Sour Grapes

These days, just about everything can be auctioned: fine art, ancient and medieval artifacts, antiquarian books, comic books, toys, and, interestingly enough, fine bottles of wine, unopened and unused of course. There are unused and uncorked bottles of wine which date back to the early 20th, 19th, and even to the 18th century (the 1700's) and even earlier which can be traded at auction. Even an unopened bottle of wine produced in circa 1995 might fetch $10,000 to $15,000 if it came from a fine vintage. However, unlike just about everything else, with the possible exception of toys in their original packaging, you can't enjoy the wine unless it's consumed. Of course, once consumed it's gone. A 73-year-old bottle of French Burgundy was auctioned not long ago for almost $600,000. Did anyone actually drink it?

I can understand faking fine art, and there have even been a few examples of faking antiquarian books. (An Italian bibliophile once faked a Galileo book.) But faking fine wine? The documentary eventually exposes the chicanery of Rudy Kurniawan, an Asian con artist and faker. What's so amazing about Kurniawan is that he was not only the prototypical con artist but he had reportedly one of the best "palates" in the wine connoisseur world. "Palate" is insider lingo for having the ability to differentiate vintages. He was basically the wine connoisseur equivalent of Clark Rockefeller, the German provincial Christian Gerhartsreiter who fooled everyone around him in New York that he was a multi-millionaire Rockefeller for over 10 years.

Like Gerhartsreiter, everyone liked Rudy Kurniawan. Everyone in the fine wine community wanted to be his friend, which seems to be a prerequisite to being a successful con artist. Much of the documentary shows lengthy footage of the Asian surrounded by friends and admirers who, of course, are drinking themselves into stupors via fine wines. Rudy shows up into the wine world seemingly out of nowhere and starts bidding up the prices of fine wines at auctions. At first they wonder, who is this "stranger who has come to our town", or more to the point, our community of wine connoisseurs? They were a bunch of happy and exclusive wine enthusiasts, mostly older white men, who had been invaded by a younger Asian.

Rudy has accomplished the first phase of the con, the "hook", the bidding on and winning expensive wines. If you remember from the film "The Sting", a con has several phases. Eventually, Rudy befriends everyone he meets, and begins the "tale". The tale is that he's from a successful business family in Indonesia and money is no object. Is his family in banking or maybe they import European beers into Asia. He dresses well, drives expensive cars, and lives a lavish lifestyle. He does everything to persuade the wine connoisseur circle of his legitimacy, even providing an address for one of his family's businesses in Indonesia. (When an investigator finally goes there, they find some run-down cheap shops at the location, but no high affluent businesses. They do find out that one of his uncles was involved in one of the biggest banking thefts in Asian history!)

Then Rudy begins to consign wines to the auction block. He sells $44 million worth of wine through an auction house, Acker Merrall & Condit. He even convinces some of the prestigious auction houses, such as Christies and Sotheby's to allow him to offer his wines through auction sale. It seems logical. He was buying them earlier, and now he wants to sell some of them. This is basically "the sting".

And it almost worked, until someone figured out there was a slight problem. Or maybe a titanic one. Some of the wines being offered for auction were apparently manufactured and bottled from a particular French winery in the 1940's, 50's and 60's, a winery still in current operation. The owner/proprietor, the latest in a long line of family owners, examines the auction catalogue and notices something amiss. Many of "their" vintages didn't actually exist at that time! Several of the vintages being offered for auction supposedly from before 1970 were not created by the winery until after 1980, even though according to the label they did! The proprietor of the French winery knows they didn't create and bottle these wines, even though the bottles have their labels stuck to the bodies. If they didn't create these bottles of wine and attach the labels, who did? The wine manufacturer attends the auction and basically forces the auction house to stop selling the vintages.

Really interesting documentary and a fascinating look at the whole wine collecting community. Several collectors as well as wine professionals are profiled. As the events unfold, not surprising, it's learned that Rudy Kurniawan is not his real name. He named himself after a Japanese sports professional. But the story becomes even more interesting when authorities enter his house and find a kind of "wine manufacturing" operation!

This documentary was a fascinating insight into the workings a conman. It was like dipping a toe into the world of extreme wealth and extravagance of the millionaire and billionaire wine collectors. My eyes are still watering over some of those sums of money paid for a single bottle of wine.

Very interesting documentary, even for a person like me who isn't a wine drinker or wine collector.

I don't even drink wine, so my understanding of the collector's impulse is bound to be limited. Nonetheless, the themes flowing through Sour Grapes, smoothly prepped in the movie equivalent of a decanter, provide a certain sparkle on the tongue, a deeply flavoured experience with a tinge of Schadenfreude. The latter is essential, as it frames the human impulse behind what is ultimately no more than an astute con.

There's a palpable story at the roots of this documentary: Rudy Kurniawan, a skinny, wise-beyond-his-years kind of fellow, appears on the international wine auctioning scene in the early/mid 2000s and becomes a big player at an impressive pace. If there's one thing that's universally known about the early/mid 2000s, it's that they preceded the latter 2000s - hah, just kidding! But not really, for the decade started with the fake excess of the dot-com bubble and then flourished in the fake excess of the housing market bubble. Per chance (or not), Kurniawan's trajectory does well to parallel these cautionary tales, only that its conclusion is brisk and there were few tears shed about the victims. As one usually does, when it comes to the rich losing out in their Bateman-esque games of self-affirmation and chest thumping.

The fascinating bit lies in the possibility of a fraud existing in a world so tightly strung by expert knowledge. A wine connoisseur has a special kind of fame attached to his or her ability to discern the exceptional from the good. It's something acquired through years of sophisticated training and a lot of expensive wines. Additionally, as important sums of money are thrown around, it is also the kind of area ripe for pretense. Similarly to, perhaps, the market for art collectors, there will always be people who understand art, historically and aesthetically, and those who collect it for the sheer exercise, be it financial or egotistical. The same applies to wines.

It's in this contrast that Sour Grapes comes alive. The story is told through a limited collection of archival footage of Kurniawan and present day interviews with people in the business: collectors, sommeliers, wine producers. It paints this canvas of wine as an ultimately simple and beautiful experience, pandering somewhat to Domain Ponsot's lavishly poetic narrative. Lavish to the point of being hypocritical, even. And it also frames Kurniawan as this endearing character, much liked by those who bought his wines. There's surprisingly little sourness to the movie, especially for so much money being involved. Yet, that also plays into this idea of the exclusive wine club, where people are so enlightened (and rich), that they can look beyond trifling deceptions worth millions.

So perhaps that's part of what I didn't quite like, the neatness of it all, the lack of further prodding. You also get a sense there's a template for these meta-documentaries, where a deeply ironic situation is framed with lyrical prowess, only to sustain some unnecessary ambiguity about its central character(s). Kurniawan is guilty and a bunch of people were defrauded, even if he might have had to bear the brunt of it.

But there's also a certain beauty to being caught in such a great deception, because the contrast is so stark. The story sells itself, so the point of the movie was to somehow capture it with the limited footage it had of its lead. Atlas and Rothwell came good and they also managed to leave any sardonic undertones as just that, undertones. Ultimately, even for someone with no taste for wine, I was excited by the end, having sat through this very particular tasting menu of intricate lies. The thought that nothing is quite black and white lingers in the knowledge that thousands of Kurniawan wine bottles are still in wine cellars around the world.

Some real, some fake - and the afterthought that one might not really want to know the truth.

The fine wine market is a very peculiar one. Firstly, fine wine is arguably an acquired taste: many people can't tell that good wine is good. You could say that people learn, but you could also say that an elite group have unilaterally determined what fine wine actually is through the simple expedient of being prepared to spend large sums of money on it. Secondly, there's a lot of ritual involved in wine drinking, and those who can wine connoisseurs would actually be very unhappy if fine wine could be bought cheaply, even if it allowed them to drink it more often: a wine bottle is definitely a fetish object, not just the container for some fermented grape juice. And finally, the supply of old wines is finite. If enough rich people want to own (and drink) them as status objects, there's almost no limit to how high the price for a bottle could go. Rudy Kurniawan appeared in the US wine collectors' market in the early 21st century. Apparently a rich kid with a fantastic palate (i.e. he could spot the same differences in taste of the most renowned experts), he soon developed a reputation as a devoted collector of the rarest wines. He was generous in sharing these with his friends (mostly fellow collectors), but he actually bought so much wine that they didn't benefit from his presence overall – the market itself moved under his influence. And when he started to sell from his cellar, you might have wondered if he wasn't just a naive enthusiast overpaying for his hobby, but actually someone smart (and brave) enough to hope to generate (through buying) an enthusiasm for rare wines that could outlast his subsequent selling, the classic technique employed by sellers of penny stocks and many other types of huckster (though it's not necessarily illegal to try and make a market in this way).

What is illegal, of course, is putting new wine in old bottles; and in the event, it transpired that this was what "Rudy" (in fact, not his real name) had done. With the aid of his genuinely good sense of taste, and with the backing of relatives belonging to Indonesian organised crime, Rudy was blending wines to match the taste of the most famous (and expensive) vintages. Because he bought so much real wine, he was able to flood the market with fake. Nonetheless, the story of his ten-year goal sentence leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth: it seems excessive for the harm caused, the crime being to spoil a game played by rich people for little ultimate effect. One can also note that no-one other than the foreigner has been prosecuted for the fraud: its hard to believe there were others who did not suspect and/or collaborate, but it's possible to conclude that the American establishment has ultimately protected its own. Oddly, some of those defrauded are inclined to cut Rudy more slack than perhaps he deserves. In any case, I strongly recommend this intriguing documentary, a perfectly paced tale whose minor subject is wine: it's major subject is what, and why, we choose to believe.