| Ever since wine filtered down from the realm of kings and into the hands of the common man, there have been crooked wine merchants. Whether topping up a cask of Burgundy with a few flagons of Algerian red, or printing up fake labels of a prestigious producer and slapping them on a few thousand cases of cheap plonk, the goal has remained the same – more money.
The same greed that drove early wine traders still compels the more sophisticated modern wine criminal – the temptation to doctor up a few tanks of wine is just too much for some to handle. The attraction is in the ease – once the juice is in the bottle, it becomes difficult to prove where it came from (and even more difficult once all the evidence is in the toilet).
By the 1930s, European countries were already penning laws to help protect the reputations of their most precious sites. With today’s modern technology and careful policing, it is more difficult to take a fraudulent wine to market. But that said, as long as there is money to be made, there will be more wine scandals.
While I don’t believe Europeans to be any less scrupulous than North Americans, it’s in Europe that most of the great wine scandals have occurred, perhaps because this is where the laws are most strictly enforced and where the great majority of wine is consumed. The most famous wine fraud in recent history occurred in 1985, when an Austrian vintner topped up some German bulk wine with an illegal additive called diethylene glycol (although referred to as "the antifreeze scandal," it’s not really the same thing). What was a burgeoning industry was brought to its knees in a single year with exports falling to almost nothing, even though this was an isolated incident that affected only a single wine. As a result, Austria now has the most strictly enforced and rigorous laws of any wine-producing nation.
A year later, a winemaker in Italy added some methanol (wood alcohol) to his rather innocuous table wine and 23 Italians took their last sip of wine. While most scandals are not nearly this serious, they all have one thing in common – what’s on the label does not match what’s in the bottle. This is where Duboeuf ran into his troubles.
There are strict rules in Europe on how wine can be labelled, depending on where it comes from, how the grapes are grown and how it is produced. Each year the French wine police are busy taking samples from barrels and counting inventory to ensure that producers are keeping things on the up and up. On one such trip to the Duboeuf winery, they discovered that George’s normally orderly ducks were not in a row. The equivalent of 300,000 bottles were found to contain a mixture of both inexpensive everyday Beaujolais and slightly more expensive wines from the named villages, or crus. While it might not sound like a big deal, this is a serious no-no in France.
So there you have it – an ignominious blot on the remarkable career of a 72-year-old man who built a business that started with him riding his bicycle door-to-door, selling single bottles of wine to restaurants, into a 30-million-case-a-year enterprise, exporting to more than 120 countries. He elevated the reputation of an otherwise unknown region into a household name and produced an international phenomenon with his creation of Beaujolais Nouveau. But according to French authorities, he has sacrificed all this in order to blend a few thousand litres of $12 wine into a few thousand litres of $18 wine. And this on the heels of perhaps the greatest vintage Beaujolais has ever known, 2003, when the region was finally starting to get some well-deserved attention.
One would think that a man of Duboeuf’s accomplishments would be able to do better than that. If he were going to create a wine scandal, something a little more profitable would be in order, wouldn’t it? It’s like the CEO of Enron getting caught on a street corner running a game of three-card monte.
Duboeuf claims it was all just a big mistake and, looking at the evidence, I’m inclined to believe him. Although the wine in question will never even come to market and the man in charge of the debacle has resigned, the incident will no doubt hurt the hard-earned reputation of the winery. Scandals have a way of doing that – just ask the Austrians. |
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