One way of getting rid of shyness is to take on the guise
of someone else making yourself rich beautiful etc.
and this new character would become more and more arrogant.
In one year he caught the upper hand on the group and even became the leader of the 12 Angry Men
in 2005 the young 29 year old collector fascinated many and became the icon of this generation of high rollers
his technique to retain power to bring increasingly rare bottles to the dinners
It's interesting, the 12 Angry Men Rudy was sort of the leader
he was the leader really, and they all admired him, and it was again oh here comes Rudy,
Rudy's coming to this dinner you know what's Rudy gonna bring?
What what incredible old wine that none of us have ever seen before will he bring?
Someone who said; "you're looking for the best vintages but I know how we can have them"
he's someone you want to trust ,because it's not simply confidence that he shows
it's the fact that you want to trust in them because they render a service,
and because they are the people realizing our dreams.
What does it take to make people dream? Behind the bidding up of
ever more prestigious bottles there was certainly an explanation
it was at this time Rudy developed a rather surprising obsession which should have set off a warning.
After each tasting he asked for the empty bottles to be returned to him
Rudy would say to the sommelier the wine director;
"I want those bottles back those empty bottles please FedEx them to my home in Arcadia
I want you to be sure to wash them clean but not to cause any damage to them"
he was so insistent that he would go as far as getting angry at a restaurant for example,
which had sent out poorly packaged and broken bottles
this was something that would set him off that the bottles were broken.
Kyle Smith would be a witness to this strange behavior
after a dinner he took a bottle of romanée-conti away with him Kyle would
then discover a side a Rudy which he didn't know for a simple empty bottle
his friend went into a rage very intriguing
he poured this at a tasting after the tasting I that he hosted and he provided
this bottle I took the bottle and he found out that I took the bottle and
left me threatening phone calls to get the bottle back if Rudy reacted like
this it's because these empty bottles were for him of key importance these
corpses of bottles actually played a decisive role in the constitution of his
famous magic cellar not so magical after all because although Rudy was showing
off in New York he continued to live in Los Angeles and in his home in Arcadia
he created a craft workshop in his kitchen to constantly bring out these
astounding bottles Michael Egan is the world's best fraud
expert no detail escapes him he would be the one who managed to prove the guilt
of the forger by removing his counterfeiting techniques one by one he
spoke of highly sophisticated methods
well the most basic the easiest way of committing a fraud it's just a
substitute one wine with another that means you have a bottle of wine and you
just put any another label on it and sell it as such but a secured anyone
really went to the enth degree in creating some very reasonable looking
fakes so how did he create these fine wines from scratch his modus operandi
was seemingly very simple after retrieving his empty bottles he filled
them with a combination of several wines using a funnel
he bought gallons of wine he dosed readjusted and tasted his beverages it
was thanks to his incredible taste and olfactory memory that he could reproduce
the taste of the world's biggest wines he has perhaps one of the best palates
that the world had seen in many many years he could figure out how to find
that bottles with other things with other wines and bring them together to
recreate the taste of the wine that doesn't exist in like a three-star chef
he had his own recipes for each of the bottles he wanted to recreate for a
romanée-conti for example his guilty pleasure he knew that by mixing several
Californian wines he could manage to find the same taste as that of his
favorite nectar we also saw other wines from the
mountain the Napa Valley Pinot Noir which had forties stroke fifties DRC
leading to the fact that he could actually use this wine in creating a
wine from the domaine de demain de la romanée-conti for the 1940s or 50s would
you say there I tasted his wines when you taste blindly like that all alone
it's virtually impossible to think that wasn't it because the color matched the
age the taste was correct it was very difficult and that's why he was doing
this for so long and was never caught after he loaded the contents into his
container the label came first using photocopying and editing software
Rudy the perfectionist managed to recreate the labels of the oldest wines
he actually treated the labels to make them look older and we saw a lot of you
know labels and he was experimenting on in his house either by putting in in the
oven or putting liquids on them just to get that right degree of antiquity last
crucial step the cork thanks to a blade corkscrew
Rudy emptied and refilled bottles without ever piercing the cork all that
remained was to put wax around it for the illusion to be perfect in this
document seized after Rudy Kearney Juan's arrest the names of the rarest
Kron crew are listed a kind of to-do list an inventory of the vintages to be
reproduced but perhaps he should have been more
careful over the months the forger perfected and tested his creations on
his acolytes been in late 2005 he was finally ready to launch his global scam