Champagne toasts life celebrations and rites of passage and, as you celebrate Christmas and the arrival of another year, it’s unlikely that violent uprisings in the vineyards will come to mind. But a century ago, thousands of grape growers took to the streets of Épernay, confronting a sabre-wielding French cavalry. Champagne houses were burned to the ground and wine flowed down glass-strewn roads. In 1911, thousands of poverty-stricken growers marched in protest against the production and sale of fake fizz. À bas la fraude (“Down with fraud”) their placards read. Unscrupulous merchants were buying cheap white wines from the Loire Valley and the Languedoc by the trainload and turning them into “Champagne”, depressing local grape prices and creating widespread privation.

You may be surprised to hear that the history of wine is not as pure as its makers would have us believe. Our image of wine as a natural product, grown in bucolic vineyards in rural idylls is only one side of the story: our idealistic notions about the Arcadian charm of grape growing and winemaking are often misplaced. There are plenty of charming hillside villages and chocolate box towns surrounded by a cascade of vines, but there have always been less than scrupulous members of the trade willing to sacrifice morals for monetary gain. From the Ancient Greeks – who added herbs, honey and seawater to wine – to the seventeenth century German merchants adding lead-laced grape reductions, the reasons for adulterating wine in its earlier history have often been to make it more palatable and ultimately easier to sell. Wine would sour quickly and could not be transported far without becoming unpalatable. It is only in recent decades that scientific advances have allowed wine to be shipped from all four corners of the world to your nearest supermarket shelf, in pristine condition.

However, the nature of wine tinkering has changed over time, from making everyday wine palatable to deception over the origins of the product. In the twentieth century the importance of a wine’s roots became the centre of attention. The creation of the appellation system in France in the 1930s supposedly guaranteed that the grapes in a bottle sporting Saint-Émilion or Châteauneuf-du-Pape on the label came from within the village’s borders, not from the Languedoc or Algeria. It was hoped this would put an end to fraud, but in 1973 one of France’s most prestigious wine families was caught flagrantly abusing the rules: barrels of rich Riviera reds were sold as prestigious Bordeaux and rough plonk was sold to the US as Beaujolais. The international media delighted in the story – and the after-hours hospitality put on by the Bordelais. It was clear that regulations were not enough to prevent the determined from scamming the end users.

Forgeries leave wine collectors with bottles of what one duped billionaire branded “moose piss”

While cases of mislabelling and creative blending continue to emerge, conning rich wine collectors is the wine fraud of choice in the late twentieth and early 21st century. Fine wine is now considered an investment and the emergence of blue-chip wines has made it ripe for the picking. What’s more, the arrival of Chinese collectors in the noughties created massive speculation and prices rocketed: single bottles of rare Burgundy or mature Bordeaux can change hands for thousands of pounds. However, forgeries are all too common and many convincing fakes have slipped through the net, leaving unsuspecting wine collectors with bottles of what one duped billionaire branded “moose piss”. The rather chummy world of fine wine has only itself to blame: a good lunch and a shared bottle of claret have all too often been the basis of trust between buyers and vendors. More rigorous authentication is needed, and that’s changing slowly, but it’s still a case of buyer beware.

The wine world is not alone in attracting talented chancers: fakery is rampant in the fashion industry, with convincing Louis Vuitton handbags and Ray-Bans available on market stalls at bargain basement prices. In the rather more elite world of fine art, talented artists have embarrassed many dealers and galleries by convincing these so-called experts that their fake masterpieces are genuine. Eric Hebborn, a British artist-turned-scammer published The Art Forger’s Handbook, sharing his secrets on how to mimic a masterpiece. Trained at the Royal Academy of Art in London, and in Rome, the talented artist was told that his drawings resembled those of sixteenth-century artist Nicolas Poussin; it sowed a seed that germinated. In the 1960s and 1970s he managed to convince experts and collectors that his fakes were the real thing: Bruegel, Castiglione, Rubens… the list goes on. The tools of the trade, he revealed, could be found in most kitchens: breadcrumbs, milk, tea, coffee, raw potatoes and olive oil were all on his faker’s shopping list. His basket flowed over until suspicions started to be raised over the materials he used. An art curator who had bought several “masterpieces” discovered that two of his artworks by different Italian artists had been created on the same paper, which was impossible.

Likewise, in 2008, suspicion fell on high-rolling wine collector Rudy Kurniawan after he tried to sell at auction a bottle of 1929 Clos de la Roche from Domaine Ponsot, a family-run winery in Burgundy. The domaine hadn’t started bottling this wine until 1934. But an auction house had unwittingly endorsed it by featuring it in the sale catalogue. Similarly, two decades earlier, Christie’s had endorsed and sold a single bottle of Bordeaux supposedly belonging to Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. The buyer – media mogul Malcolm Forbes – had been assured by the auction house that it was the real deal, and paid a record-breaking £105,000 pounds. It later turned out the experts’ word was far from a guarantee.

Here’s the crux: the art world still relies on human experts to verify a work’s authenticity and set its value. It is the same with fine wine. The author of The Art of Forgery, Noah Charney, says: “In the world of art, perception is all. If the world believes that a work is authentic, then its value is that of an authentic work, whatever the truth may be.” This seems to be true of many of the wines that Kurniawan and the Jefferson bottles’ finder, Hardy Rodenstock, poured with invited wine experts and sold to dealers. High-profile individuals declared them to be the real deal and it gave the fraudsters and their wine collections an aura of authenticity. As a result, there are certain to be fakes lurking in the racks of wealthy wine collectors, but the problem is that there are very few rich men (the realm of wine collecting remains predominantly male) who will publicly admit they’ve been duped. Many of them may not even know.

And how would they know it was a fake if the old bottle of wine they were drinking was genuine? The likes of Kurniawan made fakes of very expensive wines using recipes that involved a blend of prized wines that most of us would consider far too expensive to drink. Conversely, most adulteration throughout history has been undertaken to camouflage the defects in poor wines, such as adding herbs and spices or a lead-laced grape reduction to the bottle, or blending rich Algerian reds with weedy Burgundy Pinot Noir. Throughout history, the purpose of wine, beyond intoxication, has always been to provide pleasure – so perhaps these creative winemakers have merely been saving us from a glass of sour wine. A well-made wine that has strayed from the letter of the law may still provide as much pleasure as the genuine article. Instead of vilifying those who have slipped the straitjacket of regulations, perhaps we ought to be passing on our thanks.

Rebecca Gibb is a Master of Wine. Her book “Vintage Crime: A Short History of Wine Fraud” is out now (University of California Press, £25)