Shakespeare was wrong

Can the universally admired and respected Shakespeare be wrong? The Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon was a shrewd observer of human strengths and weaknesses.  Through his myriad characters, he has given the world more pearls of wisdom than any philosopher.  Where then has he gone wrong?

In his heart-wrenching tragedy of young, star-crossed lovers, Juliet asks Romeo, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” This appears to be so obviously right and so aptly phrased that it would be foolish to call its wisdom into question. But Shakespeare was wrong here for once. Dead wrong.

Of course the smell doesn't change just because you call a rose by a different name or leave it unnamed. But whether that flower smells sweet or not depends on what you call it. What's in a name? Everything. In fact, the name is the thing. We are so lazy that we happily take decisions based on names, not substance. Let me give you a fascinating example.

Rudy Kurniawan, 35, a Chinese Indonesian who has been living in the United States since 2001, was arrested by the FBI in the first week of March and indicted last week. His crime? He made millions of dollars by passing off cheap wine as rarest of rare vintage for more than six years. His victims? Not ignorant shoppers but some of the most learned wine experts, super rich wine drinkers, and highly respected auctioneers of rare wines. How did he fool the most cultivated of palates with cheap wines?

Please go to Mail Online  of May 15, 2012 or New York Magazine of May 13, 2012 for the full story of the fraud. While there are many factors that helped Kurniawan perpetrate the fraud in the highest rungs of the obscenely expensive vintage wines market (a 1945 DRC Romanee-Conti was sold last year for $124,000!) year after year, what is interesting is the role played by genuine bottles and well executed copies of old labels. About fifty years ago Marshall McLuhan declared, “The medium is the message.” Similarly, we can say, the bottle is the wine.

The bottle and the name shaped the experience of the experts and persuaded them to ignore any evidence of their own palates. The bottle and the label transformed cheap, newly made wines into rare old wines and generated the pleasure rare wines are supposed to give drinkers. There were occasional murmurs about the genuineness of Kurniawan’s supply of vintage wines, but he was never caught. What finally exposed him was a slip unrelated to the taste of his wines. At an international auction he had claimed that his consignment of the famous Clos St Denis was from 1959 and 1945.  The problem was that Domaine Ponsot, the maker of this wine, had started bottling it only in the 1980s.

The whole Kurniawan episode reminds me of a scene from late 1981. My four-year-old daughter would watch British sitcoms and laugh aloud along with the canned laughter although she didn’t understand the dialogue. When asked why she was laughing, she said ‘because they’re comedies.’

Rudy Kurniawan’s photo is from Los Angeles Times.