The Great Wine Fraud
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2021
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the early 2000s, Rudy Kurniawan was a newcomer to the hedonistic world of wine auctions in the US.
He quickly became well-known for his warm and friendly manner and his profligate spending on wines. But where was all his money coming from?
Josephine Casserly tells the story of one of the most high profile cases of wine fraud and speaks to Laurent Ponsot, French winemaker, turned Sherlock Holmes.
(Photo: Corks, foil capsules and wine labels used as evidence in the trial. Credit: Stan Honda/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Josephine |
| 0:39.3 | Kassily. Today I'm hearing about one of the biggest and most lucrative ever cases of wine fraud. |
| 0:45.2 | Our story starts in the 2000 in the US in this hedonistic world of wine auctions. |
| 0:50.8 | These are places where the likes of Hollywood movie producers and Wall Street bankers |
| 0:55.0 | are vying to outbid each other to get their hands on the world's finest wines. |
| 1:00.0 | It became really a kind of a snobbish way to show off. |
| 1:05.0 | It was a crazy world, really. |
| 1:07.0 | That's Laurent Ponsau. |
| 1:08.0 | He wasn't part of this crazy world, but his wines were. |
| 1:12.0 | He's a winemaker from Burgundy in France and the wines |
| 1:14.7 | that he and his family make a famous among wine lovers and they're pricey. But for many |
| 1:19.7 | who attended these auctions money was no object. We had all these people in the finance |
| 1:24.6 | that were earning so much money sometime within seconds. |
| 1:28.0 | In the early 2000s in Los Angeles, |
| 1:29.8 | a newcomer arrived on the scene. |
... |
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