The Italian police have broken up a gang of counterfeiters who wanted to sell around 11,000 fake bottles of the famous supertuscan Tiganello of Antinori in Germany, Italy and Belgium. Nine people are under suspicion. The person presumably responsible is in custody, two were placed under house arrest. Six more people are under investigation, the public prosecutor's office in Parma reports.
According to the Antinori winery, the bottles were fitted with forged labels from the 2009, 2010 and 2011 vintages. However, they had contained a cheap, previously unknown wine. The investigators have been on the trail of the fraudsters based on information from a printing company in Pistoia, local media report. There 4,500 labels of the three vintages were to be printed. However, the back label contained a spelling mistake: Instead of "altitudine" (height) the forgers wrote "altidudine".
(uka)