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The legal wrangling over fake Pinot Noir wine continues in France. Yesterday, a French court convicted a dozen people of fraud for exporting fake Pinot Noir to the United States. The wine was sold in the U.S. by Gallo under the Red Bicyclette label. Today, the wine merchant whose fake wine was sold to Gallo said he will appeal the verdict. We speak with Guy Woodward, an editor at Decanter Magazine, about the verdict.

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KATY CLARK:  I’m Katy Clark.  This is The World.  The legal wrangling over fake Pinot Noir wine continues in France.  Yesterday a French court convicted a dozen people of fraud for exporting fake Pinot Noir to the United States.  The wine was sold in the U.S. by Gallo under the Red Bicyclette label.  Today the wine merchant whose fake wine was sold to Gallo said he will appeal the verdict.  Guy Woodward is the editor of Decanter Magazine.  He’s been following the story.  Guy, so Red Bicyclette, the Gallo wine labeled as Pinot Noir, what was it really?

GUY WOODWARD:  It was a mixture of maybe a little bit of Pinot in there, but most likely also a fat chunk of Merlot and [phonetic] Sira.  Gallo would have been sold the wine by their suppliers based in the Longor Dock, which in itself is strange because the Longor Dock is not known for Pinot Noir.  They would claim, Gallo, that they bought the wine in good faith.  But obviously something went wrong somewhere along the line and it doesn’t say a great deal for their – - ability of their buyers that they weren’t able to detect this wine wasn’t in fact Pinot Noir.

CLARK: Rather embarrassing I would think.

WOODWARD: I would say so, for sure.  It certainly smells a little bit of incompetence somewhere along the line, that they weren’t able to detect this earlier than they did.  In fact, it wasn’t them that detected it in the end.  It was the French authorities themselves who cracked down on the suppliers.

CLARK: What actually happened?  How did they, what tipped them off, I guess?

WOODWARD: Well, the French, to their credit, have quite a strong system to track wine forward and French regions pride themselves on the tipicity of their wines. So, for example, in Burgundy, red wine has to be Pinot Noir.  In the Longor Dock, there are various great varieties that are allowed.  But it’s not a region that is known for Pinot Noir and the amount of Pinot Noir that was going into this Gallo wine just seemed far greater than the amount of Pinot Noir that is planted in the area.  So it didn’t really take Einstein to work out that there might be something wrong.

CLARK: So, how many bottles of wine were involved in this fraud?

WOODWARD: Well, incredibly it was somewhere in the region of about 18 million bottles.  As I say, it’s incredible that it wasn’t’ detected until now.

CLARK: For the non-professionals among us, can you explain what Pinot Noir is and how it’s different from other red wines.

WOODWARD: Pinot Noir is a particularly fashionable grape; it certainly has been over the last five years or so, ever since the movie Sideways, which championed the grape.  It’s always been a favorite as well of wine lovers.  It’s considered a very, if you can have such a thing, a kind of cerebral grape, if you like.  Very sensitive, it’s a thin-skinned grape, literally, and it produces wines that are quite elegant and refined and reserved.  So the funny thing is, of course, that the grapes that were actually being used to make the wine, Merlot and Sira, are pretty much the exact opposite of that.  They’re much more round and chewy fruit and darker fruits.

CLARK: Is it hard to produce real Pinot Noir?  I’m wondering why resort to counterfeiting.

WOODWARD: It’s a notoriously difficult grape to deal with in the vineyard because it is so fragile.  It’s very easy to get over-ripe, particularly in the south of France.  The climate there, where these wines came from, would not be conducive to Pinot, because it’s just too hot for it.  Because it needs more attention in the vineyard, prices for the grapes are higher.

CLARK: Is wine fraud very common and are we seeing more cases of it, this one notwithstanding?

WOODWARD: We’ve seen wine fraud become much more of an issue recently and perhaps part of the reason for that is because authorities have become a lot better at detecting these incidences.  Certainly in Italy, for example, where wine fraud has become more and more of a problem, the police even went so far as to train some of their officers as sommeliers.  They went to sommelier school and qualified in order to be more adept at being able to detect fraudulent wines.

CLARK: And I can understand why to wine purists and those who are making it and selling it and buying it I guess it would matter, but ultimately does it really matter if it tastes good?  Should I care so much whether I’m getting the real thing or not?

WOODWARD: Well, that’s the key question.  If you speak to a wine purist, a real connoisseur he will say absolutely it does matter.  Particularly with the wines of France that sell themselves, pride themselves on their tipicity.  If, as you say, you find a wine from Bordeaux, for example, and it was delicious but then you found out it had a touch of Sira in there, would that make it a bad wine?  I think, personally, it’s a dangerous road to go down.  As soon as you start putting one thing on the label, but there’s something else in the bottle, you’re asking for trouble.

CLARK: Guy Woodward is the editor of Decanter Magazine.  Thank you so much.

WOODWARD: Thank you.

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