Grapes of wrath: Wine fraud leaves a sour taste

In November, the owner of three Bordeaux chateaux was fined €8million and sentenced to two years in prison for fraud after being found guilty of buying cheap wine to blend with his own, which benefits from being labelled as prestigious Appellation d'Origine Protégé (AOP) such as Saint-Emilion.

The large difference in price that wine from one AOP can command compared to others has long been a temptation to unscrupulous wine producers and traders (negociants). It was once quite commonplace for wines from Algeria to be sold on the black market to bolster many famous wines of France, resulting in an old joke that the only town in France which makes every kind of wine was Sète.

Wine fraud is taken very seriously by the authorities. I wrote a few months ago about the masses of paperwork required by wine producers. The key documents to deter fraud are the Declaration de Recolte and the Declaration de Revendication, which state how much of each type of wine a producer has harvested and which then qualifies for each AOP. The Douanes can raid premises and check physical stocks against these documents whenever they like.

However, there is a grey period of a few months from harvest to the deadline for the Declaration de Recolte during which grapes, juice and wine may change hands under the radar of the Douanes. Sometimes the trade may be relatively innocuous - such as buying grapes or juice from a neighbour within the same AOP to make up for a shortfall. But in others it is the attempt to maximise the permitted quota of wines bearing prestigious AOPs by adding wines from lesser ones - for example, buying Grenache from the Côtes du Rhône which might struggle to sell for €5 a bottle and adding it to a Châteauneuf-du-Pape which could sell for €15, or even Carignan from the Languedoc being added to a more desirable Haut-Médoc, which is not supposed to contain Carignan at all.

Once the Declaration de Recolte is filed, the producers risk inspection by the Douanes to check that their volumes agree with the paperwork. So doing dodgy deals becomes more risky but it does happen. A large Burgundy negociant was found guilty of systematically bumping up the volumes of their expensive wines, like Gevrey-Chambertin and Nuits-Saint-Georges, with about 10% basic red Burgundy over a number of years

Sometimes it is even tempting to rename varietal wine as a more popular one. A few years ago, a chain of Languedoc wine companies were involved in adding Merlot and Syrah to a Pinot noir which was then sold to the US company E&J Gallo. At the time, Pinot noir was enjoying a price boom in the US as a result of the film Sideways. Neither Gallo nor their consumers noticed the difference - but the Douanes were able to trace the paperwork to see that more Pinot noir was being exported to the US than was being harvested in the whole region!

Another way of increasing the value of a wine is by giving it an Organic label - even if the grapes were bought on the grey market from a non-organic source. Basically, anything on the label that encourages people to spend more money on the bottle may be an incentive for the fraudsters.

Those who do this are clever. They do not chose wines which are very different or blend so much that the flavour is obviously not right for the AOP. To an inexperienced palate, the wine may seem to match the label. One may ask, "So what's the harm?".

The harm is that the reputation of the AOP is damaged, both by having poorer wines masquerading as the real thing and by the knowledge that the consumer may not get what they are paying for.

Nobody knows how widespread or common the practice is. The authorities do their best but at the end of the day they are no substitute for having faith in the honesty of a particular producer. Which is why I repeat that knowing your producers is more important than knowing your AOPs when it comes to buying more expensive wines.

Jonathan Hesford is owner, vigneron and winemaker of
Domaine Treloar in the Roussillon www.domainetreloar.com