Bogus Pinot Noir Fakes out America

Claude Courset of the Ducasse wine company was singled out by the judge as the ringleader, but in all a dozen locals were convicted of fraud, in essence passing off a blend of merlot and shiraz as Pinot Noir. Courset received a six-month suspended prison sentence and a fine of 45,000 euros.

The company that sold Ducasse's wine in the United States, Sieur d'Argues, was also convicted of fraud and fined 180,000 euros. Some 18 million bottles of bogus Pinot Noir were sold to Gallo who unknowingly sold the wine under its successful, south of France varietal wine series, Red Bicyclette.

There is much speculation about how Gallo could have let this happen and why the wine wasn't recognized as fake long before the investigation. Before we get into how the style of global Pinot Noir lends itself to fraud, I'm wondering how a ruse of this magnitude could possibly take place under the highly regarded regulatory nose of the French government.

The entire premise of French wine is built on terroir and its appellation system. Place is everything. Place is sacred. Place is the raison d'etre of French wine, yet in the heart of its largest producing wine region the amount of Pinot Noir sold to Gallo exceeded any possible volume based on the number of vines in the ground.

I guess we should be happy a routine audit caught up with the perpetrators, one of whom is quoted in local newspaper as saying: "We would have put Yoplait on the wine if they'd asked us to."

In the words of the judge, "The scale of the fraud caused severe damage for the wines of the Languedoc, for which the United States is an important outlet." No kidding.

Canadian wineries were recently at the centre of a media and consumer storm for labelling imported wine as "Cellared in Canada" because it was processed here, but that faux pas pales in comparison to what has gone on in the Languedoc. It will be hard to look at a French co-op wine in the same light for some time to come.

Now, to the question of how the style of Pinot Noir could be confused with merlot and Syrah and why wasn't it discovered.

I have recently returned from a Pinot Noir conference in New Zealand. We sat through a number of blind tastings where producers, writers, critics and the public struggled to identify the origin of many of the Pinots poured and argued that some examples had little or no Pinot character.

Modern winemaking can make a mockery of varietal definition. When it comes to Pinot Noir, even with the legitimate stuff, style is whatever you want it to be.

There are wood-aged wines and some that never see oak. Grapes get varying lengths of "cold soak" time before fermentation and the cap of skins that sits on top of the fermenting vats can be "punched down" by hand or machine, hourly or daily, a lot or a little. Wineries can choose from numerous clones, even more sites, and even more meso-climates and ... you get the picture. Any style is possible and then some.