Blending bench brilliance or bottled blasphemy? Bloke busted basically for buggering old labels
by PHILIPWHITE
Somebody should give Rudy Kurniawan a job blending wine.
by PHILIPWHITE
Somebody should give Rudy Kurniawan a job blending wine.
You'll have to wait 'til 2024, when he gets out
of the can in California and is deported back to Indonesia, but by then he will
have thought long and hard about how to produce even better wines than his past
efforts.
Which, on anybody's scale,
were admirable indeed.
Rudy - real name Zhen Wang
Huang, is a master blender - perhaps the most successful newcomer to the art. He
is at least the most famous. Having bought about US$40 million of rare and old
wines at auction, some of which he drank, much of which he sold on, he soon worked
out how to fake very old French classics to fool the billionaire flakes who
measured their success by the value of the ancient rarities they struggled to
procure at ridiculous prices. And, sometimes, even drink.
He sold US$24.7 million
worth at one auction in 2006.
It was Rudy's
over-confident and ill-researched marketing that tripped him up, not his skill
at his kitchen blending bench. He was stung when he sold wine claiming vintages
much older than the company he attributed on his counterfeit labels, and for
using large format bottles that weren't used in the venerable years he put on
his otherwise convincingly scratched-and faded livery.
The great Ian Hickinbotham's honesty in labelling: Kaiser Stuhl Barossa Claret 1954, "with 30% 1957" ... honest winemakers admit that much better wine can frequently be made by cross-vintage blending ... this bottle was in top form when I drank it in 1984.
You can see one version of Rudy's story in the documentary Sour Grapes.
Australia has had a few winemakers busted for breaking wine law.
My first encounter with shady wine stuff was at Len Evans' Rothbury winery in the early 'eighties, when I witnessed the delivery of enough essence of oak chips to make a great volume of Chardonnay taste a bit like it was barrel-aged. Such essence was and is illegal in wine. I was fascinated that it wasn't labelled "essence of fine French oak" but "essence of oak chips". Ew.
That was during the first
tasting I'd organised in the Hunter Valley. I was in the lab taking a break,
while in the next room, Len, James Halliday, Karl Stockhausen and other great Hunter winemaking
gentlemen discussed a bench loaded with Semillon with the young Michael Hill
Smith, unaware of the delivery being made and the fact that yours truly, the
fresh young editor of Winestate, was
signing the delivery chit.
Len Evans OBE spruiking Chardonnay with a fake vineyard. He fought to make Chardonnay "the vanilla of Australian wine." I reckon he meant essence, not real beans.
Perhaps overwhelmed by the
heaviness of those esteemed blokes, and the mighty Evans they revered, the
young Whitey talked about the delivery on later occasions. I had a very good
witness, but took no legal action and stood guilty of not reporting it at the
time, as nobody else in the wine industry seemed to care much. Export was not
so important then.
The next major scam I walked into was during my investigation of a likely apple-juice substitution racket a few years later in 1989. By then, I had learned to care. A wine tanker driver showed me his log book in the top pub at Truro. He had fastidiously recorded deliveries, to some very famous wineries indeed, of apple juice from a hail-damaged Victorian crop. On the pop charts, a new thing called Sauvignon blanc looked as if it was overtaking the horrid Chardonnay of the day, and some suspected that in lieu of having actual vineyards planted with Savvy-b, they could emulate it with some green apple juice.
The next major scam I walked into was during my investigation of a likely apple-juice substitution racket a few years later in 1989. By then, I had learned to care. A wine tanker driver showed me his log book in the top pub at Truro. He had fastidiously recorded deliveries, to some very famous wineries indeed, of apple juice from a hail-damaged Victorian crop. On the pop charts, a new thing called Sauvignon blanc looked as if it was overtaking the horrid Chardonnay of the day, and some suspected that in lieu of having actual vineyards planted with Savvy-b, they could emulate it with some green apple juice.
Which they probably could
with some tweaking, sugar and water.
I called George Mackie,
boss of the governing body, the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation, and
warned him of this scam. He sent out his undercover wine police. They bought a great number of bottled wines in retail stores and tested them for sorbitol, a
sweetening moisturising soluble powder which occurs naturally to a small degree
in apples, but never in grapes.
Eventually George called
to say they'd found sorbitol in six of Murray Tyrrell's wines, and were
proceeding against him. Tyrrell's Pty Ltd was fined $120 in their local
Cessnock courthouse and withdrew and destroyed a vast amount of wine from the
international marketplace. They claimed a $700,000 export loss.
Lot of money in those
days.
A decade later I was sent
an e-mail from a closed class-only University of Davis California web forum, in
which two visiting students claimed Kingston Estate, where they'd done vintage,
had added silver nitrate and suphuric acid to wine tanks. Both of these are
illegal in wine. They also mentioned the addition of pure ethanol and the use
of oenocyanin tannin to make pale wines red.
Once again, I called the
Wine and Brandy Corporation and warned its new boss, Sam Tolley, that I would
be reporting this in The Advertiser. I
also called the Kingston managing director, Bill Moularadelis, to advise him
he'd be on the front of the morning paper and offer him the opportunity to
comment, which he did. Kingston's export license was
suspended while investigations proceeded; wine was removed from shelves in the
UK; Bill co-operated dutifully with the process.
The minute that story hit
the stands there was a mighty flurry of clean-ups in wineries all over
Australia. The general feeling at the big end was that Bill, like Murray, had
been made a scapegoat and that while both had broken the law, the wine was not
dangerous to health.
My name was more on the
nose than ever.
I don't recall the final results of the investigation, but it didn't seem to be all
that long before Kingston's license was reinstated and Bill was appointed to
the board of Wine Australia, the new version of the old Wine and Brandy
Corporation.
The Temple of Gloom: Bill Moularadelis, left, with Treasury Wine Estates chief purchasing officer Stuart McNab and Empire Liquor wholesaler Brenton Quirini all looking a tad nonplussed as I made clear my contrary opinions of a tricky vintage at the South Australian Wine Press Club in the National Wine Centre about a decade ago ... Moularadelis and McNab were careful to contradict me, and I was never invited to address this august body again ... there were as many bankers as winemakers in the packed house, but very few working press members ... photo Leo Davis
Things have been fairly quiet on the Australian wine police front since then, perhaps because in both instances the authorities used their punishments as proof of the efficacy of Australia wine regulations. They did their job; nobody died. They did, and would continue to protect the marketplace - particularly the international one - from such scandal.
Things have been fairly quiet on the Australian wine police front since then, perhaps because in both instances the authorities used their punishments as proof of the efficacy of Australia wine regulations. They did their job; nobody died. They did, and would continue to protect the marketplace - particularly the international one - from such scandal.
What fascinates me is that while it's hard to imagine an industry as large, as troubled, and involving so many people as Australian wine production, those busted weren't engaging in clever and extremely lucrative blending of wine to emulate greatness, but were simply adding chemicals.
In Murray Tyrrell's case, he denied adding apple juice, but admitted readily to adding sorbitol, a sweetening, viscous agent used commonly to keep tobacco moist and ball point ink runny. It is also the principal efficacious ingredient in enemas. Murray had been on the New South Wales committee which decided on the permitted additives list, yet he readily admitted to the illegal sorbitol additions and pleaded guilty.
He seemed to think that adding sorbitol was better than apple juice.
"All these things they're saying about me are completely unfalse," he told me.
At about the same time, Murray also told a gathering of wine writers that he'd admitted to Premier Neville Wran that local aluminium smelter pollution was so bad the grapes wouldn't ripen so he, and others, had been forced to chaptalise their wines, or add sugar, which was illegal.
Not one winery, just by the way, was ever convicted of substituting apple juice for wine. Neither did I ever see a bottle or bladder admitting to the inclusion of apple juice. I still wonder where it all went.
I'd love to have a play with a bucket of mains water, some sorbitol (to add viscosity, mouthfeel and the illusion of sweetness), some essence of oak chips (to emulate barrels) and some oenocyanin for colour. I'm sure I could find some cheap bulk pomegranate juice, blackcurrant essence, cherry and/or beetroot from inferior or damaged crops to use sparingly for the elusive fruit flavour, a splash of ethanol and bingo! A bargain grape-free red for the discount bins!
We need great blenders like Rudy, and much better marketers to work out how to honestly package and sell the superior product.
Call it non-vintage, like the majority of the expensive sparkling wine made in Champagne.
There's obviously a market out there.
Read here of the most recent scam DRINKSTER uncovered.
1 comment:
I never looked at it that way. He must be an incredible blender! Very interesting article.
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