Sour Grapes Page #7

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and still don't see him doing it,

and I still don't believe he did it.

No way.

I think part of

what he started doing was...

Doing some reconditioning.

If you want to take

everything they're saying as true

for the purposes of argument,

and again I'm not stipulating that,

but if you want to take everything

they're saying as true,

we're talking about wine here.

-Oh, my God.

-'91 Ridge Monte Bello.

Don't you want it?

Here's a wine over here,

something that people have tasted,

that they're saying is the best ever.

Well, if you can make something

taste like that,

why not recreate that experience?

And I think that's what happened.

They tried to make that sound

like it was alchemy.

You know, like he was mixing

and matching and contriving.

But that's not what I think it was at all.

I think Rudy just really digs wine.

-This is...

-Where is Rudy?

We're all insecure.

My God, that's it, man.

And if we're the new kid in the group,

we're really insecure.

And especially if everybody else

in the group is older,

if everybody else in the group is richer,

you want to live up

to whatever the expectations are.

The only government evidence

was relating to something

that would have been a couple of bottles

at a time perhaps being made in the

kitchen sink in Rudy's house in Arcadia.

I don't think that you could have created

the number of bottles they claim

that were counterfeit doing that,

so they have a problem with that.

This bottle,

1985 Cte Rtie La Mouline,

is from the famous...

The famous crazy wine auction.

The Cellar auction where all

the sh*t happened, Rudy's auction.

The cellar was Rudy's cellar

and you will see this is very real.

So, this is an example of 90%

of Rudy's wine that he sold that is real.

It's fantastic as everyone's going to see.

Yeah, this one is real.

So, he did sell mostly real wine, I think.

He had an incredible palate

and he was also very generous.

Oh, my God, this is so good.

It's rare and perfect.

Do you want to use a fork

'cause it's on camera?

-No, I'm just going to do with my hands.

-Yeah, go for it.

-Let's do it.

-Here we go.

Thank you very much.

Hi, Matthew!

-How are you, babe?

-Everything's good.

-How are those wines?

-F***ing awesome!

Were you just walking down

the street drinking wine?

-No, we took a car here.

-Okay.

We are not able to drive right now,

so we had a driver.

This is one of the wines that Rudy sold.

Try this, please.

It's outstanding.

-It's as good as it gets.

-It does taste really good.

Thank you so much. Christian.

So, this is a bottle

that Levy bought from Rudy.

It's real.

-He bought it from...

-How long has this been open?

About two hours.

-It's garbage.

-You don't like it?

You think it's fake? Really?

I know this wine very well.

It's not even close.

It doesn't have the life,

it doesn't have the verve and the vivacity

and the dimension of a La Mouline '85,

which is almost like,

if you had a really rich

BLT with the egg on top.

That's how that wine tastes almost.

This?

I mean, it tastes like, you know,

skunk juice.

So, that's very interesting.

How much of the Rudy wine do you have?

I don't know.

Six bottles or something.

He has 6,000 bottles.

There is a kind of collaboration

between the forger and the dupe.

People kind of want to be fooled.

They really want to own

this very rare bottle of wine

that maybe doesn't even exist any more

and so, you don't really want

to know that it's a fake.

If you believe that Rudy Kurniawan

was just trying to recondition the bottles

and give them nicer appearance,

then you probably believe

that in a few weeks

a man with a white beard is going

to come down your chimney

and leave a case of 1945 Romane-Conti

under your tree.

I became interested in this investigation

when I met Jim Wynne,

the FBI agent assigned to it.

I sensed right away that there was going

to be an actual charge that could be made.

We certainly had overwhelming evidence.

A connoisseur of counterfeiting,

master of label making, cork stamping...

He had been purchasing things

like extremely large quantities,

thousands of dollars, of wax.

He was ordering paper that was known

for its antique properties

that can be used to make labels.

He was collecting dozens and dozens

of empty bottles from restaurants.

I always keep my empty bottles.

You know that.

And people ask me why.

I actually put the date

and the place that I had where,

you know, and who I had with.

Kind of simple notes

at the back of the bottle.

Rudy's explanation was that

he was creating a museum of some kind,

or he was doing a photo shoot

of some kind.

He was scanning labels into his computer

and then he was printing them on a huge

printer that was in the house.

What I'm doing is forensically

looking at the wines.

After having scanned through

and catalogued

all the evidence from Rudy's computers,

what I can say

is this is definitely Rudy's

because here's the template that made it.

There are notebooks upon notebooks

in evidence of Rudy's tasting notes.

One of the really interesting pieces

of evidence I thought was a half-bottle

that had writing on it

and he had M-45 and he had a formula.

So, that was 1945 Mouton,

and he had his first formula that he had

blended and he didn't like that.

He had that scribbled out

and then on the other side

he had another formula for M-45

that he liked better.

So, I think that it was a lot of trial

and error and it was a lot of blending.

He would take these old wines

that he had tasted once.

He found other wines

that had similar characteristics

and he'd just mad scientist it.

What he would make was generally

a very convincing imitation

of what it said on the label.

It's easy to dismiss all this and say,

"These guys are sniffing and swirling,

"and it's all a crock of sh*t

and you could, you could fool..."

Well, the fact is most of these guys

you couldn't fool them most of the time.

That's what's interesting

about Rudy's fraud

is that hardly anybody could have done it.

He was a bit of an artist.

Here this one which is dirty on the side

and not in the middle.

It was well done, actually,

but too much well done

because there is nearly

a line between the dirt and the non-dirt.

My theory is easy.

To fake one bottle you need one hour,

if you have the labels

the wax and everything.

Just to eliminate the original label,

the capsule,

and then clean it,

put the new label on it,

dirt it again, put the wax and everything.

It takes one hour.

When you know that one of the big sales

was 15,000 bottles,

or something like that,

if you multiply the number of bottles

by one hour,

15,000 hours, so it's impossible.

I mean, technically, it's impossible

that he could do it...

He could have done it on his own.

We know that some of the paper

came from Indonesia.

His brothers were in Indonesia.

We knew that there was money going

to his brothers in Indonesia.

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