Outside of Shanghai, two men were recently arrested and  20,000 bottles of fake Carlo Rossi were seized. Unfortunately no one knows exactly how much wine was made and is circulating in the marketplace.

This can come as an unsettling discovery for many wine drinkers, especially those that believe that their taste in wines is too inexpensive, and therefore shielded from counterfeiters. The most common question that typically comes from people that ask the WineFraud.com Team about what we do is, “but that isn’t the wine I drink is it? Just the really expensive stuff?” The answer typically includes that while the most commonly counterfeited wines are the very fine French wines, all levels of wine are affected by counterfeiters. What wine drinkers need to remember, is that wine counterfeiting is a business, not a hobby. A counterfeiter will only recreate wines that he feels he can sell for more than he creates them for. While profit margins on Grand Crus are certainly higher, the market is far smaller than a less expensive bottle of wine. So while all industries have companies that make their money by selling luxury goods to a small market, far more companies stay in business by selling less expensive items to far larger audiences. Unfortunately, creating counterfeits of less expensive wine isn’t brand new. Miraval– the wine of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie- is famously counterfeited.

Moral of the story: if you drink wine, do your research to ensure you are only buying the authentic kind.

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