Get real and buy smart

Despite the efforts of the Customs department, Hong Kong is known as a place where anyone can buy fake just-about-everything. It does not take much of a search through the streets of the SAR before you come across pirated VCDs and CDs, and fake designer handbags, watches, jewellery and clothes.

But people who buy these fakes are usually aware that what they are purchasing is not the real thing. It might have come as a surprise to shoppers using discount retailer AdMart that they were buying bottles of counterfeited 95 Mouton Cadet and Hennessy XO cognac.

Re-bottling and re-labelling inexpensive wines and spirits with more prestigious names is nothing new; it is a big enough problem that some chateaux and winemakers have come up with ways to make things difficult for counterfeiters. Some engrave their bottles with numbers, others use heavily embossed labels, which are difficult to reproduce.

Claes Rydberg, chairman of the Liquor and Provision Industries Association (LPIA) and managing director of Riche Monde, Hennessy XO's sole Hong Kong distributer, said it was AdMart's low price that alerted them that the store was selling the fake bottles.

'The current price of Hennessy XO in the chain stores is between $1,350 and $1,375. Just before the Mid-Autumn Festival, AdMart was selling it for around $990, and it sometimes went down to $900.

'This raised our suspicions because we knew we were not supplying it to them; if we had, they would be losing money [on the bottles]. We questioned where they were buying it from, and we realised they had sourced it from elsewhere.' Mr Rydberg admitted that to the untrained eye, it might have been difficult to tell the real bottles from the fake.

'The customer who regularly buys Hennessy XO can probably see it's different: there's the printing on the labels, the quality of the labels and the box.