If, like me, you enjoyed the The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace, a book on the infamous Jefferson wine bottles, you might be interested to know that one of the key players in the book, wine writer and auctioneer Michael Broadbent, is now suing Random House for defamation of character. Decanter reports that Broadbent is suing for libel in the UK where the book is now available. It came out in May 2008.

The book tells the story of German collector Hardy Rodenstock who had allegedly found rare bottles of Chateau Lafite walled up in a basement in Paris. An 1787 Lafite engraved Th:J sparked worldwide interest because it was thought that Jefferson had bought the bottled when he was in Paris serving as ambassador. Three of the bottles were sold at Christie's, where Broadbent worked, between 1985 and 1987 including the the 1787 Lafite which was bought by Malcolm Forbes for $156,450 fin a 1985 auction.

The billionaire in the title is William Koch who is suing Rodenstock claiming that he was the source for four Jefferson bottles that Koch bought in 1988. Those bottles are now believed to be fake. Rodenstock has said that the bottles were genuine but has not submitted them for testing. The Billionaire's Vinegar goes into fascinating detail on the ways the bottles might have been faked but ends on a rather soft note simply because lawsuits related to the case are ongoing.

Broadbent's lawsuit says that Benjamin Wallace accuses him of inventing a bid for the half-bottle of 1784 Margaux to boost bidding and implies that he may have colluded with Rodenstock. The 82-year-old wine expert says the book has wrecked his reputation. In the book he does come off as rather eager to believe in Rodenstock's story but for a wine expert to have an opportunity to taste vintages of such great age the temptation must have been very great. Random House has said it will defend the book. Movie rights have already been snapped up.

The latest tool in the battle against counterfeit vintage wines is rather high tech. Antique Wine Company in London asked Guegan's Centre for Nuclear Studies to create technology that zaps bottles with ion beams generated by a particle accelerator. The beams are meant to determine how old the glass in the bottles is and where it originated from. They can compare the suspicious bottles with known bottles from a certain chateau.

Of course this brings up the problem of new wine in old bottles. That involves another test, a method that tests for levels of a radioactive isotope, cesium 137, in the wine itself. Techniques like this were used in the case of wines sold by Hardy Rodenstock, the wine dealer who is the subject of "The BIllionaire's Vinegar" a recent book that includes the story of American collector William Koch who has sued Rodenstock claiming bottles which allegedly belonging to US president Thomas Jefferson were fakes.

Because of the high cost of testing, techniques like this are only used when there are significant amounts of money on the table. This may force savvy fraudsters to move into the mid-range of the vintage market where clients are less likely to resort to such elaborate means.

While the most famous examples of wine fraud involve older bottles, counterfeits of current vintages are also a problem. A new company called eProvenance has used RFID tags to create what they call an "intelligent bottle." The eProvenance system uses a semi-active RFID tag inside the case to monitor temperatures and shipping information, a passive RFID tag on the base of the bottle for tracking and inventory management, and a tamper-proof bottle neck seal that has a covert code applied at the base of the capsule to authenticate the wine inside the bottle and thwart counterfeiters. Eric Vogt, the founder of the company is currently working on programs with nine Bordeaux Châteaux. During the past six months, over 1200 "Intelligent Cases," equipped with temperature-tracking RFID tags from eProvenance, have been sent out from Bordeaux to a variety of locations in the USA, UK, and Japan in order to benchmark the current temperature conditions in the fine wine distribution channel.

I just mentioned him yesterday and now William Koch, the deep-pocketed wine collector who made news earlier this year when he sued German collector Hardy Rodenstock over wines owned by Thomas Jefferson that proved to be counterfeit, is on the warpath again. The Wall Street Journal reports that Koch filed a lawsuit in New York City in regards to a 2005 Zachys auction where he spent $3.7 million on what he thought were rare Bordeaux wines but later turned out to be fake. He says he was led to buy the wine by the collector, Eric Greenberg, who allegedly knew that some of the bottles were fakes because he had already commissioned the head of Christie's wine department and another wine expert to check them out. The suit also says that Greenberg himself had received a settlement from the wine merchant who had sold him the wines. The lawsuit doesn't says that Zachys knew the wine was counterfeit.

Decanter also reports that Eric Greenberg was the consignor behind Acker Merrall & Condit's recent "The Man With the Golden Cellar" auction which brought in $15,563,359. Greenberg's lawyer says the lawsuit charges are false and the Greenberg would never sell wine he knew to be counterfeit. Still, the buyers from that most recent auction have to be a bit unnerved.

Worries over potential wine fraud have started to hit the auction houses prompting the pulling of a pricey Bordeaux bottle. An Imperial of 1961 Chateau Petrus was expected to be auctioned off on Saturday by Edward Roberts International in Chicago. The single bottle was expected to bring in around $150,000. The auction house decided to withdraw the bottle from the auction in order to doublecheck the authenticity. The auction house has said they will put the bottle back on the block once all the documentation is in order. As more and more people see wine as an investment with possible big returns the stakes have been raised. Potential lawsuits such as the one filed by billionaire collector Wiliiam Koch may also be behind the increased scrutiny and the need to document the provenance of the investment bottles.

There has been a lot of talk about wine fraud lately and a lot of concern over just how many wine counterfeits are out there. Now Decanter reports that Russell Frye a wealthy wine collector, has created a new website to create a online community for those concerned about the issue. Wineauthentication.com will offer a bottle registry, bottle photos, counterfeiting solutions, an authentication service and a discussion forum. The site is still in its infancy with a planned launch for the end of the month.

Wine fraud has been in the news lately. First there was the story in the New Yorker on the infamous Jefferson wines then an article in Slate questioned just how big a problem wine fraud was. Now Decanter reports on a new solution for the problem of wine fraud. A seal called Prooftag is being used by a few producers. The seal is a small strip that runs from a metal capsule onto the glass bottle. Once the seal is broken the capsule is destroyed. The seal has both a reference number and a plastic square with a unique pattern, both of which can be doublechecked on the web to assure the buyer they have bought the real thing. As the article in Decanter mentions, the price per bottle is still a bit high (between €0.20-€1 per bottle) and may be putting some winemakers off but it is expected that as more people adopt the system the price will go down.

Decanter has a fascinating piece on wine fraud at the upper levels. At a conference on wine investment in London, the head of Sotheby's wine department spoke about the increase in wine fraud. Counterfeit wine is prevalent in the US and Asia.  The trophy wines such as the 45,47 and 61 vintages are most copied using photocopied labels or different bottles. Because the wine used to counterfeit is also top end, sometimes wealthy people will not know they are getting a fake, Sutcliffe said that wines with a solid traceable history should be valued more than other wines. As she says there were more 45s sold and drunk in 1995 than had ever been made and many wines that aren't actually available anymore are still being sold. So if that super deal on a 1961 Cheval-Blanc sounds too good to be true it probably is.