NEWS
DECANTER: FAKE-BUSTER DOWNEY CLEARS THE NAME OF WOOD CHEN’S WINE COLLECTION
By Siulan Law Mathews DipWSET
4-2-2025
Source: winefraud.com/Instagram
The fake-busters team behind winefraud.com has cleared the name of Taiwan collector Wood Chen who was linked to a fake burgundies scandal last summer, according to Decanter.dom.
The controversy arose from a tasting session where some connoisseurs claimed that some burgundies in Wood Chen’s collection tasted exactly the same despite that they are supposed to come from different vintages and plots.
In order to clear his name, Wood Chen - brother of renowned collector Pierre Chen and former chairman of electronics giant Yageo Corporation - brought in Maureen Downey and her Chai Consulting team which runs winefraud.com to inspect the wines.
California-based Downey has advised the FBI and the US Department of Justice in high-profile wine fraud cases, headed to Taipei for the inspection.
Wood Chen has approximately 50,000 bottles in his collection, around 20,000 of them were stored in Taiwan.
Decanter said Downey examined the list and selected 1,500 wines that she deemed most likely to be counterfeits.
She and six members of her team spent six days examining wine labels and cork quality, and their findings were recorded on the blockchain.
Downey ultimately determined that 130 of the wines were “definitively counterfeit”. She also identified 15 “problematic” bottles.
After crunching the numbers, she estimates that 1 to 2 percent of the wines in Wood Chen’s collection are counterfeit.
Downey described that as an “exceptionally low” counterfeit rate, adding that it is “one of the lowest rates observed in over two decades of inspecting collections for auction houses”.
Based on the typical counterfeit rates in the fine wine market, she was expecting 8 to 10 percent of the wines to be counterfeit.
Decanter quoted Downey as saying: “Collectors with extensive fine and rare wine collections, especially those purchasing from secondary or grey markets, very likely have counterfeits.”
“Unfortunately, today even trusted supply chains are affected. And with the recent advanced, professionally produced counterfeits, even careful, reputable merchants are being deceived.”
(the writer can be contacted at: info@thewinechronicle.com)
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