Jake's View | Cheers to the wine fakers who help tell us what's real

I find it hard to get worked up about the evils of wine faking. In fact, in some ways I think fakers provide a valuable service to society. They make it plain when consumer goods are overpriced.

There are some exceptions to be made, of course. I don't approve of fake aircraft parts, fake infant milk formula and fake medicines. Law enforcement agencies are well employed when protecting the public from such things.

But where is the deep evil in a bottle of wine that is not quite what it is billed to be, particularly when many of the wine drinkers whom the fakers target cannot tell the difference anyway?

To my way of thinking there is a good laugh to be had when we read that Bill Koch, an American billionaire who owns 43,000 bottles of wine, discovered that several prized bottles reputed to be part of the private collection of American president Thomas Jefferson were all fakes. Tell me that you didn't think it worth a giggle.

Mr Koch probably never intended to drink the wine anyway, which only says that he should have done a better job of checking the provenance. The case is different for people who actually buy to drink.

If it really were easy every time to tell a prize wine from a bottle of plonk then bottles of plonk could never be sold as prize wine. Faking is only possible because claims of a huge difference between prize wine and plonk - enough to justify a difference of tens of thousands of dollars in price - do not pass the market test. Large numbers of people cannot tell the difference.