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News
Chinese wine dealer smashes fake Lafite
A wine merchant in the Chinese city of Shenzen has held a public destruction of several bottles of fake Lafite he bought at auction.
At a highly publicised media event, staff smashed a large number of bottles of Lafite and second wine Carruades de Lafite that had been identified as fake.
The dealer had apparently bought 13,069 bottles of the Bordeaux first growth for more than seven million yuan (US$1.4m) at an auction but later found that around 200 bottles were not the real thing.
Xinhua News Agency reported that the bottles were bought at an auction of confiscated goods in May 2012. Bottles sent to Lafite for verification proved that some were fake and the merchant, Shenzhen Tang Bang Jiu Ye, is currently filing a complaint with the Shenzen copyright bureau to try and track down the source of the fake wines.
Fake Lafite is a real problem in mainland China with a report this May claiming that half the Lafite sold in China is fake.
The estate spends a lot of time and money to bring counterfeiters to court and Chinese police occasionally busting huge “factories” producing fake wines.
*this post has been updated
“There’s a sucker born every minute’
As reported by Xinhua News, the merchant, Shenzhen Tang Bang Jiu Ye (with its logo squarely displayed on the background of this photo), has bought over RMB7m worth of wines in an auction held by the Zhuhai Electromechanical Material Auction Co. Ltd. in May 2012. Before the sale, the auction house has made it clear that the lot in question are confisicated goods consigned by the Zhuhai city authority.
It was found out in Oct 2012 by staffs of Tang Bang that there are over 200 bottles within the lot are fake (a sample of two bottles was drawn of the lot and sent to the Chateau which confirmed the bottles to be indeed counterfeit), which valued over RMB1m at auction price. The case was then brought to the court however it did not turned out in favor to the merchant. A repeal is currently underway.
Aside from the couple of bottles smashed at the merchant’s Shenzhen office, the rest of the lot was sent to the local authority as the merchant is filing a complaint to the Shenzhen copyright bureau wishing to trace the source of the fake bottles.
Yet another case of caveat emptor.