Don’t be fooled by fancy fakes in ’09

Giovanni Morelli writes that even experts can be fooled when it comes to recognising true quality, and this applies to wine as much as other areas
Now that the festivities are over and all the New Year’s resolutions have been made (or broken), it’s time to look back at the wines we drank in 2008. Before doing that, however, it is timely to think of the financial crisis.

Every cloud has a silver lining and for wine drinkers, the outlook is good. The financial situation — together with a huge supply of wine on the market — should mean lower prices for the consumer.
This should be especially true for the cheaper wines, but may also concern the more expensive ones. Wine merchants tell me that the corporate sector was certainly weaker during the 2008 Christmas season, although lots of wine was sold. It seems that people are still buying wine in large quantities but it is of lesser quality.
This phenomenon is also true for other parts of the world, including the United States.
Sonia Kolesnikof-Jessop, writing in the International Herald Tribune, claims that a case of Château Lafite-Rothschild that was sold for $35,000 in 2007, changed hands for as little as $15,000 at Sotheby’s in October 2008, and that Burgundies as well as Bordeaux are also feeling the chill. A bottle (not a case) of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti that sold for $20,000 in 2007 only fetched $6,500 at the end of 2008! One should certainly feel sorry for those gynaecologists and surgeons who invested in those wines. However, unlike property, at least you can drink the wine and hopefully enjoy it, even if its value has fallen!
One of the fascinations in life is how experts can be fooled. Reading Edward Dolnick’s book The Forger’s Spell over the holiday, I was impressed with the ability of forgers to fool the so-called experts.
We all consider ourselves to be experts and many of us are, but that does not mean that we cannot be fooled. Eric Ripert, head chef in top New York restaurant Le Bernardin, is quoted as saying, “It’s impossible to mislead people who have knowledge.”
If only that was true! The world is full of examples to the contrary from all walks of life. We must remember that we taste wine with our minds as well as our tongues, and that context and smell are important. I have alluded in the past to the famous blind tasting in May 1976, when Californian wine was mistaken for French wine by experts, and this launched serious American wine on the international scene.
But experts being fooled are not confined to wine, and the greatest forger of recent years was probably Han van Meegeren. A Dutch artist of minor repute, he fooled the entire artistic community with forgeries of paintings by Vermeer that he had painted himself. His forgery of ‘Christ at Emmaus’ was hailed by art historians as ‘the most important art historical event of this century. The painting shows Vermeer at his best’.
After World War II, he was discovered by the police, mostly because of the lifestyle he enjoyed during the German occupation. When he confessed that he had painted ‘Christ at Emmaus’, nobody believed him.
He shocked them all by completing another copy while in prison. Interestingly, the painting (which provoked such remarks as ‘outstanding is the head of Christ, serene and sad, as He thinks of all the suffering which He, the Son of God, had to pass through in His life on earth, yet full of goodness’) now remains in total obscurity.
Before we get too smug, remember that a stem cell biologist fooled all the experts in 2004, when his totally falsified findings were published in the most prestigious scientific journals after extensive peer review.
His results, however, could not be duplicated and subsequently the university committee looking into scientific misconduct in the laboratory of South Korean cloner Woo Suk Hwang announced on January 10 that his 2004 claim to have cloned a human embryo was fake.
Do not worry, the experts can remain reassured; they make many judgments and are usually right. However, they must retain the humility to understand that occasionally they can be fooled.
The two grapes that I enjoyed the most in 2008 were Malbec from Argentina and Vermentino from Sardinia and the coast of Tuscany. One of my admirers gave me a bottle of Sassacia (a Super Tuscan) for Christmas. It was truly beautiful, but I really don’t think it was worth the very expensive price tag. Maybe I was fooled by the label!
Buon Anno e Auguri,
Giovanni.