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It’s rare for a con artist to spill their secrets – especially one with a criminal conviction. But French wine merchant Jean-Sébastien Laflèche is far from your average fraudster. Having worked in wine since the age of 18, Laflèche was already an old hand in the trade by the time he became the mastermind behind the largest wine scam in Bordeaux’s history.
The 57-year-old was one of five individuals convicted in January 2023 by a Bordeaux court for a fraud operation that led to millions of litres of cheap Spanish wine being falsely passed off as French, ranging from table wine to well-known appellations like Margaux and Médoc.
Laflèche was given a sentence of two years imprisonment but did not spend any time in jail as one year was suspended and the other year was served wearing an electronic tag.
In an interview with Voxeurop, he said the scam had been simple to execute.
“All you have to do is buy Spanish bulk wine, then blend it. Then you work with a big winery, you get a contract with a big chain of shops or supermarkets and sell them wine labelled as ‘Vin de France’,” said the Frenchman, who was also fined €235,000, and banned from working in the wine industry for five years. Anyway, Laflèche added, “how do you expect a distributor to know if it’s fraudulent wine?”
The scam ran between 2014 and 2016 in a period of poor harvests, and involved at least 34,587 hectolitres of Spanish bulk wine – the equivalent of about 4.5 million bottles. The counterfeit wine was then sold to shops and restaurants not just in France but across Europe and further afield by a wine producer in Bordeaux that ran the swindle along with Laflèche.
