Wine Forgery Goes Beyond the Bottle

What if I told you that forgery in the wine world was endemic; that it occurred before our very eyes, almost daily; that it regularly took in thousands, if not millions, of people worldwide; that, if you didn't already know it was going on, you kind of suspected it?

This is not wine forgery - oh no - this is something much more insidious and, to be really honest, much less cared-about, for the time being at least.

I can actually give you the tools to hunt it out, to confirm its authenticity or otherwise, immediately. You don't need a life-long immersion in the world of auction sales and markets; you don't need to have studied the labels of de Vogüé or Emmanuel Rouget; you don't need a magnifying glass, a UV light, a few friends with multi-million dollar, chateaux-verifed cellars; you don't need label verification catalogues and access to a snazzy spectrophotometer.

You just need Google. Because I'm talking about wine writing.

Let me give you an example (and you can do the same now, or when you've finished reading this piece): I went to Wine Spectator just now. I found a generic page about a high-end region – in this case, it was on the 1855 Classification. I highlighted a short phrase, trying to include a proper noun, and pressed CTRL and C. I then pasted that phrase into the Google search box, put a pair of double quotes around it, and pressed enter.

This was the phrase: "all of the courtiers' selections came from the Médoc, with the single exception of Haut-Brion". Looking at the results, we can engage in a couple of theories. The first is that a small blog site called sharetastebuds.wordpress.com, run by someone called Charis Lam, ran this piece in 2014 and that Wine Spectator is so deprived of original writing that it – actually Thomas Matthews – swiped some of the pearls from Lam's remarkably brief (six blog posts), but highly informed, wine writing career. Have a guess.

The other possibility is that both Charis and Matthews nicked it from The Wine Cellarage's Blog pages. But here at least, is a glimpse of ethics: "Excerpted from an article by Thomas Matthews" it says at the end – the word "excerpt" being pushed to the limit. I haven't done a word count but the blog post appears, in paragraphs, to be about 20 percent original. A bit like Oasis saying their 1994 hit "Shakermaker" was exerpted from "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing". My homework was excerpted from Wikipedia, miss.

There's more, though: chavv.com features it (bizarrely shoehorned into a piece about tea and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, as far as I can make out), as does qichengtech.com in, curiously, their "news" section. This latter, though, appears to be a re-hash of the chavv.com essay. Or is it the other way around?

Let's try another. Search Jasper Morris MW's phrase from the Berry Bros & Rudd website on Domaine de la Romanée-Conti: "Yields are mind-numbingly low and the winemaking is traditional and perfectionist." Although, ironically, the BBR page ranks fourth on Google, this appears on Liquidopulence.co.uk (now taken down, it seems); Bighammerwines.com (this is a direct rip under someone else's name: Greg Martellotto); Princewinestore.com.au (this one at least references Jasper Morris MW); Heightschateau.com (no accreditation); and bunch of links to Instagram.

© Wine-Searcher | The "influencer" on the left has stolen the copy wholesale from the Berry Bros site.

And now we get to social media. As far as I can tell – and I don't have all day to check what every influencer or wannabe influencer puts up – this is the Wild West when it comes to blatantly ripping off content. For instance, @fab_somm 's rundown of Barolo over a year ago was basically a direct lift from Decanter's regional profile and he did the same with Chablis. Compare "Stainless steel tanks are most often used in the fermentation and maturation of Chablis Some producers use oak barrels in the process, particularly the Grand Cru and Premier Cru classifications", from 10 August 2018, with: "Stainless steel tanks are most often used in the fermentation and maturation of Chablis, but some producers employ oak barrels in the process, particularly the Grand Cru and Premier Cru classifications" by Michael Austin in the Chicago Tribune on March 21, 2018.

Someone called @wordonthegrapevine, who has nearly 20,000 followers on Instagram, is a serial offender despite clearly being able to produce his own original content. His latest piece on Monthelie, for example, is a direct lift from the regional profile page here on Wine-Searcher. He has taken from decanter.com, wine-spectator.com and BBR.com – except for the emojis, of course. They are original.

Others include Joonhyuk Lee (@la_romanee_)  with an audience of more than 30,000, whose Domaine Leroy profile is Wine-Searcher's bar the tasting note, his Clos de Tart profile bears an uncanny resemblence to Wikipedia's entry of the domaine (if you're going to lift something from the net, at least have the decency to use Wikipedia only as a last resort), and his Dujac Bonnes Mares is lifted from the (classier) BBR site. Jasper should be proud, I guess.

This kind of thing occurs so regularly throughout Instagram – often by people who, it seems, are qualified enough to produce their own content – that it almost seems unfair to single people out, but if you want to know how to find out whether or not something is original, just do the same as above: copy and paste a phrase – preferably midway through the piece – from Instagram into Google, putting double quote marks around it, and let the search engine do the rest. It's remarkably easy. In fact, given how incredibly obvious the shift in tone is when something has been copied from another source, I'd be amazed if most people haven't already twigged, or at least suspected, this is going on. If you have any doubts, Google is your friend. In this case, anyway.

But let's say, like some pre-Renaissance story tradition, that we accept the pillaging of stories from the canon – after all, Shakespeare never had an original idea, right? How many people nicked from the Decameron? Fine, whatever. But I think that, more than anything – even the blatant copying – it's the bland, deadpan, lobotomized nature of the re-hashed prose on "social" media that I find utterly repellent.

Sure, an authoritative, BBC-like voice sounds great on the BBR website, but on an Instagram post? Please. Who are you kidding? If I had the time and the inclination I'd produce a meme of Jasper Morris MW with the caption "now where have I heard that before?" and go around childishly pasting it into comments sections on social media.

What's really sad, though, is that all this shows both the incredible, unrecognised value of good, informed wine writing and also our inability to place any kind of proper value on that scribble. Thousands of followers on Instagram is easy to measure and easy to give value to. Thousands of words on all the appellations of Burgundy, years tasting and talking to producers, and it's a cut-and-paste away from being adopted by some micro-blogger, like a teen's scrapbook of media cuttings about their favourite band. Only the scrapbook is being hawked to thousands of people.

At least give people like Thomas Matthews and Jasper Morris MW a name-check before you run a post about the ravages of wine forgery, okay?