Guilty: Rudy Kurniawan convicted in New York court

(Decanter) - Rudy Kurniawan has been convicted of making and selling counterfeit wine in one of the most high-profile wine fraud trials on record.

It took the 12-strong jury less than a single morning to reach à guilty verdict, following several days of evidence from the prosecution that revealed the extent to which Kurniawan had turned his Los Angeles home into à factory able to pump out copies of some of the world's finest wines.

Addressing the jury on Tuesday before deliberations, prosecutor Joseph Facciponti had described Kurniawan’s operations as ‘smoke and mirrors’.

‘The magic cellar, that's where Rudy Kurniawan, the defendant said that he found a seemingly endless stash of incredibly rare, incredibly valuable old wines that he sold to the victims around the world for years, wines that were so rare and so great that they were the stuff of legend, that even the people whose families had made those wines said that they didn't think that any bottles still existed.'

'And for a while, the defendant's magic show worked. He entranced the wine-collecting community with his self-serving generosity and self-declared expertise in all things related to fine wine. And he sold his fakes for millions of dollars at auctions and directly to collectors.'

'But there was just one problem. There was no magic in the magic cellar. It was only the defendant's lies, lies that he told to get his victims to pay the millions of dollars for his fake wines, lies that he told about the origin of his fake wines and where he got them, and lies that he told to cover his tracks when others began to suspect that the magic cellar wasn't truly magic at all, but just a bunch of smoke and mirrors.'

I said at the beginning, this is a case about greed and lies, but those lies end today,’ he said.

Kurniawan, also known as Dr Conti and Mr '47, now faces several decades in prison having also been convicted of wire fraud for fraudulently attempting to obtain a $3m loan.