A federal grand jury in New York today indicted Rudy Kurniawan on one count of mail fraud and three counts of wire fraud. Here is the indictment; the case has been assigned to United States District Judge Richard M. Berman of the Southern District of New York.

Pancho Campo resigned yesterday from the Institute of Masters of Wine (IMW). According to Siobhan Turner, the IMW’s executive director, he gave up his membership “in light of his move into more sports and music events and away from wine” (there was no mention of a desire to spend more time with his family). The IMW had been conducting a probe into Campo’s business practices, undertaken as a result of the controversy surrounding his work for The Wine Advocate and his dealings with some regional wine associations in Spain. According to Jim Budd, who had put a spotlight on Campo’s questionable conduct, the IMW had completed its investigation, and its board was due to meet this week to consider Campo’s case.

Via email, Siobhan Turner told me that 20 people have resigned from the IMW since its founding in 1953, a figure that includes Campo. I was surprised the number was that high; given the effort and money required to earn the Master of Wine designation, I had assumed that maybe just four or five people had ever quit or been defrocked. At any rate, the timing of Campo’s resignation—coming the same week that the IMW board was to consider his fate—certainly suggests that this was a case of jump or be pushed.

Yes, I’m still alive, and my apologies for the long silence. Thanks to those of you who inquired about my whereabouts and well-being, and thanks, too, for the very entertaining comments in the MIA post, which raised an obvious question: Does this site even really need me? (feel free to vote me off my own island).

Contrary to what some of you may have thought, I was not house sitting for Rudy Kurniawan, nor was I taken into protective custody by the FBI (the Secret Service didn’t offer me protection, either, but I certainly hope they used some).  I’ve just been extremely busy since mid-March on account of several assignments and travel. Last you heard from me, I was in Strasbourg, where I took part in a debate about the state of French cuisine. I was the sacrificial American on a panel that included two eminent French chefs, Emile Jung (whom I had last seen when he absconded with my wife) and Jean-Georges Klein; the French food writer Gilles Pudlowski; and the French historian Pascal Ory. It was a good discussion, and I was treated very nicely despite being the author of the blasphemous text—call me Salmon Rushdie—that prompted the debate.

I was in France for a week. It was a hectic trip, with not a lot of sleep; mostly, that was on account of work, but one night it was on account of my inability to find my car. Some French villages can be deceptively labyrinthine: walk up the wrong rue, and you can be wandering for hours looking for your car. A certain winemaker, who pops in here occasionally, has promised to ridicule me mercilessly over my march of folly. He did say, however, that had he found me curled up on the steps of the village church the next morning, he would have tossed a euro my way. Fortunately, I was reunited with my car before I was forced to sleep al fresco and accept his charity.

After France, I went to meet my wife and children at Disney World. Waking up in Paris and going to sleep in the Magic Kingdom was a bit harsh, but I quickly adjusted. Disney was fine, although I do regret that I didn’t spend part of a day experiencing it in an altered state. One of the funniest magazine articles of recent vintage was a story John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote about his own trip to Disney and all the marijuana that he smoked there. I re-read the piece while in Florida, and it made me laugh just as hard the second time.

Speaking of marijuana: I did an article a few weeks ago for The Daily Beast about pot wine. It was a fun story to report, and talk about herbal, weedy wines!

Lastly, even as Wine Diarist was silent, it received a nice honor: it was one of six sites nominated for Saveur Magazine’s Best Wine or Beer Blog of 2012. Saveur readers will pick the winner; voting ends today (I wanted to give you as much notice as possible). Would you vote for a blog that was not updated for six weeks? Neither would I, but I am pleased just to have been nominated. As it happens, some of the first wine writing I did was for Saveur. It was purely a function of nepotism: at the time, my wife was a senior editor there. I got to do some fun stories for the magazine, and I’m flattered that Saveur thinks so highly of Wine Diarist.

I will try to resume regularly scheduled programming in the next few days, and thanks for your patience.

Greetings from Strasbourg. Sorry for the silence since all the Kurniawan news broke; last week was insanely hectic. My thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion regarding Kurniawan’s arrest. It is a remarkable story, and it will be interesting to see where it goes from here. Thanks, too, to my friend Dr. Vino for unexpectedly pinch-hitting with an installment of The Wine Ethicist on Friday. I am traveling through the weekend but will try to resume regularly scheduled programming while on the road.

Late yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Denise L. Cote, responding to an appeal by federal prosecutors, ordered Rudy Kurniawan held without bail. My post yesterday about the bail appeal included links to the photos that the government submitted as evidence of Kurniawan’s alleged counterfeiting operation. In case you haven’t yet seen the pictures, here they are:

Federal prosecutors submitted a letter today to Judge Denise L. Cote of the U.S. District Court for the southern district of New York asking that Kurniawan be denied bail because they consider him a flight risk. The letter includes more details concerning Kurniawan’s alleged counterfeiting activities.  It states the following:

“Yesterday, the FBI searched Kurniawan’s home pursuant to a judicial search warrant and found an elaborate counterfeiting operation. The agents found and seized, among other things, the following:

• Thousands of printed wine labels to many of the most expensive wines in the world, such as Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Chateau Petrus. A photograph of some of the labels that were seized is attached as Exhibit A.

• Hundreds of corks, foil wrappers used to cover corks, and wax used to seal corks.  A photograph of some of the foil wrappers and labels is attached as Exhibit B.

• Scores of rubber stamps for vintages (years in which a wine was made), the names of wineries, and other identifying features found on wine bottles. A photograph of some of the rubber stamps is attached as Exhibit C.

• Glue, stencils, special scissors that cut paper in the particular pattern of certain wine labels.

• A mechanical device used to insert corks into wine bottles.

• Scores of bottles in the preparatory stages of being converted into counterfeit bottles, such as bottles without labels, bottles with inconsistent labeling (for example, bottles with counterfeit labels attached but some of the authentic labels still on the bottle because they had not yet been removed by Kurniawan).

• Bottles of moderately priced California wine with writing on the bottles indicating that the California wines would be used to pass as expensive Bordeaux wines.

• Bottles soaking in the kitchen sink to aid in the removal of the wine labels.

The evidence of Kurniawan’s counterfeiting activities, based on the results of the search of his home alone, is overwhelming.”

You can read the entire letter here.

Update: And here is Exhibit A, Exhibit B, and Exhibit C.

Rudy Kurniawan was arrested yesterday and charged with three counts of wire fraud and two counts of mail fraud in conjunction with the attempted sale of counterfeit wines. He was taken into custody by FBI agents in Los Angeles and is being transferred to New York. I will have some more comments later, but here’s the complaint that was filed against him by federal prosecutors in New York; the details are pretty amazing (among the many morsels: Kurniawan racked up over $16 million in American Express charges between 2006 and 2011, and he has been living illegally in the United States since 2003, when his asylum appeal was rejected and he was ordered to leave the country).

Aubert de Villaine was in New York two weeks ago to a host tasting of the 2009 vintage from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. It’s an annual event organized by DRC’s longtime U.S. importer, Wilson Daniels, and I’ve now had the pleasure of attending it twice. Truth be told, I would have traveled the two hours that it took me to get to New York even if there’d been no wines to taste; merely having the pleasure of de Villaine’s company would have sufficed. He is a remarkable man, whose wisdom about Burgundy, wine, and much else is immense. Back in 2009, I had the opportunity to spend a few days with him in Burgundy, and of all the experiences I’ve had as a wine writer, it’s the one I most cherish.

Around 40 people were on hand for the tasting, a mix of sommeliers, retailers, distributors, auctioneers, and journalists. De Villaine made some introductory remarks before we put our palates to work. He seemed delighted with the 2009 vintage, comparing it to 1959. Bud break came early, as is the norm these days. There was a lot of humidity in April, May, and June, which brought the threat of mildew. August was a scorcher, with drought conditions at points. The dry conditions persisted into September, although temperatures moderated.

The domaine began harvesting in Corton on September 10^th, and in Vosne-Romanée on the 13^th. The Montrachet vineyard was picked two days later. According to de Villaine, the yields in 2009 averaged 30 hectoliters per hectare, which he described as “a very nice crop.” It was a vintage with small clusters and small berries, too, which meant very concentrated fruit. “They were the best grapes we had seen since 2005,” he said, and the resulting wines were characterized, in his words, by “tenderness, immediacy, and seduction.” He returned to the 1959 analogy, telling us he’d never before experienced a year that came so close to mirroring that celebrated vintage. He said 1959 “gave a smile to the vignerons, and to the consumers—there was good quantity, and the wines were so pleasant from the beginning and for many years afterwards.”

After we’d tasted the wines, de Villaine shared some news: beginning with the 2009 vintage, DRC is no longer making supersized bottles; it’s now just 750mls and magnums. He said the domaine had noted that larger bottles tended to end up on the auction market, and to the extent that it can, DRC wants to discourage speculation. This led to a brief discussion of the counterfeiting issue, which has lately put DRC in the spotlight. De Villaine said the domaine has been urging restaurants to smash empty bottles of DRC or to at least mark them in some way, and it has also taken other, undisclosed steps to combat fraud. But he went on to say that he was reluctant to “feed the paranoia” that has sprung up around this issue; he told us that people have visited DRC with bottles they were convinced were fakes but that turned out to be fine.

This year’s tasting marked the debut of an addition to the DRC stable, a Corton. In November 2008, DRC acquired vines in three climats of the grand cru Corton appellation, Clos du Roi, Les Renardes, and Les Bressandes, and it made its first wine from those sites in 2009. De Villaine said they hope to eventually bottle the three sites separately but that there aren’t enough old vines at this point to do so. He is confident DRC can make “very great wine” in Corton but said it would take 20 years to maximize the potential of the vineyards. They vinified the Corton the same way they do the Côte de Nuits reds but used only 50 percent new oak because they didn’t feel it could absorb the wood as well as the Vosne-Romanée wines, which saw virtually100 percent.

So how were the wines? In a word, spectacular. The tasting was a reminder of why it is good to check your preconceptions at the door. There has been a lot of talk about the ripeness of the 2009 vintage in Burgundy, and it seemed many people expected the wines to be kind of plump and amorphous—not a vintage for Burgundy purists. In fact, though, the wines, while certainly ripe, had ample freshness, minerality, and grip; they are precocious but have the stuffing to age beautifully. They are not quite at the same level as the domaine’s 2005s or 1999s, but it is a great vintage for DRC, and it would be treat to own any of the wines. It was a treat just to taste them. Drinking DRC, the writer Roald Dahl once said, was like “having an orgasm in the mouth and the nose at the same time.” I suspect Dahl would have keeled over in ecstasy during this tasting.

Here, then, my (G-rated) tasting notes:

2009 Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru: The sixth time that DRC has produced this cuvée since 1999, and the 2009 edition is a gem. It is a medium-weight, succulent wine with ripe dark berries, a winsome floral aspect, and a pinch of spice. Excellent balance and length, and while it doesn’t have the gravitas of the grands crus, it is nevertheless superb. If only all entry-level wines could be this good. A-.

2009 Corton: A slight sternness to the nose—oddly, the word “Calvinist” sprang to mind (too much Rick Santorum on my television?)—with soil and stem notes dominating. Don’t let the austere aromatics deter you: this is a joy to drink. Sinewy, with great vigor and structure and a nice kick of saline minerality. There’s abundant fruit, but it plays a supporting role to the savory aspects. This is one impressive debut–like a rookie hitting a home run in his first at-bat. A-/A.

2009 Échézeaux: A somewhat dusty bouquet, with raspberry, earth, floral, and sandalwood aromas. Taut on the palate, with crisp berry fruit and sensational minerality and concentration. Impeccably proportioned, too. The Échézeaux doesn’t exude as much personality as the other wines, but that may just be a function of youth. It is, at any rate, a delicious wine. A-.

2009 Grands-Échézeaux: Broad-shouldered, and showing a little disjointed at the moment. Sappy dark fruit, robust but ripe tannins, and a heady wintergreen note across the palate. As with the Corton, there is a distinct savory edge to the Grands-Échézeaux, which I like very much. The toughest wine to taste this morning, but all the elements appear to be in place for a long and rewarding life. A-.

2009 Romanée-St-Vivant: An ambrosial scent of berries and flowers floats up from the glass, along with suggestions of anise and stone. The flavors here are so delicate but so deep—if you prize subtlety and gentle persuasion, this is your wine. Some words from my notebook: lithe, seamless, ethereal. Once a laggard in the DRC cellar, the RSV has been steadily improving, and they hit pay dirt with the strikingly beautiful 2009. A+.

Richebourg 2009: while the RSV is all about discreet charm, the Richebourg is ready to play and eager to please—it is such an effusive wine I half-expected it to jump out of the glass and into my lap. Cassis, spice, soy, and a touch of cured meat on the nose. A rich, muscular wine, but with great freshness and length and a terrific stony mineral note. I adore the tannins on this one, too—they are big but perfectly ripe and integrated. A knockout. A.

2009 La Tâche: The La Tâche takes the complexity and finesse to another universe. A come-hither nose evocative of cherries, rose petals, earth, and exotic spice—this is such a seductively perfumed wine that it could double as a love potion. The La Tâche builds in depth and dimension as it unfurls in the mouth, but what buckles the knees is the sensuality and harmoniousness of the flavors.  With the wine’s velvety tannins and subtle acidity, you could almost say the structure is seen but not heard. The finish has no finish—it just goes on and on. Brilliant. A+.

2009 Romanée-Conti: A kaleidoscopic bouquet redolent of cassis, sandalwood, flowers, soy, earth, and wintergreen. The purity of the fruit is amazing, but what really stands out here is the silken texture, the aura of completeness, and the poise. As ever with this wine in its infancy, there is a brooding aspect—a sense that something is behind kept in reserve, that there are (forgive the cliché) hidden depths.  The RC has the most regal bearing of any wine I know, and my impulse is simply to genuflect. A+.

2009 Montrachet: A lemon verbena aroma soars out of the glass, along with a bracing mineral scent and some vanilla and white pepper. Medium-bodied—svelte, even— with racy citrus and white fruit flavors and brisk acidity. This is very young and inchoate, but it is already such bliss to drink. I love the marzipan note on the finish, whose persistence is measured in minutes, not seconds. If I ever hit it big in the lottery, the DRC Montrachet is going to be my house white, and yes, you’re all invited over.  A+.

So as you may have heard, Robert Parker just released his final, in-bottle reviews of the 2009 Bordeaux vintage and gave 100-point ratings to 19—count ‘em, 19—wines, a profusion of perfect scores without precedent in the annals of Parkerism (sorry, that orgy of alliteration just kind of wrote itself, and it’s so bad that I couldn’t resist the urge to keep it). By contrast, he awarded 100-point scores to just six wines from the fabled 1982 Bordeaux vintage, and gave only two wines from the brilliant class of 2005 his highest mark.  While there is generally a lot of enthusiasm for the 2009s, Parker, with his maximum, Nigel-Tufnel-crank-it-to-11 bullishness, has now turned this vintage into a referendum on the late-era Parker palate.

Anticipating the many raised eyebrows that greeted his Bordeaux report, which he titled “The Empire Strikes Back” (what empire he was referring to, and who it was striking back against, was not clear), Parker posted a missive on eBob late last week in which he proclaimed 2009 to be “the greatest Bordeaux vintage I have ever tasted” and suggested that it could go down as the finest Bordeaux vintage ever. He brushed aside concerns over grade inflation and said the astronomical scores speak to the dramatic improvements that the Bordelais have made in their vineyards and cellars over the last three decades.

He conceded that there is superlative fatigue with Bordeaux these days but said he’d be remiss in his duties as a critic if he didn’t scream the praises of the 2009s. “Perhaps the most remarkable thing about 2009 is that there is no ‘buzz,’” he wrote. “We are all tired of the newest Vintage of the Century, but when the real one happens, it has to be recognized, and someone has to point it out. That is not called hype, but accountability, fairness, and independent professional reporting.”

Despite Parker’s attempt to head off criticism, there has already been much snickering and second-guessing concerning his 2009 ratings. Some people have noted that carnival-barking seems to be his thing now; he’s become the Bob who cried whoopee. He gushed that 2000 was “the greatest vintage Bordeaux has ever produced.” After tasting the 2005 Bordeaux vintage from bottle, he declared it “the greatest vintage produced during my 30-year career.” Not long thereafter, he said that 2007 in the southern Rhone “may be the most compelling vintage of any viticultural region I have ever tasted.” His Riedel clearly runneth over.

However, I’m writing this post not to mock Parker but to express some admiration for him. Say what you will about his 2009 scores, he has made a bold call at a point in his career when he certainly doesn’t need to throw Hail Marys. By lavishing such effusive praise on the 2009s and dishing out so many 100-point ratings, he has now staked his reputation on this vintage (and he acknowledged as much in his comment on eBob).  If these wines start cracking up in 15 years, or just don’t turn out to be as good as he claims they are, his legacy won’t necessarily be destroyed, but it will be badly tarnished. The title of his report will need to be changed from “The Empire Strikes Back” to “The Emperor Commits Hara-Kiri.”

It has been suggested that Parker’s Bordeaux review is just an attention-getting ploy by a veteran critic who senses his audience slipping away. Sure, Parker’s influence has waned in recent years, but I can’t imagine that he would risk his reputation like this simply to get a burst of publicity.  I think he genuinely believes that 2009 is the finest Bordeaux vintage of his career and that it has the potential to go down as the region’s greatest year ever, and I give him credit for not hedging even one bit. It’s a ballsy thing to do at a stage in his life when prudence would suggest focusing on legacy preservation rather than legacy enhancement.

Some big news: Noel Pinguet is quitting Domaine Huet after more than 30 years as its winemaker. The son-in-law of the legendary Gaston Huet, Pinguet is leaving because of differences with the domaine’s owners, the Hwang family. The Hwangs want to increase production of the estate’s dry Vouvrays; Pinguet objected to the change and decided to leave three years ahead of his planned retirement from the celebrated Loire domaine.

This afternoon, I emailed Mannie Berk of The Rare Wine Company, which imports Huet to the United States, to ask about Pinguet’s rumored departure, and he sent me the following:

Noel is indeed leaving. There’s an article in La Revue du Vin de France that is basis for the rumor. If you haven’t read it, here it is:

http://www.larvf.com/,vin-noel-pinguet-domaine-huet-vouvray-loire-touraine-biodynamisme-hwang,10341,4026010.asp

The long and the short of it, from my point of view, is that he will be a loss to the estate, but we owe it to the estate and its long history to put his departure in context: this is not the end of Huet’s long period of greatness. Some points:

The quality will not change. In fact, the quality and consistency have only improved in the Hwang era. And I think that committing to a larger proportion of Sec wines (which the world has warmly welcomed and, as the RVF article notes, has been encouraged by the Hwangs) will only strengthen the demi-sec and dessert wines at this estate – refining the selection of fruit for these cuvées.

The long time cellar-master/vineyard manager, Jean-Bernard Berthomé, and Noel’s hand-picked successor, Benjamin Joliveau, are both staying on and committed to building on the strong base they’ve inherited from Noel (and Gaston Huet before him).

Furthermore, as the RVF article points out, Noel had already planned his departure (in 2015). The team he leaves behind is highly skilled and passionate.

Just looking back over the past 2 or 3 years, you get a strong sense of the positive influences the Hwangs have had on the estate. I am absolutely confident in the future.