Actually just now seeing the wine bottle pics...to say this tasting was "up your alley" would be a gross understatement!

“I don’t know why it matters how much of a dick he was, but it matters a lot,” he says. Perhaps Kurniawan had been driven to counterfeiting by recent money pressures. “But if it was cold and calculated from the beginning? Whoa.”  

Perhaps you're not an ethical genius, Wasserman, but you're pretty good at rationalisation after being exposed as something of  a knucklehead.  By your silly standard,  even the likes of Bernie Madoff can be consolingly understood (if not actually forgiven)  for being compelled to meet his "money pressures" with various Ponzi schemes.  

Clearly, wine collecting of the kind investigated here is a kind of OCD-driven activity.  Septigenarians with 43,000 bottle collections containing not a few items of Kurniawan provenance might want, in future,  to create an empire of possessions they can actually manage and understand.  

Wine appreciation is (or should be) par excellence an amateur affair. When the kind of money discussed here enters the picture, all bets are off.