Is a $2,000 bottle of wine really better than a $20 one? Pieter Colpaert decants the truth about pricing, perception, and epic fraud on Skeptical Sunday! Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by producer, multimedia journalist, and wine enthusiast Pieter Colpaert! On This Week's Skeptical Sunday, We Discuss: Wine fraud is surprisingly common in the fine wine market — experts estimate that as much as 20% of fine wines could be counterfeit, especially among rare and expensive bottles. The largest case involved Rudy Kurniawan, who sold approximately $550 million worth of counterfeit wines. Wine pricing is influenced by multiple factors beyond quality, including scarcity, vineyard age, production methods, aging time, and marketing. However, studies show that beyond $50-100, you're often paying for reputation and rarity rather than significantly better quality. Scientific studies have shown that even wine experts struggle to consistently identify or rate expensive wines in blind tastings. At one Wine Spectator event, 54 experts couldn't reliably distinguish between wines ranging from $1.65 to $150 per bottle. The psychology of wine pricing has a strong effect on perception — research shows that people's brains actually respond more positively to wine when they believe it's expensive, even if it's the exact same wine. This is called the "price-quality heuristic." The good news is that excellent wines can be found in the $20-30 range. By exploring different regions, grape varieties, and styles without fixating on price, you can discover fantastic wines that suit your personal taste while staying within a reasonable budget. Trust your own preferences over marketing and pricing signals. Connect with Jordan on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [email protected] and let him know! Connect with Pieter at his website, Instagram, and Twitter! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1076 If you love listening to this show as much as we love making it, would you please peruse and reply to our Membership Survey here? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
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What makes a good bottle of wine so dang expensive? Can a $1,000 bottle of wine really be a hundred times better than that $10 bottle of Josh in the back of your fridge? Would most people even be able to tell the difference? Joining me to explore these questions is our resident wine expert, at least as of last week, Peter Kolpart. Peter, welcome to the show, man.
Thanks for having me, Jordan. But don't call me a wine expert. I think I'm just a regular guy who loves a good glass of wine now and then and who started wondering why a lot of the good stuff is so damn expensive.
Yeah, that's the big question, right? I've never really understood it myself. And it just seems like there's such a wide range, right? It's not like a camera lens where one is decently priced and the other one's $100 more or some are ridiculous because they're cinematic. This is like even more wild in the pricing than seemingly luxury goods, which is really confusing for a guy like me.
So what got you interested in all this in the first place?
Well, I think my origin story is I was drinking this beautiful Sicilian red wine from a natural winemaker in Sicily, who's actually a Belgian guy, just like myself. His name is Frank Cornelissen, and he produces some really incredible wines on the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily. So I was trying his Susu Caru, which is a favorite of rapper Action Bronson.
The epitome of taste.
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Chapter 2: How prevalent is wine fraud?
You know, it feels like natural wines. I've heard of these. They're having a moment for the last 10 years, probably to the point where you'll find a natural wine bar in every decent sized American city. It's like a whole thing. It's like it's like craft beer, but for wine. And the guy who just loves natural wine will never shut up about its delicious barnyard smell or whatever.
It's just like become a cliche around here, especially.
Yeah. I mean, I hope I'm not that cliche guy, but a lot of natural wine is a little too funky or like weird for my taste because I don't want my wine to smell like a horse stable or I don't want my wine to taste like kombucha.
Yeah. I suppose I'm with you that then again, I don't drink much wine and I love a good bootch. So what do I know?
Well, this wine that I was talking about, it had none of that kombucha flavor. This winemaker, his goal was to let the grapes and the character of the Etna volcanic territory shine through in his wines. And you know, the best part of it is it sells for maybe like $30 a bottle in the US, which, you know, it's quite expensive. It's no like barefoot or two buck chuck.
But for a wine of that quality, I think it's a steal. Because also, you know, there are risks to the natural winemaking process.
How can making wine be risky? And by the way, I know it sounds like we're sponsored by whatever wine this is and it's an infomercial, but I promise we're getting to the point. There's people hovering over the button right now. Like, do I care about this? Tell me how making wine can be risky before I start pressing you on this stuff.
So, you know, winemakers typically will be using commercial yeast and additives to prevent spoilage and to have a more stable and consistent product. So, you know, not a commercial, but this guy Cornelison, he has to be super diligent in his winemaking process, in the grapes he selects, how he stores the wines, etc.
So there's some irony there, you know, it's not intervening in your wine is more expensive and more difficult sometimes than tinkering with it.
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Chapter 3: What factors influence wine pricing?
Yeah, I mean, you're right there because, you know, this is a dynamic, again, you see it with all kinds of luxury products. Magma has this like near legendary status in the wine world. It's got glowing reviews, high ratings from collectors, and all those things contribute to price. There's also one wildcard, which is the winemaker. He says he uses this social pricing structure.
So he actually makes the magma more expensive to subsidize his other wines, like the Susukaru, so he can sell those at a more democratic price point. And so more people are able to try his wines. So that actually, that's smart.
That makes a lot of sense. It's a great idea in terms of growing his market share and exposing people to his product. Okay, I feel like I'm starting to get a sense of what goes into pricing a bottle of wine. So scarcity is one. Wines that are produced in limited quantities command higher prices. Surprise, surprise, supply and demand. But the story behind it also seems to go a very long way too.
I read something earlier this week or last week where it was like, Breaking news! Dolce & Gabbana only spent $67 making one of their, I don't know, $4,000 handbags. And everybody's like, of course! This is not a $3,500 to produce piece of fabric and metal. No, it's all marketing. There's a photo shoot with... Gwyneth Paltrow holding one, like that part costs a million dollars.
The rest of it is people making a purse next to another person who's making a purse for not Dolce and Gabbana, right? With the same crap, maybe fake gold instead of real gold. So it's, yeah, luxury goods are just a fascinating market.
Yeah. And as you say, it's about the scarcity. So the harder it is to find a wine, the more expensive it's going to be. And it's probably the same with a handbag. If it's harder to find a handbag, it'll be more expensive. Whether that's a single vineyard wine or it's from a specific rare vintage or this really prestigious vineyard, those are all factors.
And then reputation is another big one as well, because you have wines from very famous wine regions like Burgundy or Napa Valley. Those will fetch higher prices just based on the wine region they're from.
I see. So if you're a bargain hunter, look for the lesser known wine regions, maybe. And then age is another one, right? And aged wine obviously is going to have developed a more unique, complex flavor profile, whatever that means.
Yeah, and then selling a bottle right away that is cheaper for the producer than having to age and store it. So again, like with anything, production costs are a big factor. Cost of land, labor, storage, materials, and so on. And you know, like most of the wines we drink will be machine harvested, but then the premium wines, for those, most winemakers will still be handpicking their grapes.
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Chapter 4: Do expensive wines taste better?
36 wines. And you've got to probably nail all of those. And they still can't tell me if I'm drinking an expensive wine or not. What the heck?
I mean, to be fair, again, they'll be able to tell you all kinds of things about this wine. They'll be able to make a really good assessment of the quality of the wine, you know, like the balance, the complexity, the potential for aging.
So in theory, you know, these masters of wine, they'll be able to say like, Jordan, this is a well-made high quality wine that just doesn't necessarily mean that it's an expensive wine. And I think this goes to show there's no straightforward connection between perceived quality and price. And listen, I think that's good news for people like me who love wine.
Right, because, okay, so good wine doesn't have to be expensive. That's kind of interesting. I probably should have thought of that earlier. So what I'm getting from this is there's a lot of reasons why one bottle of wine might be more expensive than the other, but the vast, vast majority of people don't.
won't really be able to tell, that actually leaves an enormous amount of space for the role of marketing and storytelling. But it also means that if you kind of don't necessarily need all of that all of the time, you can afford a really good bottle of wine and it doesn't have to have $300 of story attached to it.
Right. But that's also why it's worth it for these wineries to invest in creating this image, this like aura of luxury and exclusivity around their wines, because that's what's going to make people think that their wines are worth spending money on.
Yeah, it's just good business.
Yeah. And then, you know, to your point, there are lots of small and subtle ways that they can achieve that. Because ages ago, I was just getting into wine and I had a friend who pretended to be a real wine expert.
And he told me that if the bottom of a wine bottle had what they call a punt, which is, you know, where the bottom is not entirely flat, but slightly indented, and you can kind of like put your thumb in there. That meant it was a great quality wine.
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Chapter 5: What is the psychology behind wine pricing?
Yeah, brilliant. Brilliant idea, Jordan. I think health authorities might have a slightly different opinion on that one. The shape of the bottle, that's another signifier. Like think of a classic burgundy bottle has those nice sloping shoulders or a Riesling bottle is tall and slender. Those designs kind of give them this air of tradition and of quality.
And it'll also help you notice them quicker when you go to the wine shop.
Ah, that's clever. Yeah, because otherwise all the bottles look the same. I think I've noticed that a little bit here and there. The labels are important too, right? Because that's kind of the first thing I notice, especially if the bottles look similar. The most expensive wines, it's like a lawyer's business card, right? It's simple, it's elegant.
There's just like a couple of bits of data on there. The name of the winery, the vintage in simple gold, silver lettering, whatever. There's not like a rainbow and a kangaroo on the front or something.
No, I mean, Jordan, are you going to believe me if I tell you there's a study for this?
I would indeed believe that there's a study for that. Wow, there's a lot of funding going into studying wine, obviously.
I know, there's a lot of money in wine. So in this study, they found simple black and gold labels. People perceive them as more luxurious. And then if it has a bright color, a quirky label like kangaroos and rainbows you were talking about, those are perceived as casual and affordable.
Yeah, it's funny because this study could probably have been done by just asking a few people what they thought of each label because it's so obvious this is not deep science. So to some degree, you can make people believe a wine is expensive purely by its design. And it's really hard to tell just by tasting whether a wine is expensive or not.
So it feels like it has to be very easy to fool people. And I'm wondering if that's why I keep hearing about all these... quite spectacular cases of wine fraud. Have you heard about this at all?
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Chapter 6: How does marketing affect wine perception?
Chapter 7: What role do sommeliers play in wine selection?
You know, I think he was a master at exploiting the trust and lack of transparency in the high-end wine market. This is someone who had an encyclopedic knowledge of rare wines. So he was able to create elaborate fakes, you know, very convincing fabricated labels and bottles.
It sounds like he put a lot of real legwork into it then. He's not only faking the wines, right? He's faking the bottles, he's faking the labels, and there's probably some sort of provenance certificates, right? Like, where did you buy this? Where did it come from? So how did he get caught?
Yeah, I mean, it's a real thriller, this story. There's all these experts in the wine world that started to become a little suspicious of him, including this woman, Maureen Downey. She's like an eagle-eyed wine expert, and she started to notice minor inconsistencies in the bottle that he was selling. But still, it was hard to find like actual evidence of fraud. But then he got a little sloppy.
He sold several bottles of a rare Burgundy. This is a 1945 Domaine Ponceau Clos Saint-Denis at an auction in New York.
Ooh, that sounds very fancy. And I mean, very, very fancy. Yeah. Wow. That's when you bust out the French. Yeah. And it's 80 years old. Holy smokes.
Yeah, I mean, just after World War II. And can you believe his luck? This auction was attended by Laurent Ponceau. This is the head of that winery. And this winery, it had been in his family for generations. So he knew all about those wines. And he knew that his family had not produced wine from that particular vineyard until 1982. So this guy was trying to pass off a bottle from 1945.
So that raised some obvious concerns. And then the FBI starts investigating. Long story short, Rudy Korniawan was sentenced to 10 years in prison in order to pay $28.4 million in restitution to his victims.
The 10 years in prison sucks, but $28.4 million in restitution is peanuts compared to what this guy made off that fraud. And that's wild, man. What a detail to get tripped up on. That's like when they caught the son of Sam serial killer because something to do with a parking ticket. It's like otherwise that guy would have just gotten away with it. What an amazing grift that was.
With that kind of money swirling around, there must be a whole cottage industry now around authenticating wine, preventing wine fraud, certifying cases of wine. I don't know.
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