![]() ![]() Jim Elroy was confident that this was going to be the smoking gun that would prove Rodenstock guilty of fabricating the Jefferson bottles. When you make the wine, this comes into the wine and stays into the wine." "And then with rain this radioactivity falls on the grapes. This radioactivity is everywhere on Earth - in our food, clothing, the cells of our body. "I identified the perpetrator as a man named Hardy Rodenstock," says Elroy. "So Koch says to Elroy: 'Saddle up.' And Elroy did."Įlroy put together a team of wine experts, including a former Scotland Yard inspector in England and a former MI5 agent in Germany, and launched an international investigation. The ringtone on his cellphone is the whistled theme to the Clint Eastwood cowboy film, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. "Elroy is a kind of a genial, bloodhound of a guy," says Keefe, the reporter. When Bill Koch realized that he had potentially been crossed, he contacted Jim Elroy, a former FBI agent. Most of them were 1787, a vintage Jefferson never ordered in his life." In the so-called Jefferson bottles, there were about a dozen bottles including a 1784 and a 1787 Chateaux d'Yquem, a 1787 Lafite, a Margaux. "In his vast records of over 60,000 documents," says Stanton, "there was nothing that suggested Jefferson had ever ordered any of these wines. According to his detailed books, they all arrived intact, she says. When he returned from France he had the wines he'd purchased for himself and President Washington carefully shipped to the U.S. He was also a meticulous record keeper who recorded every aspect of his life in detail. "It's important that the label look like it's been around the block a bit, so they might rub it with a bit of earth or coffee grounds." "Fraudsters put a lot of work into trying to make their corks look distressed," says Jancis Robinson, a longtime wine writer for The Financial Times. ![]() ![]() "In the last year, I myself have written reports for about $5 million worth of fakes."Īnd as fraud goes up, experts are going to greater lengths than ever before to authenticate wine - the fibers of the label paper, the tiny pits in the glass, the depth of the punt in the bottom of the bottle, all hold clues. "Counterfeit wines have become a much bigger problem of late," says Downey. Maureen Downey, wine detective and founder of Chai Consulting wine appraisal and authentication in San Francisco, has a toolkit of items she uses to forensically examine bottles of wine - razor blades, magnifying glasses, jewelers loupes, flashlights, blue light. ![]()
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