Fraud with empty wine bottles in China

Planning to crack a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1982? Do not throw the empty bottle away because on the black market in Hong Kong it can fetch up to 10,000 HKD (approx. 900 euros), according to an article on the CNN-website on wine fraud in China. The empty bottle is filled with cheap wine and sold or given as a gift as if it were the real thing. A bottle of Lafite Rothschild 1982 fetches about 4.000 euros in Hong Kong and mainland China. Websites and wine merchants in China openly bid on empty bottles of rare and expensive wines. To avoid such fraud, honest dealers, auction houses and wine clubs in Hong Kong destroy all empty wine bottles at the end of a wine tasting. Wine counterfeiting is big business in China. According to CNN five percent of all wine on sale in China is forged. The Chinese wine market is worth 9.8 billion euros.