1700 Fake Bottles of Pêra Manca Colheita 2010 confiscated

[Christian Gollnick]

Anybody who has bought a bottle of the Colheita 2010 of Pêra Manca should check the alcohol volume number on the label. If it is 14%, then you might have a fake bottle. In Portugal 1700 bottles were confiscated from this fantastic wine...this wine reaches prices of up to EUR 350 per bottle, so quite an incentive for the fakers... The bottles were offered mainly to people in Angola but also to some in Portugal.
One of the identifiers of the fake bottles is the wrong alcohol content (14% instead of the correct 14.5%).
The article describes also a few other things that the criminals got wrong... It's in portuguese, so most people will have to run it through a translation web-page...

http://www.dn.pt/sociedade/interior/per ... 07165.html

[Eric Ifune]

I'm assuming this is the Tinto since it's so expensive. Does anyone know how well the bottle and label look?

[Christian Gollnick]

No idea, Eric. But I think the label must be pretty well done - obviously it's quite difficult to spot the fake bottles.

At least the producer is very open about this case and wrote a long article about how they will avoid any more false bottles in the future... interesting read. However, currently only available on their Portuguese page, not their English page.

http://www.cartuxa.pt/pt/news/8/0/0/

[Brian C.]

Is the real version worth the money?

[Eric Ifune]

I visited the estate this past spring. Wonderful wines in general. The Perimanca Tinto was great but very expensive. The Tinto Reserva was nearly as good but a third the price. The Perimanca Branco was terrific as well but a much better bargain being as expensive as the Tinto Reserva.