British restaurants have been unwittingly selling "champagne" that was bottled in a factory in Turin by Italian "wine counterfeiters" as part of a Europe-wide fraud involving hundreds of thousands of bottles.
French customs officials discovered the fake champagne when they seized a batch of 2,000 suspect bottles, provoking an investigation by police in Turin and the champagne industry in France.
But even drinkers in France had been conned by the wine, the labels of which featured invented champagne houses and spelling errors.
Although the fake labels were impressively realistic in appearance, they also contained clear giveaways to anyone with even a poor grasp of French culture. The "Raymond Vadim" selection was an apparent mix up with Roger Vadim, the film director.
Italian police raided a dozen mafia workshops in Turin, where the wine was bottled, labelled, and put in crates. They recently found bottles in small supermarkets and several wine cellars, on sale at bargain prices.
http://www.independent.ie/world-news/some-bottle----mafias-fake-champagne-scam-uncorked-1698050.html
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