As wine crime rises, an expert samples a questionable bottle of 1962 La Tâche.
What emotions do you experience when you’re about to open a bottle of 1962 La Tâche? Disbelief, unworthiness, reverence, awe, elation—the flip side of the famed Kübler-Ross five stages of grief. After all, the wine approximates the price tag of a Porsche 911.
But there’s a sixth factor at play, as well: uncertainty. The collector sharing the bottle, acquired from a high-profile auction house, belatedly learned it was consigned by Rudy Kurniawan, the perpetrator of the world’s largest wine fraud, who’s currently serving 10 years in federal prison after counterfeiting more than $30 million worth of coveted wines. And he did it well enough to fool some extremely well-honed palates.
A 6-liter bottle of La Tâche approximates the price tag of a Porsche 911.
The 1962 La Tâche is a fabled vintage from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and a strong contender for the title of Burgundy’s greatest red wine. A single bottle of the 1962 is all but impossible to locate, and the one before me was a 6-liter behemoth—the equivalent of eight 750-milliliter bottles—called a Methuselah.