I’d like to tell you about a dinner. The night before one of Rudy Kurniawan’s auctions, the writer Jay McInerney sat down with thirteen other people and worked his way through, by his own estimate, more than $20,000 worth of legendary wine, including 1945 Mouton Rothschild and 1947 Cheval Blanc. Kurniawan was at the table too. A few years later, he was found guilty of making fake wine and selling it, which leaves us with an awkward question that nobody at that dinner can answer with any confidence: what exactly were they drinking?
I raise this not to embarrass anyone (well, perhaps a little) but because it sums up a question that three films from a heady decade for fine wine kept circling, namely what’s real in wine and what isn’t. There has always been something faintly absurd about the circus around fine wine, and over the past twenty years it has become a pastime for the very rich that bears little resemblance to the humble business of growing grapes. Watch these three films together, and you start to see why authenticity became such a sore point.
Sour Grapes (2016)
The first is a true story, and the least funny of the three if you happen to work in wine. In the early 2000s, Kurniawan dazzled the auction world, hosting tastings of rare bottles and showing such devotion to Domaine de la Romanée-Conti that people called him “Dr. Conti.” One of his sales set the record for a single wine auction, beating the previous high by more than $10 million, and a good many experts were happy to come along for the ride.
The bottles, it turned out, were blends of other wines mixed up at his home in Arcadia, Los Angeles, then corked and dressed in labels of his own making. The game began to unravel when Laurent Ponsot spotted bottles of his own family’s wine at auction that he knew couldn’t exist. In August 2014, Kurniawan was sentenced to ten years, the first person jailed in the US for selling counterfeit wine. So the pied piper did eventually have to face the music, which I found more satisfying than any of the wines in the film.
The Ways of Wine (2010)
For a lighter evening, I’d recommend the two comedies starring Charlie Arturaola, a Miami sommelier with a gift for playing himself. In The Ways of Wine, a famous sommelier named Charlie Arturaola mysteriously loses his ability to taste, which is roughly the equivalent of a concert pianist losing his hands, and his search for a cure leads him out of his glamorous, globe-trotting life and into the vineyards of Argentina.
The Duel of Wine (2015)
The sequel finds Charlie’s career in ruins and Charlie driving a taxi in Miami. To add insult to injury, his wife Pandora Anwyl, who is also his wife in real life, becomes agent to the young Italian star Luca Gardini, named the world’s best sommelier in 2010. Charlie’s solution is to bluff his way into a fictional tasting contest called the Duel of Wine, eventually turning up in a mask as a Zorro-like “Mysterious Count.” Many of the cast play themselves, including Gardini and the chef Gianfranco Vissani, which makes it all the more entertaining. I can’t promise you’ll learn a great deal about wine, but you’ll laugh.
What it all adds up to
What interests me is that all three films are really about one person searching for something genuine, whether it’s a sommelier trying to get his palate back or a young man building a legend around himself. By keeping the focus on a single character, they manage to say a good deal about the wine world without pointing a finger at anyone in particular.
I came away from them with a soft spot for Charlie, who loses everything and still can’t stop chasing the thing he loves, and a renewed appreciation for the growers whose names Kurniawan borrowed.
For all the auction records and the glamour, wine still begins with someone working a vineyard, and the best moments in these films, and in wine generally, are the ones that bring us back to that.
If you’re looking for what’s real, I’d suggest starting there, preferably with good company and a bottle whose story you trust.
Update: Kurniawan was released in November 2020 and deported to Indonesia in April 2021. In 2023, reports emerged that he had appeared at private dinners.
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