Business Notes BEVERAGES

Montrachet, a white wine produced by the French vintner Domaine de la Romanee- Conti, features a penetrating yet silky fragrance, a rich and robust fruit -- and a price tag that will knock your socks off. For $500 a bottle, oenophiles who purchase the world-famous Chardonnay expect to enjoy one of the world's great wines. Now it seems that some of them would have been better off with a bottle of Chateau Toledo. Attracted by the bouquet of easy profit, wine counterfeiters have produced bogus bottles of DRC Montrachet, which have turned up in California and as far away as Tokyo.

The mock Montrachet is probably reaching retailers through "gray-market" sales that bypass the U.S. distribution system, according to Wilson Daniels Ltd., DRC's American distributor, which denies any connection to the fakes. The counterfeiters produced a remarkable copy of a legitimate DRC bottle, perhaps by using a desktop computer. But a sharp-eyed Japanese consumer noticed that the vineyard designations on his bottles of Montrachet, vouching for the wine's authenticity, actually listed the name of a DRC red wine, and alerted Wilson Daniels. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is investigating.