Rudy Kurniawan's family business is fraud. Now that he has served his 10-year prison sentence for counterfeiting wine and been deported from the United States, he is, according to reports, back to doing what he knows best.
Moreover, he has fans paying him to create fake wines.
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Wine fraud expert Maureen Downey has uncovered photos and tasting notes from a dinner held in Singapore in July at the exclusive Pines Club. Kurniawan was tasked with creating fake versions of 1990 DRC Romanée-Conti and 1990 Petrus, which seven guests tasted against the originals. Most of the tasters preferred the fakes.
The description of the event posted on Downey's site Wine Fraud says that Kurniawan starred in a similar event just over a month earlier, at which most of the 15 guests also preferred his fake versions of 1990 Domaine Jacques-Frederic Mugnier Le Musigny and 1982 Château Cheval Blanc to the originals.
The notes written by a guest are fawning: "So here we are again – the same setting, a smaller party of seven, to experience again the magic of Rudy's vinous knowledge, imagination and craft." And in conclusion: "Mr Rudy Kurniawan is a vinous genius."
Kurniawan, born and raised in Indonesia, was convicted in the US in 2014 of counterfeiting wine that the FBI estimated he sold for about $30 million, as well as bank fraud for a $7m loan he obtained with false information.
But he's really small potatoes compared to his uncles, Hendra Rahardja and Eddy Tansil. Rahardja committed bank fraud in Indonesia for more than $200m and was sentenced to life in prison in absentia, because he had fled the country. The really successful member of the family was Tansil, who embezzled $420m from an Indonesian bank and bribed his way out of prison two years into a 17-year sentence. Rahardja is reportedly dead, while in 2015, Tansil was reported to be living in Macau.
"People like to hang out with gangsters," Downey told Wine-Searcher. "It's amazing to me, but people are paying him for his company. They're also paying him to counterfeit wine."
The parties at the Pines Club are reminiscent of rare-wine blowout dinners that introduced Kurniawan to the fine-wine-collector set in Los Angeles and New York in the early part of the millennium. The difference is that back then, many of the diners could kid themselves that the wines they were tasting were real. Now, they know they're fake and they love them anyway.
"The deal with these tastings is, a billionaire hosts the meals," said Downey, a former auction house employee who now helps manage private collections, and assists the FBI with wine-fraud cases.
"He talks to his big collector friends and they pull some of the biggest wines that they have out of their cellars. That guy gives Rudy the list. Rudy makes his version of the wines. They have a meal and they taste them side-by-side, blind. The man that writes the tasting notes is very good. The overall impression is that people prefer Rudy's wines, because they're fresher. That really speaks to the audience."
Let's be clear: what Kurniawan is doing at these dinners is not illegal, at least not in any way I'm aware of. You or I could blend some Cabernet and Merlot together and say: "This is my attempt to duplicate Lafite-Rothschild. Let's taste them against each other."
But fraud is the family business; it's a strong statement, but the facts support it. If Kurniawan is making fake wines for friends, could they find their way to the market? What's happening to the real empty bottles brought to these wine dinners? Kurniawan always collected such empties in his Los Angeles heyday because it's easier to refill a real bottle than to create a new one.
Downey said that the successful prosecution of Kurniawan did not make a dent in the worldwide growth of wine counterfeiting. Counterfeiters are staying technologically ahead, such as by buying digital printers that enable them to counterfeit anti-fraud seals.
And they're not just making DRC and Pétrus. In 2021, counterfeit bottles of Yellow Tail were found on sale in grocery stores in Birmingham, England.
Moreover, she said, the counterfeit wine market is nowhere near as large these days as the counterfeit spirits market, and the UK is awash in both. Downey, one of the world's leading experts on counterfeit booze, said that on a recent visit to London, she ducked into a well-known department store to buy a bottle of Hendrick's Gin to have in her hotel room, only to discover too late that it was a fake.
"They're being made in conflict zones," Downey said. "There's a huge spike in counterfeit spirits being made in Northern Ireland – that's still a conflict zone – and Syria. It's a quick way for terrorist groups to make a lot of money. If they get caught, they get a fine, but they don't go to jail the way they would with drug trafficking."
