Wines and vines Jesus style
By Clint Archer Detecting fake wine is a specialized business. When collectors purchase wines with historic value, they never open them. As long as the bottle remains sealed, you can claim the wine is good. Opening it reveals if it’s turned sour. So, wine forgery is all about the bottles, the labels, and the corks. Forgers who get their hands on old bottles will carefully distress a cork, color a label, and then offer the product at an inflated price. The most infamous example was the Jefferson Wines. In the late 1980s billionaire, William Koch bought four bottles of wine from the collector, Hardy Rodenstock, for a total of $500,000. Rodenstock claimed to have unearthed the wines from a bricked-up cellar in Paris and said they dated back to 1787 and belonged to the 3rd US president, Thomas Jefferson. The bottles were engraved with the initials, ThJ, like others in Jefferson’s collection. Jefferson was well-known as an oenophile, having imported much French wine from his days as Ambassa