Michael Egan: Wine Detective, Part One

Mar. 23, 2016

There are many career paths available for people interested in wine, and Michael Egan has found one of the most unusual: wine detective. Egan earned that nickname from the American press in 2013 when he assisted the FBI and Department of Justice in the trial of accused wine counterfeiter Rudy Kurniawan. Egan applied his decades of experience in the world of fine wine to prove the bottles in question were forgeries, helping to send Kurniawan to prison for 10 years. Since then, Egan’s services have been in high demand for serious collectors and trade clients seeking to authenticate rare and valuable bottles. We caught up with Mr. Egan by phone recently to talk about his incredible career.

Let’s talk about your work as “The Wine Detective.” When you’re looking at a bottle of wine, what do you look for to determine if it is the genuine article?

I’m not going to say to anyone that I’ve got all the answers. It’s just based on my experience. Using logic and reasoning, I can normally tell a fake item from a real one.

The first thing I start off with is the shape of the bottle, particularly the older wines. Is the bottle too old for the vintage, or too young? Because in Bordeaux and Burgundy, the wine is bottled two years after the harvest, the bottle logically must be manufactured during a specific year. Therefore a much younger or older bottle will raise my suspicions. The second thing is the label itself, whether it looks like a copy or the real article. Sometimes the waters are muddied, because the Château can do a later release of older bottles, which would have been with them the whole time but they’re using a newer style label. I can usually talk to the Château to see if they’ve released any 1893 or 1921 onto the market using newer labels. But basically the label is printed, and there are different printing methods through the eras. So if say, for a label from the 1940s, under magnification the print starts pixelating or it doesn’t have the sharpness you would get from a lithographic press, then I know it’s a copy. Also, I look for artificial stressing and soiling of the label. Having inspected and catalogued for auction so many bottles that have been in situ forever, they develop a certain patina. If the patina looks wrong, for instance, if you’ve got a dirty label but a clean bottle, that gives grounds for suspicion. If the label is scratched or mutilated in a strange way, that’s another point that something’s not right.

And you rely on your connections to Châteaux and other winemakers to verify questionable bottles?

Yes. They’re eager to stop the proliferation of counterfeit bottles. They’re very proactive. Château Pétrus, for example, has got its own legal department. They do a lot of litigation, which we don’t often hear about. They and other top Bordeaux and Burgundy producers are very assiduous in protecting their brands, and of course the consumer.

How else do you examine suspicious bottles?

It’s all visual. But for further ratification of my suspicions, I can take bottles to a laboratory in Bordeaux, which is part of the University of Bordeaux, where they measure for gamma rays. This is very important for wines purporting to be older than 1945, because the background radiation will show up in any wine which was produced from the late 1940s up to now, now, thanks to the introduction of radioactive isotopes created by nuclear fission into the atmosphere. Anything from the 1920s, 1930s or earlier will have a very low level of gamma rays in the wine. And also, the new isotopes created through nuclear fission, such as Cesium-137, didn’t exist before 1945. So if that particular isotope is in the wine, that will show all or part of that wine is younger than 1945. And the great thing about that is they can test it by just measuring the rays when they react with a Germanium crystal. You don’t have to open the bottle, which is good because if you want to use the bottle for litigation, then it’s there. If you do chemical testing, it means you have to open the bottle, the cork is open, the seal is broached and the contents have been destroyed through testing.

Are there any forgeries that stick out in your mind as remarkably great?

Some of the Kurniawan items were very good, because he had labels professionally printed. He would have a Château Latour or a Cheval Blanc label scanned at a very, very high resolution and then sent off to a printer in Indonesia, and that printer would be able to replicate the gold lettering or the bronze lettering on the label. Obviously, when you compare them to the real label there is some difference, but they used a gold or a bronze paint on the labels. So there again, that would probably pass muster without looking at it under a microscope. He was very good at taking capsules off in their entirety and painstakingly reapplying them to his fake bottles. There are a few folds on the capsules, but otherwise they look pretty good. Also, he had rubber stamps manufactured which were a close enough replication of the branding found on real corks. He would then ink them and stamp them on blank corks. They’re not as well rendered, but you’d have to have photographs or real corks to compare to see the difference. So Kurniawan was definitely very good. For example, he would use a real bottle from Romanée-Conti of that year to put his fake stuff in. He was pretty good, and he was prolific.

Are there any forgeries you saw that were totally inept?

At Sotheby’s in the late 1980s, a man brought in a few bottles of vintage port for sale and left them at the front desk. When they were brought to the wine department we noticed that the wax capsules were made from soft candle wax, not the hard sealing wax. Later one cork shot out, spewing fizzy red wine all over the desk. It turned out that this individual had put his home made wine into the bottles and it had kept on fermenting inside—hence the geyser of wine!

Is the wine industry taking any measures to fight back against the forgery?

There are so many more anti-counterfeit measures being applied to the actual items, particularly spirits and whiskeys, to make them unforgeable and also preventing refilling of the contents. And that’s coming down to the fine wine world as well. They’re putting special inks in the labels, micro-printing which only shows up under very high magnification, even chemical taggants in the actual wine. It’s a good step forward, because that means they’ll be much harder to fake in the future.