You can’t con an honest man, goes the old saying, and you can’t sell fake vintage wine to billionaires who aren’t pathetically desperate to prove how cultured they are. This highly entertaining documentary tells the strange story of Rudy Kurniawan, a young man from Indonesia who in the early 2000s electrified the sedate world of US wine investment by paying colossal sums at auction for rare bottles. He schmoozed the top players in wine, dazzled them with his apparent wealth. Everyone wanted to be Rudy’s friend. Then, riding the crest of his self-created bull-market wave, he began selling his stock at a vast profit. But French wine producer Laurent Ponsot noticed something iffy about some of the bottles, and the expensively dressed young emperor of wine was in deep trouble. The movie shows that Kurniawan was presiding over a viticultural Enron. And because the market in wine, like that of contemporary art, depends on the bubble of reputation, it is always vulnerable to anxiety about value. Rightly or wrongly, this movie is careful to emphasise that the wine business is basically sound and Kurniawan is a spectacular one-off. I wonder. At any rate, it’s an interesting film to put alongside Jonathan Nossiter’s wine documentaries Mondovino (2004) and Natural Resistance (2014) about the industrialisation of wine production, and how it makes everything taste the same. That process can only help the counterfeiters.
