A Taiwanese billionaire, Wood Chen, is being linked to a new ‘fake wine’ scandal with links to some of the country’s leading tycoons. Two merchants, Top 100 Wine and UMC are embroiled in the affair, having sold up to NZ$50m worth of wine, including high-end Burgundy, that is now under a veil of suspicion. One of the stories doing the rounds in Taiwan (and now around the globe) is that a gathering of many of the nation’s richest wine-lovers resulted in a diverse set of wines looking and tasting nearly identical.
The path of the wines on the tables led back to Wood Chen – the billionaire former chairman of electronics giant Yageo Corporation, who is well-known for his love of top wine and fine dining. However, since 2019, the 67-year-old businessman has been ‘selling off’ his wine collection to friends, either directly or via merchants such as UMC.
Such is the scandal engulfing the trade in Taiwan, that reports say that Huang Huihong, of Top 100 Wine, has agreed to accept returns and reimburse his clients, and has revealed that the batch of suspect wines did come from Wood Chen.
It is thought that some collectors have bought “hundreds of bottles of rare Burgundy”, such as Domaine Dujac 2006 Grand Cru Chambertin. That is enough alone to raise suspicions – as only a few hundred bottles are distributed annually across the globe in a year. So, for them all to end up in Taiwan would be rather incredulous.
In another twist to the tale, Wood Chen’s brother, entrepreneur Pierre Chen, is in the process of auctioning off a wine collection that has been labelled ‘The Epicurean’s Atlas’. Sotheby’s expects to fetch a record $50m (£39.2m) by auctioning off the collection of bottles. It is being auctioned in stages – having started in Europe, and will progress to sales in New York and Hong Kong. There is, however, nothing to suggest a connection between Wood Chen’s wines and those owned by his brother.
