Exposed: fraudsters sold supermarket wine on a large scale as expensive Bordeaux
Whether you’re a wine drinker who thinks it can never be expensive enough, or more the type of glugger who’s happy with anything as long as red is red and white is white (and okay, you don’t mix the two to ‘make’ rosé), you do want value for your money, right? At the very least, you want to know what you’re paying for, and even if you’re a bit of a wine snob, you should at least realize yourself that you’re also paying for the name, right? Well, in the fraud case below, people paid for the name alone…
French police have made more than twenty arrests in a major fraud case. That’s criminal behavior regardless, of course, but when it comes to wine, we become especially outraged. Just imagine! You hand over your hard-earned euros for a bottle whose contents you think a winemaker from the Bordeaux region personally worked incredibly hard on, only to find yourself holding a bottle of fake juice. Outrageous.
Big bucks Bordeaux
But that is exactly what happened in this wine scam: the owner and wine merchant of a château in Bordeaux has been arrested on suspicion of large-scale fraud. He is allegedly at the head of a scam in which the fake-wine gang bought cheap wines from regions other than Bordeaux and from other countries, including Spain, bottled the wine, and provided the wine bottles with homemade labels.
Wine fraud
They were then sold to supermarket wine buyers, who purchased very large batches in order to sell them as mid-range Médoc wines at a discount. ‘At the end of the chain, customers thought they were buying Bordeaux wines at steep discounts from a genuine château, with names and labels that inspired confidence, while in fact they were buying wines from the lowest segment, originating from regions far from Bordeaux,’ said the local public prosecutor.
The police tracked down the gang after finding the supplies needed to print wine labels during a drug raid. Alcohol and drugs, then, in seemingly so respectable Bordeaux…
Read also:
- Come on, be crazy, put your (expensive!) red wine in the fridge
- Why a city trip to the wine city of Bordeaux is a brilliant idea
- Eddie’s dining annoyances: when the waitstaff eats your last bites or takes your leftover wine
Source: The Drinks Business
