Vintage Villains

The Dutch connection is cut

Wine scandals are like bad vintages. They don't happen every year, but often enough to offend good taste. In 1974 the Bordeaux region was rocked by the news that the respected firm of Cruse et Fils Freres had sold cheap Midi reds under more expensive Bordeaux labels. In 1979 Burgundy Shipper Bernard-Noel Grivelet was accused of peddling an inferior blend under the finest names of the Cote d'Or. Now comes a 1980 scandal that may dwarf them both.

The suspect wine again is French, or is purported to be. But the principal culprits are Dutchmen who, in two separate operations, are believed to have passed off several million bottles of cheap wine as the product of well-known French vineyards, earning as much as $10 million in the process. American importers have been a favorite target for shipments of bogus Pouilly-Fuisse, a white wine from the Burgundy region that has soared both in popularity and price in the U.S. According to investigators in The Netherlands, Americans drank between 300,000 and 500,000 bottles of the phony-Fuisse during the past two years, usually paying more than $10 a bottle for the privilege.

One of the swindles began to unravel last year in Liverpool, where a firm called Eutron Ltd. had hired a British bonded warehouse company to store and label bottles of French wine shipped in from The Netherlands. Eutron ran up a $22,000 bill with the warehouse, which in turn seized 3,000 bottles of wine still awaiting export to the U.S. Meanwhile a British customs officer got curious about the special green certificates of origin that under European Community rules must accompany quality wines. On the Dutch seal on one form, he noticed, the likeness of Queen Juliana was facing in the wrong direction: it proved to be an impression made by using a Dutch coin. A wine expert was quickly called in to sample the impounded Pouilly-Fuisse. Concluded the taster: nothing of the kind.

As pieced together by investigators, the Liverpool scheme was elaborately simple. A mysterious Swiss businessman named Jean Cottet used a Panamanian firm to buy and ship bulk consignments of cheap French table wine to a few select bottling firms in The Netherlands. There it was put into unlabeled bottles and pro vided with a forged set of papers attesting to the fact that it came from a respected wine-growing area entitled to a French government Appellation Controlee certifi cate. Thence to England, where the high-priced labels were put on by Eutron before the wine was dispatched abroad.

Ringmasters of the Liverpool scheme were two Dutch businessmen, a Leiden wine retailer and the head of a bottling firm in Lisse. The Lisse company, investigators learned, also did business with an other Dutch wine dealer named Bernard Kahn. Authorities believe Kahn was running his own, higher-class fraud.

Last December Kahn was charged in a Dutch court for selling doubtful rose d'Anjou, but the case was postponed pending further investigation. In the cur rent affair, Kahn only admits buying bottled--but unlabeled--French whites, having them labeled in a place he will not name, and exporting them through Lisse.

He denies using any forged papers. The Liverpool operation, he laments, "committed frauds and forged certificates in such a stupid way that they came to grief.

Those idiots loused it up for me."

Kahn's Pouilly-Fuisse is still selling under the Michelet label in New York City for $11 and up. But U.S. customs agents are currently holding 2,450 cases because of questions about their Belgian certificate of origin. Bacardi Imports Inc., of Miami, which owns the Michelet label and has bought some of Kahn's wine, is taking no chances on the rest. The firm is asking wholesalers to recall the Pouilly-Fuisse and will reimburse them for the loss.

French wine industry leaders were understandably horrified. "Any fraud is most detrimental, whether it's the deed of French or foreign dealers," said Regis Affre, head of the Burgundy Wine Merchants' Association. "My only hope is that Dutch authorities will tighten controls."

One prominent U.S. wine expert, Sam Aaron of Manhattan's Sherry-Lehmann Inc., pointed out that the fraud had probably been made all the easier because the actual production of Pouilly-Fuisse' is only about 250,000 cases a year, hardly enough to meet the heavy demand. The real Pouilly-Fuisse, he believes, will probably stand up to the sting.

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