Top French Wine Diluted and Sold With Fake Labels

The Bordeaux wine industry is facing its worst scandal for more than 20 years after police raided a dozen chateaux and seized documents in a vast anti-fraud operation amid reports that some top French wines may not be what they claim.

The raids took place as the trial opened last week in which a wine distributor, Jacques Hemmer, is accused of fraud and misleading advertising. He allegedly sold thousands of bottles of Bordeaux under false names and vintages, diluting the genuine stuff with wine from the Languedoc-Roussillon region. He could faced an 18-month prison term.

Six leading Bordeaux wine dealers, who were among his customers, have also been charged.

Police are checking how much of the false Bordeaux was exported to other European countries, including Britain.

The scandal emerging on a much bigger scale, however, concerns a Belgian company with vineyards in the South-west of France. According to police, a senior employee disgruntled about being sacked tipped them off about alleged frauds in six wine-producing areas which included the Gironde, where Bordeaux is produced.

He claimed 'wine from outside was transported to the region and sold under the Bordeaux' local label, a judicial spokesman said, referring to the system which strictly identifies the territorial origins of wine. The creation of such blends 'is tolerated as long as this is made clear. The rule may not have been respected'.

If the allegations are true, they echo Bordeaux's worst setback, in the Seventies, when growers similarly used cheap wine from other areas to produce false Bordeaux and illegally increase the alcoholic content of some products.

The threat of a fresh scandal has been fed by reports that hundreds of falsely-labelled Margaux and Petrus, two of Bordeaux's top crus, have been sold abroad.

The whistleblower from the Belgian firm was being protected by police this weekend after claiming he was being threatened. Some of his former colleagues at the company, controlled by the businessman, Roger Geens, were being questioned.

The company has long been known for legally inventing chateaux labels on wines from vineyards that have no trace of an imposing manor house. Among its export labels are a Médoc, an Hauterive, a Saint-Emilion, a Grand Ferrand and an Entre-deux-Mers, all described on the bottles as AOC - Appellation d'Origine Contrôllée.

Fraud investigators said the inquiry would take many months as they were also unravelling the accounts of about 20 wine companies in the group as part of a tax investigation.

A company executive, Guillaume Berckmans, said that the police inquiries had nothing to do with the quality of the wine. 'The press is going to sink us,' he added. 'We are losing the sale of hundreds of thousands of bottles when there have been no charges laid against us.'