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In 2004, an Italian wine producer was travelling in the Netherlands when he came across a bottle of a highly-rated wine labelled by a winery he had never heard of.

That's because it didn't exist.

His discovery led to the unravelling of a massive counterfeit wine ring in which cheap Italian table wine had been dressed up and sold across Europe as a top-shelf product.

The Italian scam is the latest in a string of international counterfeit wine sales. But unless they turn their noses up at anything less than the finest, experts and industry insiders say, Canadian wine drinkers can relax when they pull the cork. Strict quality controls, they say, keep fraud in check.

"There's almost no point to [counterfeiting] anything that the average consumer would consider purchasing on a regular basis," said Peter Rockwell, product manager at the Nova Scotia Liquor Corp.

"You might be able to sell a $12 bottle of wine for a few dollars less, but that's a whole lot of work for not a whole lot of payoff."

The Italian wine scam dated back to 2004 and raked in millions of euros, with the sale of an estimated 120,000 bottles.

News of the Italian fraud came three days after word that an Ontario icewine maker had fallen prey to Chinese counterfeiters. It also followed the launch of a federal probe into bogus wines in the United States after a billionaire businessman was duped into buying forged wine said to be from Thomas Jefferson's vineyard.

While some countries take a more laissez-faire approach to liquor sales, the state monopolies that control wine distribution in every province in Canada except Alberta are responsible under federal law for assuring product safety and authenticity.

Industry experts say those safeguards are among the most stringent in the world. They are so strict, in fact, experts say, that some older and prized vintages that tend to amass metal content over time are barred from liquor store shelves.

The quality assurance process undertaken for every single alcoholic beverage sold by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, the largest single buyer of alcoholic beverages in the world, reads like a crime scene investigation checklist.

Professional tasters ensure that the wine being sold has the appearance and aroma and taste of the varietal and region from which the maker claims it originates.

Then the wine undergoes a battery of chemical analyses that search for things such as pesticides and metal content.

Lastly, the labels and bar codes are inspected to ensure they are not forgeries.

"If somebody is trying to pass off plonk as a top-end wine, I have every confidence that our sensory evaluation panels would pick it out," said Leonard Franssen, manager of quality services for the LCBO's quality assurance department.

With a report from Reuters News Agency