Counterfeit wine: A vintage crime

(CBSNews) - It's unlikely you'll encounter this problem for your holiday toasts, but distinguishing a truly fine wine from a fake can require "CSI"-like skills. Without them, collectors are clay pigeons for the devious masters of a vintage crime. Our Cover Story is reported now by Martha Teichner:

"Jawdropping" just barely describes the art in billionaire energy executive Bill Koch's Palm Beach home. You may have heard of his brothers, Charles and David, who bankroll political causes.

Bill Koch is a man willing to spend a great deal of money on the best of everything, including wine.

He is also a man who doesn't like getting cheated.

He says he has spent $4.5 million on 421 bottles of wine that turned out to be counterfeit. "So it's a pretty big swindle."

What we're talking about here is a world where a bilked billionaire says he's spent nearly twice as much on fake wine as the average college graduate will make in a lifetime.

He show Teichner a "nice old bottle," a 1737 Lafite. Its label reads "1737 Chateau Lafite Rothschild."  "You know, the Rothschilds didn't own Lafite in 1737," Koch said.

There's still wine in the bottle, too -- what could it be?  "Moose piss?" Koch suggested.  

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that it's the money that attracts counterfeiters to these wines, usually from France -- Burgundy or Bordeaux. The older, the better.

"Unless you have a good magnifying glass and know what you're seeing, it's easy to be fooled," said Maureen Downey, a San Francisco wine consultant and wine detective.

She showed Teichner a bottle purporting to be a 1961 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, which would cost $3,000-$3,500.