Wine and fraud go hand in hand’

A British con man was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Monday for swindling nearly $100 million from more than 140 victims. The financial asset he used to build his scheme? It wasn’t crypto or real estate. It was wine.

The con man, James Wellesley, told his investors they were making loans to wine collectors, and that he was holding those collectors’ valuable wines as collateral, according to federal prosecutors. Unfortunately for those who trusted him with their money, neither the wine nor the collectors existed.

The high-profile case is one of many recent incidents of scammers turning grapes into financial crimes. Patrick Briones, the former top wine buyer at the grocery chain Albertsons, pleaded guilty in October to bribery and conspiracy, after prosecutors alleged that he’d accepted kickbacks like fancy vacations and expensive watches from wine sellers. And the winemaker Jeffry Hill was sentenced in January for orchestrating a $2.5 million grape scam in which he fraudulently mislabeled his bottles.

This new wave of wine fraud has occurred as the industry experiences a severe downturn, with climate change disrupting grape-growing conditions and consumers drinking less. According to Silicon Valley Bank, the number of wineries with “very weak” financial health has nearly tripled since 2022.

Experts are hesitant to link the surge in crime to the broader business environment. Rather, they say financial crime is a long-running problem that’s practically embedded in the industry.

Frances Dinkelspiel, the author of “Tangled Vines,” a book about an arson attack at a California wine house, says it’s the nature of the product. “I think this industry attracts people who want to cheat, because there’s a certain mystique around wine,” she said. “Wine and fraud go hand in hand.”

Maureen Downey, an expert on wine fraud and the founder of Chai Consulting, blames the proliferation of wine crime on the industry’s murky supply chain, saying that it’s “more opaque than guns or illicit drugs.”

“It’s getting bigger and getting worse because nobody wants to talk about it,” Downey said of the crimes. “The producers don’t want to admit that it’s happening, victims don’t want to come forward and governments don’t want to invest time going after it.”

A well-cellared trend

One of the first modern criminal scandals to rock the wine world came in the early 1990s amid the meteoric rise in popularity of white zinfandel, a blush wine invented by the budget winery Sutter Home. Its sweet taste and low price made it extremely popular.

In 1993, the famed vintner Fred Franzia, whose spout-laden white zinfandel boxes filled many a baby boomer’s fridge at the time, pleaded guilty to misrepresenting lower-quality grapes as zinfandel. His firm paid $2.5 million in fines, and Franzia completed community service. This type of fraud, dubbed “blessing of the loads,” extended to other wineries and, according to The Los Angeles Times, cost consumers $55 million at the time.

It was the first glimpse into how far Napa Valley wineries would go to increase profits, but the headlines soon faded into the background as wine became more popular, with sales of red wine jumping 39 percent in 1992 alone. Franzia overcame his white zin scandal and, in 2002, launched “Two Buck Chuck” through Trader Joe’s, which sold over 800 million bottles over the next decade.

An ensuing lack of scandal in Napa Valley during the 2000s was likely not a function of less crime being committed, but of a lack of enforcement. “There had been a lull,” Benjamin Kingsley, the former assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, told DealBook, adding that the geographical and cultural isolation of Napa Valley made it especially hard to investigate.

“The ability to make a case is entirely contingent on a really dogged agent and a dogged A.U.S.A.,” he said, referring to his prior position.

These prosecutorial stars aligned after the 2008 financial crisis. Money flowed back into Napa Valley, crime followed and big cases started getting made.

The rise of big wine crime

Rudy Kurniawan is one of the most prolific scammers in the world of modern wine. Between 2002 and 2012, he sold an estimated $150 million in fraudulent wine. The subject of the 2016 documentary film “Sour Grapes,” Kurniawan preyed on the gullibility of unsophisticated wine drinkers who tried to buy prestige through acquiring rare vintages. In 2009, the billionaire Bill Koch sued Kurniawan, and in 2013 the con man was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Kurniawan seemed to be a bellwether for a certain type of criminal that had embedded itself into the wine ecosystem. His crimes involved more money and were more sophisticated than most previous wine scams (with notable exceptions: In 2005, the winemaker Mark Anderson, for example, burned down a warehouse that housed 4.5 million bottles of wine — with a value of roughly $250 million — to erase evidence of his fraudulent business practices).

After Kurniawan was arrested, investigators exposed a flurry of additional frauds, forgeries and fakes. In 2015, a bookkeeper for Whitehall Lane Winery was arrested and charged for embezzling over $600,000 and, that same year, the longtime wine dealer John E. Fox was busted for running a decades-long Ponzi scheme in which he sold “wine futures” to investors. Fox admitted to selling, or trying to sell, $20 million worth of “phantom wine” between 2010 and 2015.

Also around that time, burglars stole $550,000 worth of wine from the famed Bay Area restaurant The French Laundry, and the well-known Napa vintner Robert Dahl killed his business investor Emad Tawfilis after Tawfilis discovered that Dahl had been misappropriating funds. After chasing Tawfilis through his vineyard with a gun and shooting him, Dahl turned the weapon on himself.

Ripening conditions

The wine industry has experienced pronounced economic headwinds over the past few years, which have been some of Napa Valley’s most challenging. “I started talking about a market correction in 2017,” said Rob McMillan, an executive vice president at Silicon Valley Bank who authors the bank’s annual report on the wine industry. “But it’s worse than I expected.”

According to the International Organization of Vine and Wine, wine consumption is at its lowest level since the 1960s, and Gallup found that overall alcohol consumption was at its lowest level in 90 years, falling to 54 percent among U.S. adults in 2025 from 60 percent in 2023.

This has hit wineries, especially in Napa Valley, particularly hard. “Thirty percent of the industry is really struggling,” McMillan said. The middle is stable, he added, and the top 20 percent of winemakers are doing well — another instance of a K-shaped trajectory.

With Napa Valley’s future in jeopardy, crime may seem even more tempting to desperate vintners. And the market’s very nature makes it easy to commit fraud, forgery, bribery and theft.

A lot of wineries are small businesses, which attracts infusions of unstructured capital that are easier to manipulate than institutional investments. The regulatory framework and criminal enforcement surrounding wine have proven spotty, and unlike most products, determining a wine’s legitimacy requires an element of technical sophistication that is extremely hard to master. Many wine drinkers, faced with a blind taste test, would be hard-pressed to distinguish a $2,000 bottle of wine from a $20 bottle. Because of this, many believe that fraud will find its way into wine, regardless of economic conditions.

“Through all economies over the last 30 years, we’ve had crime,” McMillan said. “There are so many ways to create fraud through wine. That’s the problem, not the state of the economy.”

Question to AI: What About Quench in Woodfin?

What Makes Quench! Wine Bistro Stand Out

• Exceptional chef‑driven menu: Multiple reviewers highlight Chef Sam Etheridge’s culinary skill and diverse, high‑quality dishes.

• Top‑tier ratings:

  • 5.0 stars on Tripadvisor (small but consistently glowing reviews).

  • 5.0 rating with 21 reviews on WanderBoat.

  • 5.0 rating with 47 reviews in local listings.

• Cozy, intimate atmosphere: Only a handful of tables and bar seats—reviewers describe it as a “hidden gem” and “tiny but perfect.”

• Strong vegetarian and flexible menu options: Guests praise the variety and the ability to modify dishes.

• Community favorite: Locals appreciate having downtown‑quality dining without downtown hassle.

Wine storage using qvevri vessels in Batumi, Georgia. Photo by Ivan Semenovych

By Gina Trippi

Set your wine calendar for back to the future! Wine from Georgia, one of the oldest wine-producing countries, is back and trending.

Georgia is located at the intersection of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, part of the Caucasus region bounded on the west by the Black Sea, on the north and east by Russia and Turkey and on the south by Armenia. The moderate climate and moist air influence from the Black Sea provide near perfect conditions for vine cultivation. The vineyard soil is so accommodating that the grapevines grow up the trunks of fruit trees, grapes hanging down among the fruit as they ripen.

Archaeologists unearthed clay vessels called qvevri (pronounced kway-vree) used in winemaking dating back 8,000 years. How do we know these clay jars were used for winemaking? Because grapeseeds were found in the jars! Amazed by the longevity of these jars, UNESCO included qvevri on the 2013 Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

The qvevri is a large egg-shaped, beeswax-lined, porous terracotta vessel. Once filled with grapes—skins intact—the vessel is buried underground for six months. Due to the vessel’s bulbous shape and pointed bottom, it acts as a natural filtration system. This ancient tradition of winemaking in Georgia is solidly intertwined with the national identity of the people. There are more than 500 indigenous grape varieties in Georgia.

While many countries claim to be the birthplace of wine, Georgia makes the best case. And now, after centuries, Georgian wine is accessible in this country—more specifically, in Asheville! Metro Wines has both a red and white wine.

Saperavi, pronounced sah-per-ra-vee and translating to “place of color” in English, originated in eastern Georgia and is now the most widely planted red varietal in the country. Indigenous to Georgia, the grape produces a full-bodied wine that is inky, deep red to nearly black in color with a profound texture.

Our Qvevri Saperavi was made, pursuant to tradition, in clay. Collection and processing of grapes is by hand. Deep in fruit character, yet brisk with acidity, this gutsy grape presents a unique alternative to everyday reds. Characteristically a dark red, opaque color in the glass, Saperavi is one of the few teinturier grapes—a red wine grape with dark skins and flesh—in the world. A varietally correct representation, this bottle has aromas and flavors of dark berries, licorice, grilled meat, tobacco, chocolate and spices.

The Qvevri Kisi Amber White is what is now called an orange wine. Again, Georgia is the birthplace of this style of wine. An orange wine is a type of white wine made by leaving the grape skins and seeds in contact with the juice, creating a deep orange-hued finished product.

In the glass, our orange wine is straw in color. Made in Qvevri, it is bold with honeyed aromas of tropical fruit, hazelnut, brazil nuts, juniper, sourdough and dried orange rind. On the palate, the wine is dry and presents tannins similar to a red wine.

Back to the future with wines from Georgia!

Gina Trippi is the co-owner of Metro Wines, 169 Charlotte Street in Asheville. Committed to the community, Metro Wines offers big-shop selection with small-shop service. Gina can be reached at gina@metrowinesasheville.com or 828.575.9525.

Quench Wine Pairing Dinner on April 21st, 6pm

Go Here for RESERVATIONS

3 Day Hard Target Vacation #3: West Palm Beach! As Subscribers know, John and I do 3 Day Hard Target Vacations (7 days, including travel for international trips). The Hard Target in Madrid was "The Head of the Dog by Goya at the Prado, the Detroit Institute of Art and Motown in Detroit and, last week, the Rembrandt Exhibit at the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach. But always, the experience is taken from a wine perspective.