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Guilty verdict for French Pinot Noir counterfeiters
French wine industry figures from Laungedoc have been found guilty of selling $7 million of fake Pinot Noir to Californian wine producer E & J Gallo.
The court in Carcassonne singled out Claude Courset, head of Ducasse wine merchants, who had been the intermediary between local producers and a conglomerate that sold the wine to E & J Gallo, as the “kingpin” in the scandal.
Courset was given a six month suspended jail term and fined €45,000.
Sieur d’Arques the trading company that sold Gallo the wine, were fined €180,000.
Two Sieur d’Arques executives were the only accused to deny any knowledge of the affair.
The eight co-operatives who supplied the grapes were also fined according to the scale of their involvement and several were given suspended jail sentences.
The multi-million euro scam lasted two years and saw the producers sell 135,000 hectolitres of Vins de Pays d’Oc, for the Gallo Red Bicyclette range, labelled as Pinot Noir when in reality it was mixed with cheaper varieties such as Merlot and Syrah.
The fraud was discovered by French audit officers who noticed that the volume of Pinot Noir being shipped was more than that produced in the region as a whole.
The judge, Jean-Hughes Desfontaines, said: “The scale of the fraud caused severe prejudice to the wines of Languedoc in the United States.”
Prosecutor, Francis Battut, said: “If Americans lose confidence in French wine production, particularly the Languedoc region, which is already going through a serious crisis, the consequences could be terrible.”
“We are deeply disappointed to learn today that our supplier Sieur d’Arques has been found guilty of selling falsely labelled French Pinot Noir as recently as March 2008,” said Susan Hensley, a spokeswoman for E & J Gallo.
The Red Bicyclette range was created in the wake of the cult film Sideways that sparked a huge surge in the popularity of Pinot Noir in the US.
E & J Gallo has announced that it has pulled the product from shelves.
Rupert Millar, 18.02.2010