MFDB

Storyline

It tells the story of one of the greatest wine fraud cases in the USA. The film unfolds as a heist thriller taking us on a insider trip into the vintage wine market. Sour Grapes: The Great Wine Fraud is the story of how an Indonesian immigrant fooled the US wine world, making millions of dollars from fake vintage Burgundy created in his Los Angeles suburban home.

Sour Grapes is set against the collision of two worlds: rural Burgundy, where for centuries the arcane craft of wine production has been handed down through generations of families; and the super fast, super rich world of New York and Los Angeles during the finance boom of the early 2000s. During that time, vintage wine was taken up by the new rich both as an investment and as a marker of taste, status and class. Crashing into these elite was a Chinese Indonesian migrant called Rudy Kurniawan, who quickly established a reputation for expertise in burgundy.  He was, it was rumoured, a wine savant who had an expert memory for taste, a generous host offering rare wines from his huge cellar  and in 2006  he made $35 million in 2 wine auctions from the sale of his wine. Then in 2008 a French wine producer, Laurent Ponsot, realised that wine from his family's domain was being auctioned by Kurniawan from a year they hadn't produced it. That day, he says, he took the first plane to New York, and thus begun his crusade.