Wine real and fake - how to distinguish. Good WINE - wonderful to taste and
But, alas, they often “fool our brother” - a wine lover. ((Yes, the winemaker must know which additives are not allowed to be used. I I'm talking only about dry wine and about classic small winemaking with the aim of making WINE, and not homemade "harvesting".
Below Simple Tips to help you recognize counterfeit wine and maintain good health and faith in WINE.
But first, a few words about fake wine and its varieties. There are many opinions about which wine is considered fake.
Others want to correct the shortcomings of the drink with sugar, water, alcohol, other additives - and still consider their creation as wine ... Yes, youor someone else, if you like, you can make such wine for yourself. And to treat those who wish. It's your right.But there are winemakers who want to make and drink good dry wine. I agree with them. You can try and you will definitely get wine, albeit less, albeit more difficult. But wine.
Types of fake wine. IMPORTANT . I also include wine drinks among them, and the so-called. "corrected" faults.
- Gallized: low-quality wort with the addition of sugar and water to the required density
- Petiotized: based on pulp (pressed grapes) - wine drink.
- Sheelized:.with the addition of glycerin to improve the palatability of low-quality wine
- Chaptalized: sour must "softened" with sugar and alkaline additives
- "Powder": this term for wine is absolutely not correct, because qualitatively lyophilizing wine (turning it from a liquid into a powder) is a very expensive process, and it is not suitable for reducing the price of wine. Talk about powdered wines originates from the old GOST, concerning the production of the so-called. "original" wines, which was adopted in the 90s. According to this GOST, wines could be produced using artificial flavors, dyes, etc., produced in powder form. At present, this GOST has been canceled, but, alas, the bodybuilders have remained. Now The raw material for low-quality ordinary strong wines is grape must (must before fermentation!) from high-pressure press fractions, evaporated to a dry or very thick residue. Then, at the right time, it is diluted with water and alcohol (with the addition of flavors.) In general, that is still disgusting, a little better than artificial (see below).
- artificial: a plausible (in color and even in taste) combination of water, alcohol, sugar, yeast, citric acid, preservatives, flavors, something to drink, but nothing to do with wine and grapes.
What to pay attention to
In the shop:
Houses:
If there is a reason for suspicion, be sure to check the wine. Your "chemical" experiments will, of course, be a sad sight for guests who, for example, brought this particular wine. But, believe me, it's better for us healthy to laugh at the eccentricity of a friend than to guess later - what we poisoned ourselves with. Or just spoil your mood and the evening with fake wine….
But the presence in VINE shouldn't scare you. It will be present in some acceptable amount in almost any wine, since it is an approved drug for
San Francisco wine detective Maureen Downey is one of the world's few experts investigating counterfeiting of rare and collectible wines. Esquire found out who sells expensive fakes and how to recognize them without opening the bottle.
“In 2000, I accidentally ran into a prominent fraudster named Hardy Rodenstock. It was at the very beginning of my work in the company. Morrell & Company engaged in the sale of old and rare wines. Prior to that, I graduated from Boston University and professional sommelier courses and worked in several New York restaurants. Hardy Rodenstock, posing as a German collector and dealer, was one of my first clients. He wrote that he wanted to buy several bottles of rare wine from our company, but first he needed to get detailed information about them.
Rodenstock began to find out what the bottles look like, what stamps they have on the bottom, what is printed in the lower left corner of the label, and a bunch of other non-obvious details. He then asked me to take pictures of some bottles and send them to him. It's good that my boss Peter Morrell caught me doing this and asked for the name of the client I'm working so hard for. Hearing the name Rodenstock, he immediately exclaimed: “Yes, everyone says about him that he fakes wine!”. Now I understand that a swindler, who for many years earned millions selling counterfeit wine, wanted to use my services so as not to accidentally buy his own fake. After that incident, I became interested in who forges wine and why.
The global market for counterfeit collectible wines is estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars and is arranged in the manner of a successful auction house. Actually, real auctions also help scammers turn big deals by placing their fakes in their catalogs. For example, the owner Acker Merrall & Condit personally helped another famous swindler Rudy Kurniavan to make provenance for his cheap wine. He even enlisted his friends to lend Kurniawan several million to produce forgeries. Back in 2002, I suspected that something was wrong with this collection of “rare” wines, and in 2005 I already publicly declared that Kurniavan was a criminal, but no one believed me. He was arrested only in 2012, and until then, the rich from New York and Los Angeles imagined themselves to be connoisseurs of wine and rolled sumptuous dinners with the sourness that Rudy mixed in his own kitchen.
Most often, according to the observations of Maureen Downey, scammers counterfeit wines from France. And the first three and do account for one region - Burgundy.
Fake wine is very difficult to detect - for the most complete analysis, you need to open the bottle, and not every owner will agree to this. For the last 15 years, I have been doing just that, determining the authenticity of wine by external signs. If a collector has purchased a batch and suspects a fake, he calls me and I go to his cellar with a professional photographer. To begin with, we photograph every detail on the bottles that raise questions, and after that I carefully study the pictures. During major investigations, I made it a rule not to photograph more than 30 bottles a day, so as not to blur my eyes.
First of all, I look at the glass. I don’t know how to explain it, but over time you begin to feel what thickness, transparency and color this or that bottle should be. It happens that it is enough to take a bottle in hand to immediately distinguish a low-quality fake. If you are dealing with wine that cost $5,000 and is bottled in thin glass like some Chilean merlot, you understand that the scammers were simply lazy.
Having finished with the glass, I move on to the metal capsule that seals the neck and the label. Fraudsters often make a mistake by forgetting the obvious: all the elements of a wine bottle age at the same time. If the capsule looks like it was in the war, and the label is new, I vividly imagine a woman with the face of a model and the body of a 70-year-old housewife - you immediately feel the catch. Then I look at the cork and check whether it corresponds to the size, quality, age required for this or that type of wine, whether it has all the necessary markings. Once I discovered a bottle of 1961, on the cork of which the last digit was barely noticeably corrected: the shadow of a four appeared around the unit. The difference is 3 years, but the price is different at times.
The most interesting part of my research is the label. Most wine producers use a certain type of paper for a certain period of time. Therefore, you need to make sure that the paper is of the right color, the right thickness and weight, that the necessary watermarks are applied. And, of course, you need to trace how this paper oxidized over time. Counterfeiters use different techniques to artificially age the label: they impregnate it with tea, coffee, dirt or tobacco, cover it with tree resin, even bake it in an oven. But paper quality isn't everything. Equally important is the quality of the print. I have a huge database of labels from different eras and regions; I know what typefaces and even inks winemakers use. Often fakes can be recognized just at this stage - on artfully aged paper, when magnified, cheap printing suddenly appears, and the font of 1945 blurs with pixels.
China is considered the leader in the number of fakes: according to WINE SEARCHER, from 5% to 70% of imported fins in the Chinese market are fakes. Producers of valuable wines have come up with only one effective way to combat fakes today: they advise breaking empty bottles immediately after tasting.
Sometimes, however, the font does not reach - a banal grammatical error gives out a fake. In my practice, there was a case when deceivers wrote Chateaux instead of Chateau. This, of course, is a completely stupid blunder, more often they come across on ignorance of some facts. For example, when there is an AOC badge on the bottle - and the wine was allegedly produced 100 years before the system that controls the regional origin of wine in France even appeared. Many of my clients probably would not notice the difference between a genuine collection wine and a fake if they did not contact me. They cannot be blamed for being illegible. Yes, I'm sure anyone can learn to tell a $10 wine from a $5,000 wine if they want to. But in recent years, due to fakes flooding the market, some rare varieties have simply disappeared from sale. No one knows what they should taste like because no one has ever tasted them. In addition, it is important to remember that wine is a living matter, and its taste changes throughout life. Two bottles bottled from the same barrel, but stored in different conditions, after 70 years can radically differ in taste. There are only a few people in the world who have tasted the same rare wines many times and can really recognize their origin right off the bat. All the rest who boast of such an ability are either poseurs or swindlers.
Among my clients are not only hereditary billionaires with huge cellars. There are also very poor people: real estate agents, university professors, students who are fond of wine and are just starting to collect it. Many of them are willing to pay $5,000 per bottle or even more. And this is normal, because such a price is not a marketing legend, but a necessity. For example, the Romanet-Conti vineyards are located on a very small area that cannot be physically expanded. They can produce a strictly defined amount of wine, and the number of people who want to buy it will grow every year - the price will grow along with them.
In my free time, I help the FBI. After I found evidence in the Rudy Kurniawan case, they contact me regularly. Sometimes this work seems cool and exciting to me - the counterfeiting of wine is handled by the same department that investigates art crimes. But at times it can be terribly hard: the accomplices of the same Rudy pursued me for several years, and once they even tried to attack me during the tasting. I would like to say that I deal with ridiculous harmless petty scammers, but the wine mafia, unfortunately, in their methods differs little from the ordinary mafia. And the real scale of the black market is impossible to calculate, because not only rare and old wines are faked, even rosé wine for 30 bucks, which is produced by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, is successfully copied all over the world - simply because there is a huge demand for it.”
Dishonest producers have learned to pass off a mixture of water, sugar, aniline dye and citric acid as real grape wine. It is very difficult to recognize a fake without knowing the appropriate verification methods. I will tell you how to determine the quality of wine in simple accessible ways.
When choosing wine in a store, we can only evaluate the appearance of the bottle, which does not always save us from counterfeiting. Now you can fake a bottle and a label of a famous wine company even in the basement. The similarity with the original will be one hundred percent. As a result, when determining the quality of wine, one cannot rely only on appearance. The wine must be tasted before serving.
The quality of wine is its compliance with the normative indicators for chemical composition, color, transparency, aroma and taste. All these parameters must comply with GOST R 52523-2006 “Table wines and wine materials”, but in practice this is not always the case. I advise you to play it safe and check the wine, especially if you bought this brand for the first time.
Methods for determining the quality of wine
1. The amount of sediment. The bottle is directed to the light and turned upside down with a sharp movement. If there is a lot of sediment, then this may be a sign of a bad drink.
Top quality wines usually contain some sediment called tartar. But in no case should the bottom of the bottle be completely covered with it. In good wine, after shaking, the sediment quickly sinks to the bottom.
White and red wines are tested the same 2. Smell the cork. Immediately after opening the bottle, I advise you to pay attention to the cork. It should not be dry or leaking (if the material is wood). A broken cork indicates that the rules for storing wine are not followed. Next, experts recommend sniffing the cork. If a musty smell is felt, then the wine has deteriorated or its quality leaves much to be desired.
3. Water test. A small amount of wine is poured into a vial, its neck is clamped with a hand, and then the vial is lowered into the water and the finger is released. Real wine without impurities should not be mixed with water. This is the most reliable consistency check. More on video.
4. Glycerin method. Glycerin will not change its color, but will simply settle on the bottom if you add it to natural quality wine (proportion: one part of glycerin to five parts of wine). When added to a fake, glycerin acquires a yellow, purple or red tint.
5. We study the foam. The bottle is shaken, and then some wine is poured into a glass. If the wine is of high quality, then its foam collects in the center of the glass and quickly subsides. In a bad drink, the foam is at the edges, slowly subsiding.
Almost every day we hear statements about the benefits of wine. We are sure that you have come across such judgments more than once: wine prolongs youth, has a positive effect on the circulatory system, namely the heart, normalizes metabolism, and also removes toxins from the body. We are sure that all these positive properties are present only in real wines. Therefore, being able to distinguish fake wine from the original is essential for your health.
A bit of theory: fake wine is just evaporated grape must diluted with water. As a rule, such wine contains a lot of flavors. It does not need special care, and from this we can conclude that this product cannot be expensive.
There are two criteria to distinguish the original wine from the fake one:
Appearance
Bottle content
Let's take a closer look at the first criterion.
Label. The first thing you need to pay attention to the label. The quality of the print should be high (without any fuzziness), because this is the hallmark of wine, something that the buyer immediately pays attention to. It should contain information about the country of origin, the composition of the wine, as well as the date of production. The label should not have any streaks from the glue, everything should be done carefully.Seal. Remember that on original wines, the date is printed separately, and not along with all the information.
Container form. In some cases, the shape of the container will help you in choosing the wine. Not all wines are produced in similar containers. Most manufacturers try to protect their product from mass cloning. And so they often use asymmetry or completely change the shape of the container. In order to find out the features of the appearance of a particular wine, you will need to visit the official website of the manufacturer.
Having dealt with the appearance of our container, let's move on to its contents.
Content
Sediment. Before opening the bottle, shine a light on it and quickly turn it upside down. If you notice a large amount of precipitation, then this should alert you. In expensive and high-quality wines, sediment is allowed (after active shaking, it quickly sinks to the bottom), but it obviously should not cover the entire bottom of the bottle.Cork. After uncorking the bottle, the cork should not smell bad and fall apart (crumble). If you observe this, then, as a rule, this is a sign of improper storage or spoiled wine.
Foam. All that is needed is to pour some wine into a glass. If you notice that the foam has collected in the middle of the glass and quickly disappeared, then everything is fine - you managed to choose a good wine. But if the foam collects on the edges of the glass, then you should think about the quality of the alcohol.
Glycerin test. Add a couple of drops of glycerin to wine. If the glycerin sinks to the bottom without changing color, the wine is natural. And if it has acquired a reddish or yellow color, then in your hands is nothing more than a fake.
Soda test. When you add a pinch of soda to natural wine, nothing will happen.
Just try. And the last way. If you notice the taste of alcohol, then in front of you is nothing but a fake.
Lifehack: it is advisable not to buy cheap wine in different "fancy" containers. The principle is this: the more beautiful and original the container, the more expensive it is. We conclude that the manufacturer spent most of the budget on the production of containers, and not on its contents. It may not be a fake, but it's not worth talking about high quality products.
To begin with, an artificial wine drink is simply evaporated grape must diluted with water. Plus alcohol, yeast and all sorts of flavors. The diluted concentrate in the bottle does not require special storage conditions. Therefore, its production is a fairly inexpensive and not labor-intensive process.
How to distinguish fake from natural wine?
Firstly, look at the price. This parameter gives a rough idea of whether the cost of a bottle corresponds to your understanding of the price / quality ratio. If not, then most likely you have a surrogate in front of you.
After all, in order to make natural wine, the manufacturer should seriously spend on its production, bottling, transportation and storage. Making powdered wine is much easier and therefore cheaper.
Secondly, powdered wine in the vast majority is not vintage. It should also be borne in mind that there are no dry artificial wines. Therefore, almost always a drink made from a concentrate is sweet, with an obsessive aroma, but does not leave an aftertaste.
Thirdly, you can easily check the quality of the wine by swirling it in the glass. If it is natural, then “paths” of liquid will remain on the walls of the vessel. The French call them "wine legs". It is believed that the longer they stay, the better the quality of the wine. In addition, they also talk about age: the thinner the traces, the more years the drink is.
Fourth, you can conduct simple chemical research at home. To do this, you can drop a few drops of glycerin into a glass of wine. If it sinks to the bottom and does not change color, then the wine is natural. If the glycerin turns red or yellow, then you have a “natural” powder in front of you.
And finally fifth, in order to determine whether it is a powder or not, you should fill a deep bowl with water, pour a little wine into the vial, and then pinch the neck with your finger. Next, lower the vessel with the drink into the water and turn it over.
Then everything is very simple: the finger is removed from the neck and the effect is visible further. If the wine is mixed with water, this will indicate that the drink contains additional impurities, flavors and other additives. But natural wine will not mix with water.
