When we buy a bottle of a famed wine, we take it on faith that it’s genuine and not a fake. In fact, fake wine is precisely why corks began to be branded with the name of a winery as well as the vintage date. It’s also why most reputable wineries still use branded corks. When you order a bottle of wine in a restaurant and the waiter hands you the cork, the main reason is so you can inspect it and see if the brand is the same as the one on the label. If you order a bottle of Chateau Palmer and the cork is blank, for example, that alone is sufficient grounds for rejecting the wine. (Very inexpensive wines often are sold with blank corks that have no brands.) Is wine fraud rampant here? No, it’s almost nonexistent. But it happens elsewhere, and often enough that it …