WEEKEND COLUMNISTS 
Laurent Ponsot used to be a famous Burgundian wine grower, but now he is an amateur detective too. “I’m the new Sherlock Holmes,” he told me gleefully in London in late May. “It’s very exciting but I have to be careful.”
The story started in April last year, three days before a fine wine sale organised by Acker Merrall & Condit, one of New York’s most energetic fine wine auctioneers. A New York lawyer friend of Ponsot’s called him to point out that Acker were offering the puzzlingly ancient 1945 vintage of Ponsot’s grand cru Clos St Denis. Ponsot knew that the first vintage of this wine was 1982, so he asked John Kapon, head of Acker, to send him photographs of all 107 bottles of Ponsot wines in the forthcoming sale. “I saw that probably half of these wines must be fake, so I called John Kapon – I didn’t know him – and asked him to withdraw the wines from the sale.” Ponsot flew to New York just to make sure he did.
Ponsot’s entrance into Cru restaurant where the auction was held must have been quite dramatic. At that stage, he sported a long pony tail as well as his neat goatee. Kapon announced that “at the request of Domaine Ponsot, and with the agreement of the vendor”, the Ponsot wines, with an estimated value of between $700,000 and $1.3m, would be withdrawn. There was aggrieved muttering in the room. (This was at a time when the New York market was burning with new wine collectors eager to blow their bonuses on trophy bottles.)
All of the contentious Ponsot bottles had been consigned by Rudy Kurniawan, a young Los Angeles wine collector of Indonesian extraction who had already been responsible for two extraordinary single-owner sales under Kapon’s direction. The day after the Cru sale Kurniawan, Ponsot, Ponsot’s lawyer friend and John Kapon met for lunch, but little progress was made in establishing where the bottles came from.
“Then I said, ‘What can I do?’” Ponsot told me. “I asked Rudy to keep the wines unopened, if possible in New York City – and they are still there today. Then I decided I should start a crusade. I decided to take another American lawyer to see if I could sue someone. I wasn’t quite sure who. I tried to follow the tracks and set out to try to find the guy who printed the label and put it on the bottle.” He smiled mysteriously, apparently more intrigued than riled by this saga.
“I don’t spend all my time doing it but I found a lot of tracks to follow. Most of them took me to Asia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia ... but there was always a dead end. These were tracks, I realised, given to put me off the scent. Finally though, I had names.” He folded his arms with something like satisfaction. “These names were taking me to the UK, Sweden, Germany, Italy, and Burgundy. My guess is that the labels are printed in Burgundy. I have no proof yet but I will get some one day. I am very confident.
“For my son’s wedding last year in late July I had to go to the US and I decided to go and see Rudy in LA. I invited him to an Italian restaurant for dinner. He brought some bottles and said, ‘I will give only to Laurent Ponsot the name, address and telephone numbers of the guy who sold me these bottles ... ’ At the end of dinner he gave me a tiny piece of paper with one name and two Jakarta telephone numbers on it, saying he bought them all from this guy.
“I came back to France with this tiny document and I tried the numbers. One of them didn’t work at all, and on the other there was never any answer after 50 calls. It appeared the name that I’d been given was like John Smith in Indonesia. In the meantime I found that it was probably someone from Asia who sold the wines to him. Someone who trades around the world.”
He continued: “I saw Rudy again [in May], and invited him to a dinner at XIV [a smart new restaurant] in LA. Rudy again brought bottles. I said to him, ‘Face to face, you have to tell me the truth now.’ He agreed, but I’m still waiting for the e-mail.” When I tried to contact Kurniawan he was unavailable for comment on Ponsot’s claims. He did not return my calls and he has not replied to my e-mails.
“It appeared to me that when all this started, it was just to feed demand of new, rich people from the US and Asia. It was easy,” Ponsot says. “I saw the first fake Ponsot wine – a 1985 Clos de la Roche – in 1990 in Kuala Lumpur. It was obvious that this wine couldn’t exist, but at the time I thought it was fun and I was impressed that people were bothering to counterfeit my wine. You don’t copy Swatch, you copy only Rolex. My first reaction was to say, ‘OK, I don’t like the system but it’s good for fame.’ It was a very badly copied label. Then I saw more and more fakes. There are still fake Ponsots in Asia and in private cellars in the UK – though they’re mainly in the US.”
So what will he do next? “I will try to put everything I have in the hands of the FBI. But I need money to do it. Probably $400,000. I had the idea to create a lottery and sell tickets to raise money,” he grinned wolfishly.
I asked John Kapon for his explanation for the disputed Ponsot bottles, pointing out that they included wines that even Acker’s own sale catalogue admitted did not exist. He responded by e-mail: “Although the Ponsots we have tasted consistently have been superb, when Laurent called and asked us to withdraw the wines from auction, we honoured his wishes and pulled them. If there are counterfeit Ponsots out there, as Mr Ponsot believes, then it is most unfortunate as this is a truly exceptional vintner, and one we continue to endorse with great enthusiasm.”
Ponsot claims that all this detective work may have taught him how to spot fakes but that his expertise is often wasted. “I wish there were some central place where people can check authenticity, although of course it would be difficult to exclude the fakers, who could learn from it how to create fakes. The way they fake is very easy. They buy old bottles, mainly in Burgundy at négociants such as Patriarche, which still have old bottles for a reasonable price. Then they put on a label which makes the wine worth 10 to 100 times more.
“I’ve been working on a new, anti-fraud system for the 2007 vintage involving a tag on each bottle which will be impossible to fake. Several Burgundy producers are already using this system [devised by Prooftag, where his daughter works]. Every single person will be able to check online whether a bottle is genuine. I’ve also worked on secret things that we can check ... [so] labels will become [like] bank notes.”
I asked various American collectors and professionals for their reaction to the Ponsot/Acker affair. One prominent collector based in Napa Valley, who preferred not to be named, admitted, “It did alter my thinking on buying wines at auction. My confidence, already a little shaky, became more so.”
According to Bernie Sun, in charge of wine at New York’s Jean Georges, where Ponsot had the first of his three meals with Kurniawan, “This just goes to prove that auctions are still a ‘buyer beware’ type of environment. Everyone has to do their own due diligence. Even then one cannot always be 100 per cent sure, unless the wines were offered directly by the winery.”
