UK ‘flooded' with fake wine
The UK market is being flooded with convincing knock-offs of popular wines, says a leading fraud expert.
Maureen Downey, known as the 'Sherlock Holmes of wine', said organised criminals are producing 'high-end counterfeits' of labels such as Yellow Tail, the second-largest brand in UK supermarkets.
She said that wine bottles are being replicated 'to a professional degree' never seen before.
Yellow Tail, an Australian brand selling Merlot, Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Pinot Grigio, sells 13.5 million cases worldwide each year and is widely available in supermarkets such as Tesco, Sainsbury's, ASDA and Morrisons.
Ms Downey told the Wine Blast podcast: 'An Asian organised crime gang has partnered with a European organised wine gang to flood the market with counterfeit Yellow Tail.'
'The crime rings are spending half a million dollars to get the same digital printer used by the professional producers. They're replicating bottles to an unprecedented level.'
She added: 'They're no longer making old and rare bottles because you need period glass, you have to age the labels and make sure the cork is ok.
'Now, they just have it all made to the same specs that the producers use. It's a different game. It's much more money. The average consumer is pretty screwed.'
She said it was interesting that the regular Yellow Tail drinker would be able to spot a counterfeit easier than somebody drinking a rare or vintage wine, 'because if you drink Coca Cola every day and somebody gives you a Pepsi, you're going to know the difference.'
Ms Downey said it was easier today to replicate wines at scale. Many producers keep their anti-fraud measures so secret that even their distributors did not always know what to look for.
In 2021, trading standards began an investigation following reports from supermarket customers in the West Midlands that bottles of Yellow Tail did not taste right. KVK supermarket in Sutton Coldfield had its alcohol licence removed after 41 bottles of Yellow Tail were found to be fake.
In 2022, a shopkeeper in Leicestershire was ordered to pay £4,000 after 142 bottles of fake Yellow Tail were found in his shop. Kannan Vigneswaran admitted to buying the wine from a man in an unmarked van offering a deal.
Peter Richards, presenter of Wine Blast, said: 'It's not just fine and rare wines. You constantly read about producers or merchants being convicted for blending X into Y and calling it Z.'
Mr Richards said a source at Yellow Tail had confirmed the scale of the problem, revealing that a criminal gang in Moldova had supposedly produced up to 100,000 cases of counterfeit Yellow Tail.
'That's an industrial level. The company have pursued it legally, but don't have much hope of any convictions. Instead, they're monitoring shipments as closely as they can,' he said.
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