If you ordered a glass of Sancerre and were served a cheap Sauvignon Blanc instead, would you notice? What about if you asked for Chablis but got the Sauvignon Plonk? Readers of this website might bristle at the suggestion that they could thus be taken in. But an undercover investigation by Paris daily Le Parisien set me wondering.
True, journalist Mathieu Hennequin disguised himself as a nerdy American tourist (red “Paris” woolly hat) in an amusing secretly filmed video in touristy central Paris cafés. But the pattern that he and two sommeliers accompanying him found was consistent: a minority of waiters served a cheaper wine – including the Chablis/Sancerre switcheroos – than he’d ordered. Several waiters speaking anonymously in Le Parisien’s video confirmed similar scams. “I sometimes put leftover wine in a single bottle for happy hour,” said one. Another claimed: “apart from the regulars, all the other customers were getting ripped off.”
For those of us who expect mere Gallic rudeness from our Parisian waiters, it’s shocking. The more interesting question is how far we are conditioned to assess a wine based on its label – or what we’ve been told is the label. This has implications far beyond the rigours of blind tasting.
How you taste the difference between what the label says and what’s in the bottle is an unanswered question in the counterfeiting of mass-market wines. These stories don’t get much attention: the likes of notorious fraudster Rudy Kurniawan scamming high-end Burgundy collectors are much sexier than organised criminals making “Yellow Tail” from Moldovan plonk. But the latter appears to have happened recently, with a Moldovan gang reportedly producing as many as 100,000 cases of the Australian brand. Trade website The Drinks Business surmised this month that this is one reason for Yellow Tail’s new label design in March.
And in 2021, British trading standards officers seized 41 bottles of fake Yellow Tail from a Sutton Coldfield supermarket. A Chinese gang was suspected. It seems unlikely that international counterfeiters would have made only a few dozen bottles to flog to just one shop in a nondescript corner of the West Midlands. With the real thing retailing for £7-8 in supermarkets, the criminals’ margins per bottle cannot be high: it’s only worth doing at scale.
“The interesting thing about wine fraud is that organised crime have looked at it and seen it’s incredibly low risk,” says wine fraud expert Maureen Downey. “At the low end, people don’t really care.”
I’ll be honest: my professional opinion is that Yellow Tail is only marginally less unpleasant than a Prosecco enema. But would I be able to tell it from a Moldovan knock-off? I doubt it. Yellow Tail Shiraz’s 11 grams per litre of residual sugar – a largely unexamined feature of many mass-market reds – might get in the way. As for a couple opening that bottle to share a glass over dinner, or mates in the pub ordering another, they’re unlikely to notice the difference. And if they’re enjoying it – parking the question of Casella brands’ intellectual property – does it matter?
In those settings, as in Paris, “if the wine tastes good enough, and looks the part, and the context delivers all the right cues (a nice label, a Parisian setting, the waiter’s confidence), then swapping a €15 wine for a €3 one isn’t a scandal,” says wine merchant and commentator Joe Fattorini. “It’s a triumph of behavioural design.”
Indeed despite the British cultural cringe, the French are no better at this. The world’s largest single bulk wine route is from Spain to France – 380 million litres a year (2022). It has a remarkably opaque trail: almost none of it ends up labelled as such, Gallic consumers’ familiarity with Spanish wine being on a par with their knowledge of llama husbandry.
Some of goes into big brands labelled as “Vin de la Communauté Européenne”, such as Vieux Papes (the third-biggest French brand in 2022) and La Villageoise (eighth), both owned by wine giant Castel. Some ends up… elsewhere.
A Bordeaux court convicted wine merchant Jean-Sébastian Laflèche in 2023 for his role in a fraud that passed off some 4.5m bottles of blends involving Spanish bulk red, over several years, as “Médoc” and other Bordelais appellations. It wasn’t necessarily bad wine: UK journalist Barnaby Eales, who investigated the case, comments, “If it had been notably different in terms of quality, I think people would have noticed earlier.” Except nobody seems to have clocked that their Médoc had a hefty slug of Garnacha in it: Laflèche was rumbled only because of a tax irregularity.
The same applies to wine faults. In a well-regarded London restaurant recently, I sent back a bottle of Chianti as corked. The waiter agreed that it didn’t taste right: I was vindicated when he opened another bottle. But I’d guess a good 90% of diners wouldn’t have objected: partly not wanting to make a fuss but mainly because they wouldn’t have realised. You’re in a decent restaurant, having fun, you’ve ordered what should be a nice wine. So, to say, “hang on”, you effectively need to block out what your brain is telling you about the label and the setting.
Again, does it matter if, in the mind of the drinker, the wine is good enough? A drink just doing the job is why I happily knock back “French” 1664, even though I know it’s a rubbish industrial lager brewed in Manchester.
But it does matter. Never mind drinkers being ripped off; those of us in the wine business should be aiming to help people break out of the ho-hum cycle of “good enough” wine. If that’s really all they want, fine. But people having low expectations of wine, of all things, is a bit tragic. And we’ll never raise those expectations until they can be sure of what’s in their glass.
Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash
Andy Neather blogs at https://aviewfrommytable.substack.com/. With Jane Masters MW he is writing Rooted in Change: The Stories Behind Sustainable Wine, published this autumn by the Académie du Vin Library.