Spanish winemaker accused of passing off cheap bottles as quality vintages in £22m fraud
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A winemaker was accused of masterminding a £22 million fraud by passing off millions of bottles of lower grade wine as better-quality vintages in what is believed to be the largest fraud of its kind in Spain.
A husband, his wife and her sister and three other executives allegedly pretended their wine was from the Denomination of Origin of Terra Alta and Priorat and other types of wine, when in fact it was the inferior grade Reserva de la Tierra.
The company flooded supermarkets in Spain with 15 million bottles of lower-quality wine and even sold some in the United States and China, where Priorat wine is popular, court papers said.
The case began in 2020 after a routine check on the company’s wines at a supermarket in Falset, Catalonia, northeastern Spain.
Inspectors discovered some of the labels for the Denomination of Origin of Montsant were false, according to its president Pilar Just.
Police seized 752,000 fake bottles of wine at the premises of the company, which has now gone into administration. The judge has frozen the sale of 18 brands of wine sold by the company.
The six defendants, who have not been named by the magistrate investigating the case as is standard practice in Spain, face charges of offences against industrial property, fraud, false publicity and false documentation.
They must appear next month in court in Tarragona, Catalonia. None have entered a plea.
