cares.

What is Kurniawan doing now?

On Dec. 18, 2013, a federal jury found Kurniawan guilty of fraud for selling counterfeit wines, making him the first person tried and convicted for selling fake wines in the U.S. Kurniawan served nearly nine years of his sentence. On Nov. 6, 2020 he was handed over to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement where he was deported to Indonesia.

But the story is not yet over. Bill Koch won a $3 million settlement in his lawsuit against Kurniawan, as well as a promise that Kurniawan would provide details of his sources and accomplices. He never did, and he never paid a cent, pleading bankruptcy. 

Some people are worried about him continuing his counterfeiting life back in Indonesia, some people are also concerned about his accomplices as well as Kurniawans family and there questionable rise to wealth.

Its been less then a year his his release so i’m sure within time, we will hear from Rudy again. All I will say is unless you are an overly wealthy individual spending a fortune on rare wine than Rudy is not someone you need to be worried about.

Perhaps he will write a tell all book. If so, i’d be first in line!