
The Fall of a High-End Wine Scammer - kspaans
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-premier-cru-john-fox/
======
TazeTSchnitzel
> Meanwhile, the store was becoming even slower to deliver. In February 2012 a
> participant on Wineberserkers.com, a popular discussion board, started a
> thread titled “Why does Premier Cru take so long” that would continue
> unspooling into outrage for the next four years.

If you want to amuse yourself, here's the thread:
[http://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=61257](http://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=61257)

It's interesting to me that even the mere hypothetical suggestion that Premier
Cru was a Ponzi scheme produced such outrage.

~~~
S_Daedalus
Powerful, respected people, or just people with enough money to demand to be
treated as such, do not like to be made fools of any more than you or I, some
even less so. Do they want to believe that they're so thick they've been
swilling crap and scammed? People usually believe what they want to believe,
for as long as possible.

~~~
nerdponx
Nobody said anything about the why am being bad. The scam is that the wines
they ordered just didn't exist -- what little they did receive was the genuine
high-quality stuff. That's the whole reason the scam was able to take off

~~~
S_Daedalus
I phrased that poorly, I didn't mean in this case. I'm thinking in general of
study after study that shows most people can't tell the difference between red
or white wine without the color as a guide.

Also, "Wine" to "Why am", classic autocorrect. I wonder how much longer we're
all going to get to enjoy them?

~~~
bardworx
I've read many studies that depicted folks not able to distinguish the price
point of wine[1] but not being able to tell the "color" of wine is slightly
rediculous to anyone who've drank enough wine. The flavor profiles are
extremely different.

P.S. I spent 10 years in hospitality industry and have known many wine
sommeliers, purveyors, and restaurant owners and have sold enough wine to be
able to judge the regular public. I've also participated in many blind
tastings and never experienced anyone "mixing up" the verity of wine.

P.P.S. I put color in quotes because all wine is white, red wine gets its
color from the skin of the grape and the oak barrels. That's why Oak Ages
Chardonnay is "golden", it took a bit of the oak barrel with it.

If you're curious, white Pinot Nior should be easy to find. Try a blind test
against other verities, for scientific purposes.

[1]: [https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-
ta...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk-
science-analysis)

~~~
S_Daedalus
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/08/19/the-red-and-
the...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/08/19/the-red-and-the-white)

Granted, "Study after study" was clearly wrong.

~~~
smcl
Seems this is typical of urban legends - something that has a hint of truth
but which has been retold in a way to produce a more sensational sounding
result. Snopes did a little digging a couple of years back to find out what
the origin of this story was: [http://sciencesnopes.blogspot.cz/2013/05/about-
that-wine-exp...](http://sciencesnopes.blogspot.cz/2013/05/about-that-wine-
experiment.html)

To save you the bother of reading the article (though it is pretty
interesting) here's the key few sentences which describe the experiment setup
and execution. Essentially a scientist called Frédéric Brochet was doing some
research into "perception and wine tasting" and setup an experiment with some
undergraduate enology (wine tasting) students.

"The undergraduate subjects came into the lab one week and were given a glass
of a red wine and a glass of a white wine. (both Bordeaux, but the
experimental details do not include any label or vintage, so we are unable to
judge them) They were supplied with a list of potential descriptive words, and
told to make a list of words and phrases that best described each wine, either
from the supplied list or in their own words. The following week they return
to the lab for another session. They were presented with two glasses, one
containing white wine, and the other containing the same wine dyed red. They
were then given the list of descriptors that they had used to describe the
wines from the previous week, and asked to choose which of the wines in front
of them best represented each descriptor. It was a forced-choice setup"

So "undergraduate students select the same words to describe a red wine which
they had previously used to describe a white" becomes "wine experts can't tell
the difference between red and white".

~~~
dagw
Here is the paper of actual study:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20070928231853/http://www.academi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070928231853/http://www.academie-
amorim.com/us/laureat_2001/brochet.pdf)

It is infuriatingly short of methodological detail and the little that is
there is very much open to questioning.

------
h4nkoslo
Any business that has a long delay between collecting revenue and delivering
product is vulnerable to this - it's one of the reasons, for instance, that
life insurance is so highly regulated. Grey-market auto sales (eg of high-end
sports cars that need to be imported & converted), real estate development
(Galt's Gulch in Chile), and sales of silencers or other highly regulated
firearms stuff (lots of paperwork to wait for) are other examples. Hell, even
Kickstarters are notorious for this.

One problem is that it's really difficult to distinguish business incompetence
from never intending to follow through, so often the guy pulling the scam
won't be prosecuted and pops back up pulling the same scheme in a different
market. It's totally legal to solicit orders and only then try to fulfil them,
and depending on the market sometimes there is an issue actually getting the
product.

~~~
jeffdavis
I thought there was a law against taking money selling a product, and then
spending it on something else and having no money left to fill the order. Is
that true?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
No, because then using pre sales or deposits for operating expenses would be
illegal. Fraud is generally based on intent in addition to outcomes.

------
hownottowrite
Watch Red Obsession for a little background on this market.
[http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2419284/](http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2419284/)

Should be on Netflix - edit: but it is not :(

~~~
ndonnellan
"Unavailable to stream" :-(

~~~
hownottowrite
Bummer. It was up there a couple months ago.

------
biocomputation
Sounds like I'm not the only one who gets headaches from wine.

~~~
brianwawok
That's sulfites right? Do they make lower sulfite wines? They might.

~~~
biocomputation
Probably. Beer is fine, but I don't really drink that either.

~~~
S_Daedalus
Beer is not fine if you have a real sulfite allergy.

~~~
biocomputation
Noted.

------
revelation
This seems like a generic scammer. He didn't even have the brain to run it as
a pyramid scheme, you certainly don't want your big clients to only ever
receive 1 bottle.

~~~
CaliforniaKarl
Just guessing, but I'd say that it's harder to pay back the original people
because they're not being paid in cash, they're being paid in a harder-to-get
product.

Or the guy simply forgot about the older orders...

------
teh_klev
If you enjoyed that Bloomberg article you might enjoy this story which was
posted a while back on HN:

[http://nymag.com/news/features/rudy-kurniawan-wine-
fraud-201...](http://nymag.com/news/features/rudy-kurniawan-wine-
fraud-2012-5/)

HN discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10474174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10474174)

------
ImTalking
If the guy is a scammer, then why is his fall disastrous?

~~~
bradbatt
I'm assuming disastrous for all of the people he bilked out of their money.

------
S_Daedalus
It's almost as though the world of fine wine is full of rich suckers who truly
believe they have a rare and golden palette.

Delightful.

~~~
walrus01
They can hang out with the people who buy $3500 ceramic insulators for their
$14,500 stereophile grade audio cables.

~~~
jpatokal
You mean "$10,000 stereophile grade _Ethernet_ cables".

I wish I was joking: [http://arstechnica.com/staff/2015/02/to-the-audiophile-
this-...](http://arstechnica.com/staff/2015/02/to-the-audiophile-
this-10000-ethernet-cable-apparently-makes-sense/)

~~~
metaphor
"$10,000 for _Ethernet_ cables?! What a rip off,” says Mr. Morita[1].

[1] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-gift-for-music-lovers-who-
have...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-gift-for-music-lovers-who-have-it-all-
a-personal-utility-pole-1471189463)

