© MMD | Various vintages of Cristal are among the treasures offered for sale.
The ultimate collectibles are set to hit the auction market this week, as Rudy Kurniawan’s confiscated wine cellar goes up for auction.
Nearly 5,000 bottles of wine were seized when FBI agents arrested Kurniawan in March 2012, and U.S. Marshals will auction off 4,711 of those bottles — those deemed authentic, of course.
Kurniawan was convicted of fraud in federal court in 2013 for producing and selling millions of dollars of counterfeit wine, becoming the most infamous wine fraud of all time.
The commissioners have already sold three cars from Kurniawan, which had also been seized. The three vehicles alone raised $310,000, a fraction of the $24.4 million in repairs he was ordered to pay. The wine will be sold in two online auctions, one from November 24 and one from December 1, at www.txauction.com.
“It may seem ironic that we are selling wine that belonged to a convicted counterfeiter,” said Jason Martinez, deputy program director for the Marshals Service’s asset forfeiture division. “But we have a duty to recover as much value as possible from the sale of these authentic wines to compensate those who were victims of his fraud.”
These victims were numerous and varied and mostly well-off. Billionaire Bill Koch is probably the best known, but many have refused to be named in court to preserve their dignity.
The wine up for auction was stored by Kurniawan at a wine storage facility in California. Much of it was intended to be used in the production of fake high-end wines as part of his now infamous scheme. Additionally, a number of high-value authenticated wines that Kurniawan stored at its facilities were included in the auction.
The wines include several vintages of Cristal, a bottle from 1945 Chateau Mouton Rothschildsix bottles from 1962 Château Margauxdouble magnums of Léoville-Las Casesa magnum of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 2002, a Salon 1959 and a case of La Mission Haut-Brion 1976.
The net proceeds from the sale of the wine will be made available to the court to ultimately be returned to the victims of the case.
The Marshals have contracted the authentication and evaluation of the wines. The contract was awarded to Stephanie Reeves of Houston, who worked with a team that included Michael Egan of Bordeaux, France. Egan participated in the Kurniawan case in the Federal Court as the prosecution’s main expert witness at trial. Specifically, Egan inspected the bottles with the highest risk of counterfeiting and discovered a quantity of counterfeit bottles that had been removed from the collection being sold.
Kurniawan, 39, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and is serving his sentence at Taft Correctional Institute in California.
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