FoodRepublic's Food Crimes series reports on scandals plaguing the food industry.
In this captivating episode of Food Crimes, go inside the world of black market wine to expose how two crooks duped the wine world in New York and beyond.
Food Crimes, Episode Four: "Corkscrewed: The Art of Fake Wine" looks at the lives of the men whose cons left a blemish on the world of fine wine.
Once high status players in the luxury wine trade, both Hardy Rodenstock and Rudy Kurniawan found ways to infiltrate and corrupt the industry as a whole, duping prominent wine enthusiasts out of millions of dollars over time.
Though major shakeups led to Rodenstock's disappearance and Kurniawan's arrest, the problem of counterfeit wines lives on as the collectors who spent thousands on the con mens' collections still have no idea they're harboring fakes.
Today, counterfeiting efforts continue in China and beyond. In fact, the video reports that up to one out of two bottles of French wine in China could be fake.
Some of these knockoffs are extremely dangerous, to the extent that some do not contain alcohol at all and are instead comprised of mixes of chemical substances.
Read more about the wine fraud at FoodRepublic.