079 The Great Wine Fraud | Peter Hellman, author of In Vino Duplicitas
Curiosityness
Travis DeRose
4.8 • 566 Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2020
⏱️ 80 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Even if you're not into wine, you're gonna love this story about the most notorious con in wine history!
Rudy Kurniawan, a young, virtually unknown twenty something from Indonesia, rose to become the leading purveyor of fine wines in a span of only six years. During that time, he sold tens of millions of dollars worth of wine to the American elite.
In time, however, discrepancies begin to appear and crates of Kurniawan's fine wines are abruptly pulled from auction. It turns out that crates of Kurniawan's fine wines up for auction are not even supposed to exist!
In this episode, I interview Peter Hellman who was present for these counterfeit discoveries and worked to investigate the case. Tune in to learn why wine is so ideal for counterfeiting, about Rudy Kurniawan's methods for counterfeiting wines, why Rudy was so successful, and the outcome of his trial and sentencing.
Grab your copy of In Vino Duplicitas
On IndieBound at: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781615194957?aff=theexperiment
On Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3bgbfxo
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Transcript
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| 0:33.6 | A spontaneous and unrehearsed interview. |
| 0:40.8 | Hello. A spontaneous and unrehearsed interview. Hello and welcome to the 79th episode of Curiosityness. |
| 0:46.6 | I am Travis DeRose, the guy who does these podcasts. |
| 0:51.0 | If you're new here, welcome aboard. |
| 0:52.9 | This is a fun little podcast where I interview people who are |
| 0:58.5 | interesting or have good stories to tell or are knowledgeable in certain subjects. And that's |
| 1:05.3 | what today's episode is. It's no exception. I'm interviewing Peter Hellman, and he is the author of a book called |
| 1:13.4 | Invino Duplicitas, the rise and fall of a wine forger extraordinaire. And this is an awesome story. |
| 1:22.8 | I'm not a wine drinker, not even that big into wine, but the story's good nonetheless. And I think you'll really |
| 1:28.1 | enjoy it. It's about a man named Rudy Koneowan who conned like literally millions of dollars |
| 1:36.7 | of fine vintage wines out of rich folks. So it's a fun story learning about how he did this, how he gained, you know, |
| 1:45.7 | his authority in that world, how exactly he counterfeited these wines and, you know, |
| 1:53.0 | kind of the downfall too of him and how he was found out and kind of the whole trial and |
| 1:58.6 | conviction. So let's get to the episode. |
| 2:01.5 | I'm going to stop talking and give it off to Pete now. |
... |
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