Wine Investment in South Africa - Cape Wine Academy

may be legally more deserving than holders of wine in bond, such as Customs, Tax and
service providers.
Recent estimates have put the proportion of fake wines on the Asian market at 5% of the
total; a staggering $70m (R5bn) a year of a $13.7bn (R100bn) total ( Shadbolt, 2011 ). The
most common deceptions in Asia are replacing the wine originally sold in the bottle with a
cheaper wine and faking bottle labels.
‘Sometimes it's as subtle as putting, say, a Château Lafite '85 -- which is quite a lot
cheaper -- into a Château Lafite '82 bottle. And at the other end, there was a very big
bust by Hong Kong customs of a consignment of Mouton Cadet, which is not the
most expensive wine on Earth, but someone had gone to the trouble of counterfeiting
it’ ( Tam, 2010 ).
In 2001, 30 bottles of 1982 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild sold in a Hong Kong auction for
HK$5000 (R4680) each were found to contain wine that was retailing for HK$160 (R150),
( Independent on Sunday, 2011 ).
With this in mind, fine wine empty bottles are highly desirable. There are web sites and
companies blatantly advertising to buy pristine empty bottles, with Château Lafite the
favourite. With a 1982 Château Mouton-Rothschild fetching $6,071 (R42,500) a bottle at
auction in China it is unsurprising that to a criminal the empty bottle is selling for $1,500
(R10,800). Faking bottle labels is now big business and some businesses are going further;
‘I was sent a sample bottle of fake Lafite and it looked like the real thing. They'll often
ask you to visit their facilities where they are making the whole product -- right down
to the wooden boxes’ ( Walker, 2010).
Counterfeiting is now spreading to other wines in Asia. Supermarkets all over China saw
bottles of popular Australian brand Penfolds on the shelves with their highly recognisable
branded label, only this time the typeface read ‘Benfolds’ ( Lightstone, 2010 ).
Blatant attempts to defraud have included selling wine under false labels or with false
descriptions, such as the 2009 ‘Red Bicyclette’ scandal where 12 people were sentenced in
France for selling inferior grapes as Pinot Noir to E & J Gallo in the US and making €6.6m
(R66m) in profit, or the discovery of 400,000 bottles of ‘Mont Tauch’ Fitou in China which
had never been near France but had originated in South America ( Macle and Fish, 2010 ).
For wine investment, provenance is everything, an area which has opened up many more
opportunities to lose money to criminals.
In 2008 three people were found guilty of defrauding American investors of over $1.7m
(R11m) by buying wines that had no investment value and by ‘selling’ wines to investors that
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