Suspected of large-scale wine fraud, five merchants and transporters from Gironde and Charente are appearing this Thursday before the Bordeaux Criminal Court. They would have imported the equivalent of millions of low-end wine bottles from Spain before reselling the goods under French labels, or even sometimes AOC from the Bordeaux vineyards. The damage would amount to millions of euros.
“It’s not every day that we discover such a major fraud”
“It’s a very big deal”, immediately warns a source close to the file joined by France Bleu Gironde. In their investigation carried out between 2016 and 2019, the repression of fraud (Dreets), customs and the police estimate that 35,000 hectoliters of wine, i.e. 4.6 million bottleswere thus fraudulently sold in France.
According to these investigations, a Girondin trader with a storefront was ordering the goods in Spain. The wine tanks were then transported to the South-West by a carrier located in Charente. A third brokerage company was then responsible for disguising the transport documents so that the red produced under the Pyrenees becomes, as if by magic, French wine.
A parallel circuit of fraud would also have made it possible to dress up several thousand bottles of prestigious AOCs such as Saint-Emilion or Pomerol. Customs claim four million euros penalty to the defendants, or the amount of the infringing goods.
Asked by France Bleu, the lawyers for the defendants did not wish to comment on these accusations, claiming to reserve their explanations for the judges. Only the representative of the transporter and assembler from Charente, Maître Bénédicte Bertrand agreed to speak. “My client is more than the big pigeon since he sold Spanish wine and it was the person to whom he sold it who transformed this Spanish wine into French wine. If you go into a hardware store and you buy a hammer to go and smash someone’s head, the hardware store that sells you the hammer, he doesn’t know what you’re going to do with it!”