How to read provenance before you buy
Most counterfeits do not fail on the label. They fail on the story around it — the missing years, the broken custody, the details that do not quite agree. Provenance is read in the gaps.
Provenance is often sold as a document: a certificate, a receipt, a line of ownership on paper. Those help, but they are the easiest part to fake. A certificate can be copied. What is harder to fake is a chain — an unbroken account of where a bottle has been and under what conditions.
Start with the fill level. For an older bottle, the height of the wine in the neck or shoulder tells you how the cork has held and how the bottle has been kept. A fill that is too generous for the vintage is as suspicious as one that is too low. The bottle should agree with its age.
Then look at custody. Where has the bottle lived? A bottle held in professional bonded storage since release has a short, clean history. A bottle that has moved through several private hands has a longer one, with more places for the story to break. Ask not only who owns it, but who has kept it.
The original case, where it survives, is evidence — not because old wood is valuable, but because it keeps bottles together so their details can be compared. Fills, labels and capsules from the same case should share a life. When they disagree, that disagreement is information.
None of this is proof on its own. Bottles can be replaced, cases opened, paper forged. But provenance is cumulative. When fill, custody, case and record all agree, they make an argument that no single document makes alone. The discipline is to read the whole pattern, not just the label — and to be more suspicious of the bottle whose story is too clean than the one whose history you can actually follow.