Wine personality of the day

Rudy Kurniawan was arrested in 2012 for one of the largest cases of fraud in the wine trade. He first became famous around ten years before his arrest for accumulating one of the finest cellars in the world; it was full of famous wines from the best vintages. His company bought wine for investors to speculate on the value increasing as the wines became scarce, hoping that wealthy millionaires would then pay a premium to own or drink these wines in the future. The investment company was incredibly successful which he promoted through auction lots of extremely rare wines. In 2010, people became suspicious of the wines he was auctioning and began investigating his company. Some of the wines he had auctioned proved to be fake which he initially denied by claiming he must have bought them as fakes. He was, however, eventually caught when police discovered fake labels, corks and bottles at his home. During his trial, he was found guilty of running a sophisticated operation that was selling cheap AOC wines transferred into bottles with fake labels and corks. It’s thought he made, and lost, over $10 million before being caught and jailed for ten years.