It's a big time for fakes. Fake news. Fake art. Fake handbags. Fake sushi in Los Angeles. And increasingly the focus is turning to fake wines. A few years ago, a report in a French newspaper, Sud Ouest, estimated that 20% of wines might be cheap tipple in a fancy bottle. The problem is biggest in China, because of its exploding wine market, which is projected to be a $69.3-billion (about R944-billion) business by 2019, an 81% increase over four years. In 2016, Italian authorities seized 9,000 bottles of fake Moët & Chandon. Discovered in a shed in Padua, the faux champagne - actually sparkling wine - had a retail value of $375,000. There was also a cache of 40,000 fake Moët labels, worth close to $2-million. The Italian police are becoming expert at spotting fake wines. Two years earlier, they seized 30,000 bottles of counterfeit brunello and chianti classico in a raid in central Italy. But the most notable cases of counterfeit wine involve extremely high-end bottles, and the man be...
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