Spotting fake wine, starting with the story.

Most advice on how to spot fake wine starts with the label: the typeface, the paper, the print under a magnifying glass. The label is the last line of defence. A careful forgery can survive a close look at the bottle. It rarely survives a close look at the story: who owned the wine, where it was kept and how it reached the person now offering it to you.

The reassuring part is that most wine is not worth faking. Counterfeits cluster where a single bottle repays the effort, which means the most famous names, legendary vintages and large formats. If you buy recent vintages from an established merchant, heat damage is a far bigger risk than fraud. If you are buying a famous old bottle on the secondary market, the checks below are routine and a serious seller expects them.

Where counterfeits cluster

• The most famous names. Forgers copy wines that sell on the name alone: the handful of estates, many of them in Bordeaux and Burgundy, whose labels buyers recognise at a glance.
• Legendary vintages. The older and more celebrated the year, the fewer genuine bottles survive and the fewer buyers have ever seen one, let alone tasted it.
• Large formats. Magnums and bigger bottles of old vintages were made in small numbers and are rarely seen, so there is little to compare them against. Ask whether the estate bottled that size in that year at all.
• Deals that seem too good. Here the target is the buyer who wants the wine badly enough to stop asking questions.

Before you look at the bottle, look at the market. Recent auction results and the lists of established merchants give you a range for the wine, vintage and format in question. A famous old bottle offered well below that range is not a bargain. There is always a reason and it is rarely a good one. The reverse does not hold: a full price proves nothing, because a competent fraud is priced to look normal.

How to spot fake wine: start with the history

The strongest evidence that a bottle is genuine is a continuous history from the estate or its first buyer to the person selling it. Ask for that history in writing. Who has owned the wine and since when? Where has it been stored? Is there an original invoice, a storage statement or an auction record? How did it reach the seller? These are the same questions that protect you against heat damage, set out in how to check a bottle's provenance. Here they carry even more weight.

Paper is only evidence when it fits the bottle in front of you. An invoice should come from a business you can find, for the same wine, vintage, format and quantity, dated when the story says it was. A storage statement should name the owner the seller describes. Documents can be forged too, so the test is consistency: each piece should agree with the others and with the bottle.

Gaps matter. A bottle that surfaces after thirty years with no record tells you more than any label. So does a history that nobody will put in writing. Keep copies of everything you are given. If you buy, they become the first pages of your own paper trail.

What the bottle can confirm

Physical checks work by comparison. Find a bottle of the same wine and vintage whose provenance is beyond doubt. Failing that, use clear photographs of one from the estate or a reputable auction catalogue. Then go through the details side by side.

• Label. Print quality, typeface, spacing, colours and paper, looked at closely and with a magnifying glass if you have one. Estates change small details over the years, so compare with the same vintage.
• Ageing that fits the story. Label, capsule and glass should have aged together and in the way the seller describes. A bottle from a damp cellar usually shows it; one that lay in its original case may be clean. What matters is that the wear is consistent.
• Capsule. It should match the estate's design for that era. A capsule clearly newer than the label needs an explanation, with a record of who replaced it and when.
• Cork. Many estates brand their name on the cork and often the vintage too. You usually see it only after opening, so keep the cork of any important bottle. A cork that does not match the label is evidence.
• Glass and punt. Colour, weight, the shape and depth of the punt and any embossing should match genuine bottles of the same vintage.
• Fill and colour. The fill should suit the wine's age and the fill-level scale shows what is normal. An old wine that looks improbably young through the glass deserves a question.
• Back and importer labels. These show which market the bottle was first sold into. They should fit the route: a bottle said to have spent its life in one European cellar should not carry the strip label of an importer on another continent.

A bottle can rule itself out, but only its history can rule it in.

Red flags in a seller

• No history. "From a private collection" with nothing written down behind it.
• Pressure. Another buyer waiting, a price that holds only until tonight.
• Unusual payment. Cash only or a transfer to an account in someone else's name.
• "A private client." Discretion about a consignor's name is normal, particularly at auction. Discretion about the wine's history is not.
• Improbable quantity. Several cases of a legendary vintage or a run of rare large formats from one source at one time.
• A shifting story. Details that change or improve each time you ask.

Auction does not remove the risk. It does give you specialists to question and terms of sale to read before you bid, including what happens if a lot proves not to be genuine. The guide to reading an auction catalogue covers the rest. Ask a merchant for the same protection in writing: a guarantee of authenticity and a refund if a bottle is shown to be fake. A confident seller agrees without fuss.

Codes, seals and special glass

Some estates now protect their wines with unique codes on the label or capsule, tamper-evident seals or engraved and specially made glass. These measures are worth checking and they make forgery harder. They also have limits that buyers tend to forget.

• They mostly cover recent releases. Old bottles sold decades ago predate them, although some estates now tag and engrave old stock when they release it from their own cellars.
• Verify through the estate's own channel. Never through a link, phone number or certificate supplied by the seller.
• They prove the bottle, not the wine. A genuine bottle can be emptied and refilled, which is one reason to break the empties of famous wines after a dinner instead of leaving them intact for recycling.
• They say nothing about storage. A verified code on a bottle that spent a summer in a hot container still marks a cooked wine.

When in doubt, walk away

The arithmetic is lopsided. Walking away from a genuine bottle costs you one bottle you did not drink. Buying a fake costs the money, the occasion and your confidence in everything else from the same source.

If the wine matters and your doubts are specific, have it assessed before you pay. An independent authentication specialist or the wine department of an established auction house can examine photographs or the bottle itself. For some wines, the estate or its official agent may also help. Send sharp photographs of the front and back labels, the capsule from the top and sides, the fill with the bottle standing upright and the base of the bottle.

If a doubtful bottle is already in your cellar, do not open it and do not sell it on. Keep it sealed with every document that came with it, tell the seller in writing and get an assessment. Where the sums are large, take legal advice as well. A sealed bottle is evidence. An open one is an argument.

For any famous old bottle, buy the history first and the wine second. If you would rather someone else asked the questions, our sourcing service can do it for you.