CSI Bordeaux: Wine Detective Solves Multimillion-Dollar Case

Jun 19, 2014

(Forbes) - The Boston affair was the first high-profile assignment for Michael Egan–dubbed “The Wine Detective” by the New York tabloids when, last December, he helped the FBI break the U.S.’ biggest wine counterfeiting case–and it was a doozy. Tech entrepreneur Russell Frye of Frye Computer Systems had put a portion of his collection up for sale through Sotheby’s in New York in 2006. Billed as “The Magnificent Cellar of Russell H. Frye,” it rang up $7.8 million, at that time the second-highest total ever for a Sotheby’s wine auction. From Frye’s point of view there was just one massive, bloated fly in the decanter: the estimated $3 million of his other wines Sotheby’s had shied away from.

The bottles that greeted Egan in Frye’s Boston storage facility were beyond trophies. The assemblage included, among other extreme rarities, an 1811 Château Lafite, three bottles of 1847 Château d’Yquem and two magnums of 1921 Château Pétrus. Though he wasn’t told which wines Sotheby’s had refused, Egan rather quickly realized that Frye had a big problem: All of those bottles, and many others purchased from the same source, were fakes.

“They just didn’t look right,” Egan remembers now. And he would know. By the time he launched Bordeaux-based Michael Egan Fine Wine Expert in 2005, the British-born Egan had already put in 24 years at Sotheby’s in London, rising to become a director of the wine department and responsible for rounding up bottles for sale from the Continent. “I was traveling around France, Belgium, Germany and Holland looking at these magnificent family cellars that hadn’t been moved since the 1920s or even earlier,” he says. “It was a great way to see how the patina of age would affect a label over time and what real bottles would feel like and look like.”


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