Chateau Lafite Monsieur?

Looks like we'll be taking a pass on expensive French wines while we are here. Shanghai police said yesterday they busted a ring of six people producing and selling fake Chateau Lafite Rothschild.

More than 4,000 bottles of fake Chateau Lafite were found in hideouts in the suburban Fengxian and Minhang districts of the city, police said yesterday. They estimated the value of the bust at about 10 million yuan (US$1.6 million).

On April 5, the police, working with the industry and commerce department, raided a company at Fengcheng Town and found hundreds of counterfeit labels and caps and a sealing machine. They followed the clues of less than great tasting wine and at a warehouse in Fengxian and Minhang districts, they confiscated 1,678 bottles of fake Chateau Lafite and 684 bottles of fake Chateau Margaux.

Police said the ring had purchased red wine from Hebei and Shandong provinces (known for producing cheap red wine) and bought caps, labels and packages from Guangdong and Shandong provinces and Shanghai to make fake Chateau Lafite. The suspects sold the fake wine to less than sophisticated buyers (mostly Chinese millionaires with no idea what good wine should taste like) in provincial regions of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan, Shandong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan and Guangxi.

As they continued their search, police found yet another warehouse with more than 2,000 bottles of fake Chateau Lafite.

The fake French wine was one of nearly 900 infringement cases solved by the city's police this year, said Yang Lieyi, deputy director of the commercial crime department of Shanghai police.

Yang said yesterday that police had detained more than 1,900 suspects in the first seven months for intellectual property crime, and the total value of illicit money reached nearly 300 million yuan (US$47 million).

So as of now just to be on the safe side, we'll be adding expensive French wine to the list of fake stuff we have to watch out for.