When Older Means Better

Last month the British newspapers devoted considerable space to the news that a customer in a restaurant had returned a bottle of wine. He was concerned that his £18,000 magnum of 1961 Château Pétrus might be a fake: apparently the cork did not carry the stamp of authenticity he was looking for. Elsewhere in the wine world, collector William Koch has apparently hired a former British Secret Service agent and a nuclear physicist to help determine whether his bottles of 18th-century claret once owned by Thomas Jefferson are what he thought they were when he bought them.

In the luxury world, fakes are normally associated with counterfeit handbags, accessories and watches. However, now that the concept of vintage luxury is taking root, with certain old luxury items rising in price, there are more opportunities for the unscrupulous. When it comes to wine, a "real" bottle from a relatively inauspicious vintage can be fitted with a trophy label—something like a 1982—dramatically increasing the bottle's value.

The customer who ordered the Pétrus was reportedly rather cross. Apparently the wine had been reserved weeks in advance, and it's easy to imagine the sense of mounting anticipation: inviting select friends to savor the moment of triumph, the excitement as he walked into the restaurant feeling all eyes upon him, the delicious moment of summoning the sacerdotal bottle, the solemn ritual of pulling the cork—and then, as with a big-game hunter about to bag an elephant, the gun jams.

The problem with vintage luxury is that often such items date from an era when products were not badges of status and dignity but rather simply well-made goods—in this case, a bottle of admittedly high-quality red wine made by a family company. But the passage of time had changed it from a bottle of wine into a potent status symbol.

Vintage luxury harks back to a time when things tended to be a good deal more handmade than they are today. And while this handmade quality accounted for products of character and individuality, it also admitted scope for human error. With the Pétrus, perhaps the winemakers simply ran out of the corks that were normally used and had to make do with another one. However, what was a matter of little consequence almost half a century ago is enough to make the national newspapers in the early 21st century: this is what happens when we apply the rigorous standards of today to a product made when the world was a very different place.

Cigars, long a sign of plutocracy, offer an analogous example. Today there are a few vintage smokes that really appeal to the collector: Cuban Dunhill Cabinetta, Cuban Davidoff and the Flor de Cano Short Churchill. These cigars, dating from the 1980s, now fetch up to £5,000 a box—if you can find them. "There are more fakes than real ones around," says Edward Sahakian of Davidoff in London. "You used to be able to tell by the boxes, but now fakers are filling old boxes with new cigars, so really you have to rely on your own senses of sight, smell and, of course, taste."