Egan, who worked at Sotheby’s for more than 20 years, said it took him five days in Texas this summer to review about 770 of the wines and “give a final say on questionable bottles which were not out-and-out fakes.” In the end, 548 bottles -- about 10 percent of the collection -- were deemed counterfeit or unfit for sale.
“I looked at wines such as Petrus, Roumier, Ponsot, a handful of wines where the value was very high,” Egan said in an interview from his home in Bordeaux. Most of the wines were too inexpensive for Kurniawan to have bothered counterfeiting and may have been for private consumption, he said.
“I know Rudy wasn’t a murderer, but this wine is his crime,” said Maureen Downey, a wine authenticator who helped prosecutors vet the wine for trial and assessed collections for several victims. “It’s almost like the government is selling the utensils which Jeffrey Dahmer used. There’s something a little bit grotesque.”
Egan is a little wistful about the bottles that are to be destroyed. “I think it would be good to have a cache of this, because it is good, so people would know what these fakes looked like,” he said.
Kurniawan was devious but not always painstaking. Laurent Ponsot, who heads Domaine Ponsot, testified at Kurniawan’s trial that in 2008 he was alerted to an auction of Domaine Ponsot wines about to take place in New York City, consigned by Kurniawan. Ponsot flew to New York and arrived in time to stop the auction, saying there were more than 80 bottles dating from the 1940s to the 1970s, for a label he said didn’t exist until 1982.
At a later meal, according to Ponsot’s testimony, he asked Kurniawan where he’d gotten them from. “I don’t know,” he replied.
Aubert de Villaine, whose family owns half of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, said he was satisfied with the steps the U.S. had taken to authenticate the wines. “I would of course be careful,” he said in an e-mail. “But we know that Mr. Kurniawan had a cellar of good bottles besides the fakes he was producing.”
Kurniawan’s lawyer, Jerome Mooney, noted the evidence showed that his client spent at least $40.6 million in wine from dozens of auctioneers, dealers and private collectors in the U.S. and Europe.
“As far as I know, it’s all legit,” Mooney said. “It’s not like Rudy was buying Two Buck Chuck.”