BOGUS LAFITE GETS SMASHED

PERHAPS there should be a new Chinese proverb: Beware wine bottles bearing “Lafite” on their label. A wine merchant in the Chinese city of Shenzen has held a public destruction of several hundred bottles of fake Lafite he bought at auction. At a highly publicized media event, staff smashed over 2OO bottles of Lafite and second wine Carruades de Lafite that had been identified as fake. The dealer had apparently bought 13,O69 bottles of the Bordeaux first growth for more than seven million yuan (US$1.4m) at an auction but later found many bottles were not the real thing. The identity of the buyer, where the wine was purchased, what exactly the wine was, and how it was identified as fake have not been divulged. Bogus Lafite is a real problem in mainland China – with a report last May claiming that half the Lafite sold in China is in fact fake. The estate spends a lot of time and money to bring counterfeiters to court and Chinese police occasionally bust huge “factories” producing the wines.