Kurniawan trial: Fine wine expert labels Rudy wines fakes

(Decanter) - An expert in authenticating fine wines, Michael Egan, has told jurors that nearly all the wines that he has examined from defendant Rudy Kurniawan's home are fake.

As anticipated following a pretrial hearing, Egan took to the witness stand and rubbished the authenticity of the 267 wines seized from Kurniawan's Los Angeles home that he has been asked to examine.

'Almost all, with very few exceptions, of these bottles are counterfeit,' he told jurors in the US District Court, Southern Dictrict of New York, where Kurniawan is facing a charge of making, selling and attempting to sell counterfeit fine wine worth around $1.3m.

Egan, who worked at Sotheby's wine department from 1981 to 2005, also told of how he was hired in 2006 to examine the authenticity of wines bought by two clients from an Acker Merrall & Condit auction in January 2006.

He testified that he believed 39 lots sold at that auction were counterfeit. Those lots sold for a total $1.29m.

'Since I started doing my fine-wine expert business, out of the thousands of bottles that I checked, I found that 1,433 are counterfeit and, off those, 1,077, or 75%, came from Rudy Kurniawan.

'And the people who bought the most fakes from Rudy Kurniawan were Michael Fascitelli and William Koch.'

However, Egan defended auction houses' policies in general. 'I think the auction houses were checking wines. It was not just the auction houses where counterfeit wines were found.'