One of the big current stories is fake wines. Fake expensive wines. Fake VERY expensive wines. It turns out that some people think that wines from one of the most famous collectors could have dodgy provenance, as Neal Martin's article explains. Decanter also have a news piece on this. It's a big story - expect to hear more on this. This is what Serena Sutcliffe of Sotheby's said to me on the subject earlier this year:

"Frauds are a big worry, stop (not just the auction scene). If I could give you a £ for every fake bottle I have seen or tasted, I would be as rich as Croesus. It has happened over the last 20 yrs, with a tremendous escalation recently, with huge money swirling about and totally innocent
punters up there buying with no point of comparison. They saw them coming. It is a HUGE INDUSTRY, ESP IN STATES AND ASIA - but unhappily it mostly seems to originate in Europe and is then sold by middle men in the two areas indicated. A lot of money has been made. In the last few yrs we have seen cellars with millions of dollars' worth of fakes in them. We might refuse them, but they then go elsewhere....They vary from the basic, photocopied labels etc, to the extremely sophisticated, but there is a pattern to them and they ALWAYS originate from the same group of people, when you delve."