DoubleLine's Gundlach sues California wine merchant over bogus Bordeaux

Bottles of Chateau Latour, Chateau Haut-Marbuzet, Chateau de l'Evangile, and Chateau la Mission Haut-Brion. (Flickr / filtran) · Reuters

By Jennifer Ablan and Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK, July 28 (Reuters) - Jeffrey Gundlach, one of the world's best-known bond investors, has sued a California wine merchant he said sold him several dozen bottles of fake wine, including Bordeaux that experts consider among the greatest wines ever made.

In lawsuits filed on Friday, the founder of DoubleLine Capital claimed that at least 67 bottles he bought from Soutirage were fake, and that it would cost more than $1 million to replace them.

Gundlach raised similar claims in a separate lawsuit against Soutirage's founders Chad Meyer, Aimee Meyer, Matthew Wilson and Ashley Wilson. They were not immediately available for comment.

Gundlach said Soutirage assured him the wines were real after he expressed concern, but that subsequent testing by a "world-renowned" expert he hired proved otherwise.

Among the wines he said were bogus were several classic wines from the Bordeaux region in France, including a 1928 Latour, a 1947 Cheval Blanc, and a magnum of 1961 Petrus.

"Soutirage is nothing but a crass huckster," Gundlach said in a complaint filed in a California state court in Los Angeles.

Gundlach is seeking damages at least equal to his cost to replace the fake bottles with real ones.

A spokeswoman for Gundlach, considered by some on Wall Street as the Bond King, declined to comment.

The lawsuit is one of a handful in recent years in the United States challenging the authenticity of various wines.

The billionaire William Koch, the younger brother of billionaires Charles and David Koch, has filed a variety of such lawsuits over the years, including one against Silicon Valley entrepreneur Eric Greenberg where he was awarded $1.15 million. (Reporting By Jennifer Ablan and Jonathan Stempel; Editing by Tom Brown)