(Morey-Saint-Denis) “I couldn’t stand it”: in 2008, Laurent Ponsot, winemaker from Burgundy, in central France, discovered that a crook was making millions selling fake grands crus. And will launch a global hunt worthy of Hollywood.
“Well, it all started on April 23, 2008 at 6 a.m.…”: it is with these words, spoken in front of a New York court in December 2013, that Laurent Ponsot begins a testimony which will plunge Rudy Kurniawan , the biggest wine forger ever arrested.
On April 23, 2008, the winemaker read an email from an American friend. “How long have you been producing Clos Saint-Denis? “, asks this lover of great Burgundies, ready to pay tens of thousands of dollars for this famous grand cru then offered at auction in New York in the 1945, 1949, 1959 vintages… But Laurent Ponsot replies: “We don’t We have only been producing them since 1982.”
The winemaker from Morey-Saint-Denis (Côte d’Or), a prestigious address in Burgundy, then flew to New York and had lunch with the seller: Rudy Kurniawan, a ” golden boy » Chinese, Malaysian or Indonesian… We don’t really know.
Supposedly from a rich family, the thirty-year-old is invited by all of New York, crowned with his nickname “Dr Conti”, in reference to his passion for Romanée-Conti, the most expensive Burgundies in the world which he nevertheless uncorked “like bottles of soda”, remembers Mr. Ponsot in an interview with AFP.
Confronted with the wine grower, Rudy Kurniawan gave him the two telephone numbers of the people who would have given him the controversial bottles, he said. But one is a fax machine and the other is airline customer service.
Laurent Ponsot then decides to carry out the investigation. Because, for this wine man, born “above a cellar” 69 years ago, “it was visceral”.
“I couldn’t stand it: this guy was defiling the spirit of wine. I went on a crusade,” recalls the winegrower with the look of a gentleman farmer, shoulder-length gray hair falling over an elegant jacket.
A “magic cellar”
From hideouts to “threads”, as he says, using the language of the detective he has become, Laurent Ponsot follows the thread from New York to Singapore, Hong Kong, then Indonesia.
The so-called “Rudy” is in fact Zhen Wang Huang, son of modest Chinese grocers from a village in Malaysia, who went to study in Indonesia before living illegally in the United States. Little by little, his great oenological knowledge brought him into the circle of the greatest amateurs.
As he recounts in a book called FBI, Fake Bottles Investigation, Laurent Ponsot monitors the forger’s Californian apartment, follows all his comings and goings. He then finds the suppliers where the crook buys corks, wax, labels, etc.
“I was dealing with an ace at concealment,” he remembers. But the winegrower does not have the power to search. He is stuck.
Until 2009. Laurent Ponsot was then contacted by the FBI: he also investigated the forger and discovered that Burgundian was already on his trail. The American federal police therefore asked him to share his discoveries.
On March 8, 2012, the FBI entered the counterfeiter’s apartment. In a sort of “magic cellar”, hundreds of bottles, thousands of falsified labels and multiple recipes are piled up, such as that for making a Château Mouton Rothschild 1945: “half a bottle of Pichon Longueville 1988, a quarter of oxidized Bordeaux and a quarter of Californian wine.”
“We have never seen so many falsified bottles. There must have been 20,000, including 500 from my field.”
After his New York trial at the end of 2013, the Indonesian was sentenced to ten years in prison and to pay $28.5 million to the injured winegrowers.
Laurent Ponsot is, for his part, made an “honorary FBI agent”.
Rudy Kurniawan was released from prison in 2020. But, “10 days after his release, I knew that he was at the bar of the Mandarin Oriental in Singapore”, a very famous luxury hotel, says Mr. Ponsot, which “remains the lookout.”
The Indonesian “would still have millions in Hong Kong”, he accuses. “He’s getting back in the saddle.”