Book Notes: Peter Hellman – In Vino Duplicitas (2017)

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Title	In Vino Duplicitas – The Rise and Fall of a Wine Forger Extraordinaire
Author	Peter Hellman
Publisher	The Experiment
Date	31-Jul-2017
ISBN	9781615193929
Pages	272
Shop	theexperimentpublishing.com/catalogs/spring-2017/in-vino-duplicitas
Excerpt	google.com/books/edition/In_Vino_Duplicitas/8J9qDwAAQBAJ
Audio	8 hrs and 26 mins

The Author

Peter Hellman, a New York–based journalist and author for more than 40 years, has been a contributor to Wine Spectator for more than a decade. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, and many others.

Wine Spectator Articles

The origins of the book, the “bedrock’ in the words of the author, are a number or articles about wine fraud and Rudy Kurniawan that Hellman wrote for Wine Spectator between 2008 and 2015.

Dr. Conti

The main protagonist of the story is Rudi Kurniawan, a.k.a. Zhen Wang Huang, from Jakarta Indonesia (1976). He was convicted for wine fraud in 2013, sentenced to 10 years, and deported back to Indonesia as illegal immigrant in 2021. For a summary, see the Wikipedia article: Rudy Kurniawan, sourced from several articles by Hellman.

If you want, you can follow him on Facebook and Insta (like the wine, the account may be fake). Apparently, he is back.

The Con and Connoisseur

For a brief introduction and acquaintance of the main protagonists, watch the ABC News The Con episode on wine fraud, with scenes from Sour Grapes (see below).

“I scam people and drink their wine.” How did this wine collector have some of the world’s best, most expensive wines?
ABC The Con: Wine (S1 E7) | 03.25.21 | 41:48

Still from the ABC Documentary

Sour Grapes

The story is also covered in the film Sour Grapes (2016).

For the notes, see

Film Notes: Sour Grapes (2016)