Wine: Marquis de Plagne Crémant d’Alsace Brut - €12.99

ONE of the biggest wine scandals of the past few decades reached its final chapter in a New York court on August 7 last when Rudy Kurniawan was sentenced to 10 years in prison for selling fake wine.

Kurniawan was a regular on the US fine wine auction scene and bought and sold tens of millions of dollars worth of wine. It now seems that most of what he sold was concocted, most likely by labelling ordinary AOC wine with famous labels such as La Tache.

What rumbled him was a batch of Clos St Denis consigned for auction at New York auction house Acker Merrall & Condit, which had to be fake as the producer on the label did not actually make wine from that vineyard until many years later. The fact that the auction house didn’t carry out basic checks is an even bigger scandal in my view.