Mind Over Money. Claudia Hammond

when we are buying things.

      We do it every day, with purchases big and small. You might imagine it’s a simple enough mental process. In fact, it’s rather tricky. We are easily tricked, and our own minds sometimes seem to join in the fun and games. When we add in the fact that prices are not stable, it is no wonder that exerting mind over money can sometimes be very difficult.

      NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES

      Every month Rudy Kurniawan would spend around a million dollars on wine and then make even more than that from selling it. In 2006, his sales totalled $36 million. Although he was young and had seemingly appeared on the wine scene from nowhere, he was soon regarded as one of the world’s foremost wine traders. He impressed established experts with the speed with which he learned the different wines and by his unusual interest in the details of labels and corks. In blind tastings he was brilliant at identifying producers and vintages. He could even spot counterfeit bottles, saying he had trained himself to do it, having been caught out in the past.¹

      Kurniawan had an extravagant lifestyle, appearing in magazines wearing a white leather coat and carrying his white poodle, Chloe.² His generosity was legendary. An evening would start with the Californian treating his friends in the trade to wines worth thousands of dollars from his own cellar. Then the party would move on to a restaurant, where Kurniawan would also insist on buying only the very best.

      One strange thing people noticed was that Kurniawan always asked the restaurant to have the empty bottles couriered to his house the following day. He would tell the sommelier he was building a bottle collection in the garage at his Los Angeles home.³ He had even engaged an architect to create a museum for the collection.⁴

      There were other things that got people talking. For example, Kurniawan owned bottles dated 1923 from a domaine in Burgundy that wasn’t founded until 1924. Unusually for a collector of the world’s best wines, he was also known to buy large amounts of cheap red. And when his wine was auctioned, it would include greater quantities of extremely rare bottles than you normally find in a single auction.

      But friends and colleagues could always come up with explanations. Perhaps the family who owned the domaine in Burgundy all those decades ago included a few bottles from the previous owners’ vintage under their own label. Perhaps he’d been sold the occasional fake bottle. With the quantity of wine he was dealing in, it wasn’t impossible.

      Still, suspicions started to grow. The wealthy industrialist William Koch, who won the prestigious sailing race the America’s Cup in 1992, owns more than 43,000 rare bottles of wine.⁵ He bought more than two million dollars worth from Kurniawan and after a while he felt something was seriously wrong. In his efforts to expose Kurniawan, Koch hired cork experts, glass experts, label experts and even glue experts.

      Around the same time the owner of one of the world’s most prestigious vineyards, wine producer Laurent Ponsot, also became suspicious, alerted by one of Kurniawan’s more blatant frauds. Ponsot didn’t begin making his most famous wine until the 1980s, yet Kurniawan was discovered trying to auction bottles of it from 1959 and 1945. In the end, the evidence against Kurniawan was overwhelming. And when the FBI’s Arts Crime Team raided his home, they found he was producing fake fine wine on an industrial scale. A washing-up bowl was full of old corks, while drawers contained sealing wax, glue, stencils, instructions for making labels, a quantity of the red seals you find on the top of unopened bottles and vintage labels neatly created using a laser printer. In the sink there were bottles in soak, ready to have their labels removed. Next to them was a box of genuine old labels taken from vintage wines, and beside the box, not a corkscrew but a device for putting corks into bottles.⁶

      It turned out that for eight years Kurniawan had been buying cheap burgundy and blending it with top quality wine to mimic the taste of rare and expensive vintages. He poured this blend into old bottles, attached fake labels, and resealed the bottles with old corks. So how did he get away with it for so long?

      Some commentators have complained that the winemakers, auctioneers and guests at tastings must have gone along with the fraud. But Koch and Ponsot were instrumental in exposing Kurniawan, who is now serving a 10-year prison sentence, and if you read interviews with others in the wine trade they seem genuinely troubled that they were fooled. After all, they were supposed to possess refined and discriminating palates. Some of these experts even clung to the idea that the bottles at the tastings must have been real and that it was only the subsequent sales which involved fakes. Yet that was not the case. The wines at the tastings were Kurniawan’s own blends too.

      What Kurniawan relied on was one of the oldest tricks in the book. It’s a ruse beloved of con artists, because the trick is played by victims on themselves. In this case, experts were told the wine was a rare vintage. The look of the bottle and label confirmed it. So when they opened the bottle they tasted what they expected to taste. The confirmation bias was at play. The experts looked for information to back up their expectations. They were at a fine wine auction, and at a fine wine auction you generally get fine wine.

      Now, Kurniawan was particularly skilled at fooling the experts in many different ways, but this is a chapter about price, and price was a vital component of Kurniawan’s fraud.

      Perhaps you recall an advert not for wine but for beer that was on TV a few years ago. The lager, drinkers were told, was ‘reassuringly expensive’.The same was true of Kurniawan’s wine. One of the things that gave the traders confidence was that the wines they were tasting had very high prices.

      Since Kurniawan’s conviction around five hundred bottles of his fake wine have since been destroyed and composted, but another 5,000 bottles were put up for auction by the United States Marshals Service at the end of 2015, in the hope of recouping some money for the victims of the fraud. Really? you might be asking. How can they be sure it’s genuine? The ninth and final question in the accompanying FAQs anticipates this: ‘How certain are you that none of the wine being sold is fake?’ In response, the US Marshals admitted they couldn’t be 100 per cent certain these particular wines were genuine, but said that to the best of their knowledge they were. Kurniawan did after all buy plenty of genuine wine in order to make his unique blends. Still, you’d think buyers might be wary, yet three bottles of 1911 Romanée Conti attracted a top bid of $45,600. Perhaps the connection with Kurniawan added some notoriety value? Perhaps people can’t resist a bargain, even if they are not 100 per cent sure it is real.