The first time, Koch purchased four bottles that purportedly belonged to Thomas Jefferson. He discovered that fake in 2005 when he was asked to display one of his bottles at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and curators asked him to check the provenance. (For the record, the Forbes family was also famously duped in the Jefferson bottles scam.) Then, at an October 2005 Zachys auction, using a consultant as his buyer, he shelled out $3.7 million for 2,669 bottles of wine—a haul that turned out to include 24 fakes, one of them a 1921 Château Pétrus, for which he paid $29,500.
Where there’s no independent third-party authenticator, ask a lot of questions, starting with, “Where did you get it?” Be especially careful on eBay, says Gregory J Rohan, president of Dallas-based Heritage Auctions, the world’s largest auctioneer of collectibles. An eBay regular, Rohan once shelled out for a counterfeit Paloma Picasso silver baby rattle on the site.
(This story appears in the 12 July, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)