He was the man with "the nose of a blood hound," as one wine critic once put it.
Rudy Kurniawan was once the toast of the fine wine world, renowned for his ability to find some of the rarest — and priciest — wines in the world.
He was also, prosecutors alleged, a fraud who duped some of the country's wealthiest wine purchasers with counterfeit bottles of wine that he manufactured in his home laboratory.
And on Wednesday, a Manhattan jury agreed, finding Kurniawan guilty of fraud in connection with selling counterfeit wines and of defrauding a finance company.
The sensational trial began Dec. 9 in a Manhattan federal court. Prosecutors have argued that Kurniawan used his exceptional palate to blend together younger wines with older French wines of poor vintage. He then slapped counterfeit labels on the bottles, prosecutors alleged, and passed them off as some of the rarest wines on Earth. When these bottles turned up at auctions, the excitement of coming across them often overshadowed bidders' skepticism of whether they were the real thing.
Among those who believed they were duped is billionaire industrialist Bill Koch — yes, a brother to those Kochs — who said he spent $2.1 million on 219 bottles of Kurniawan's wine.
Born in Indonesia but residing in California, Kurniawan began turning heads in the fine wine scene around 2002, winning over sommeliers, wine critics and auctioneers with his palate and his generosity. He often footed the bill at restaurants, where he poured thousands of dollars of wine from his personal collection for his friends.
"I've never known him not to bring a bottle," testified Truly Hardy, director of auction operations for Acker Merrall & Condit.
Around 2004, prosecutors say, Kurniawan began passing off his fake wines. Last week, both Koch and Laurent Ponsot of top Burgundy winemaker Domaine Ponsot, testified that they had long suspected that Kurniawan's wares weren't quite what they seemed. Ponsot told jurors that he became suspicious of Kurniawan in 2008, after the collector consigned to auction dozens of bottles of Domaine Ponsot wine of a vintage that had never existed.
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