“It’s sacrilegious,” Koch says. “Here is something beautiful and wonderful they are destroying for base reasons. How would you feel if some guy burnt the Mona Lisa? I feel my love has been violated.”
The object of Koch's complaint? It seems that he has been ripped off by counterfeiters of collector-grade wine, who bled him for more than $25 million. In response, he has sued one dealer and had his entire 43,000 bottle collection screened for fakes (investigators found 211 suspicious bottles from one dealer alone).
Koch's openness is unusual in the world of high end collectors. When the dealer who defrauded Koch was convicted, the judge delayed sentencing in hopes that other collectors would reveal other misdeeds. Nobody else did. Koch explained that "they want to dump the fake wine on some other sucker."
Also unusual is Koch's willingness to spend upwards of $800 per bottle to authenticate wines. In explaining to a reporter from Bloomberg Pursuits why he responded so strongly, he remarked that "I hate being cheated, and I was cheated a lot when I was a weak and vulnerable little boy."
The article is a remarkable attempt to show a softer, more human side to Bill Koch, at least to the high-end audience of Bloomberg Pursuits. People who typically spend $8 on a bottle of wine might not be won over, but they don't seem to be the primary audience for this message. As someone who is coming around the the view that most all public utterances by such figures are strategic, it's interesting to see that Koch apparently thinks that such revelations actually help his position. I have my doubts.