Watch the 'Sherlock Holmes of Wine' explain how to spot a counterfeit bottle
As Notorious B.I.G once said, with more money comes more problems.
This holds very true for those wealthy enough to possess cellars full of fine wines. As it turns out, there's a chance that that '82 Petrus you dropped thousands on is actually a fake.
"Wine fraud is not new," Maureen Downey tells Bloomberg Business. As a wine fraud investigator, Downey spots counterfeit wines for a living — a job she has so meticulously honed that she earned the nickname "The Sherlock Holmes of Wine." Downey's craft is extremely particular, requiring her to examine wine labels with magnifying glasses and blue lights in order to determine if a bottle is a counterfeit.
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"You have to have looked at tens of millions of dollars of real wine to be able to spot a fake," she says. "It can be really brutal to tell a client that they've got fake wine, so I kind of have to treat it like taking a Band-Aid off." Watch Downey explain her craft in the video below. —Samantha Rollins
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Samantha Rollins is TheWeek.com's news editor. She has previously worked for The New York Times and TIME and is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
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