The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine
Author: Benjamin Wallac
It was the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold.
In 1985, at a heated auction by Christie’s of London, a 1787 bottle of Château Lafite Bordeaux—one of a cache of bottles unearthed in a bricked-up Paris cellar and supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson—went for $156,000 to a member of the Forbes family. The discoverer of the bottle was pop-band manager turned wine collector Hardy Rodenstock, who had a knack for finding extremely old and exquisite wines. But rumors about the bottle soon arose. Why wouldn’t Rodenstock reveal the exact location where it had been found? Was it part of a smuggled Nazi hoard? Or did his reticence conceal an even darker secret?
It would take more than two decades for those questions to be answered and involve a gallery of intriguing players—among them Michael Broadbent, the bicycle-riding British auctioneer who speaks of wines as if they are women and staked his reputation on the record-setting sale; Serena Sutcliffe, Broadbent’s elegant archrival, whose palate is covered by a hefty insurance policy; and Bill Koch, the extravagant Florida tycoon bent on exposing the truth about Rodenstock.
Pursuing the story from Monticello to London to Zurich to Munich and beyond, Benjamin Wallace also offers a mesmerizing history of wine, complete with vivid accounts of subterranean European laboratories where old vintages are dated and of Jefferson’s colorful, wine-soaked days in France, where he literally drank up the culture.
Suspenseful, witty, and thrillingly strange, The Billionaire’s Vinegar is the vintage tale of what could be the most elaborate con since the Hitler diaries.It is also the debut of an exceptionally powerful new voice in narrative non-fiction.
The New York Times - Bryan Miller
…captivating…Wallace frames his narrative as a suspenseful mystery, although we pretty well know whodunit early on. He escorts readers through the fast and fulsome world of high-stakes wine collecting, where $1,000 bottles of grand cru Burgundy are guzzled like lemonade and conversations revolve around trophy wines in home cellars that can be the size of a high school gymnasium.
The Washington Post - Bruce Schoenfeld
Somebody may have resisted the urge to yank open at least a few bottles of 1787 Chateau Lafitte (as it was then spelled) and enjoy them with a brace of partridges or an ascension of larks or whatever the French were eating at the time. Whether that somebody was Thomas Jefferson and whether a few bottles purported by a flamboyant collector to be from Jefferson's stash are actually Chateau Lafitte at all are mysteries that form the centerpiece of The Billionaire's Vinegar, Benjamin Wallace's entertaining look at wine forgery.
Publishers Weekly
The titular bottle, from a cache of allegedly fine, allegedly French wine, allegedly owned by Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s, set a record price when auctioned in 1985. The subsequent brouhaha over the cache's authenticity takes wine journalist Wallace on a piquant journey into the mirage-like world of rare wines. At its center are Hardy Rodenstock, an enigmatic German collector with a suspicious knack for unearthing implausibly old and drinkable wines, and Michael Broadbent, a Christie's wine expert, who auctioned Rodenstock's lucrative finds. The argument over the Jefferson bottles and other rarities aged for decades, flummoxed a wine establishment desperate to keep the cork in a controversy that might deflate the market for antique vintages. (In the author's telling, a 2006 lawsuit almost settles the issue.) Wallace sips the story slowly, taking leisurely digressions into techniques for faking wine and detecting same with everything from Monticello scholarship to nuclear physics. He paints a colorful backdrop of eccentric oenophiles, decadent tastings and overripe flavor rhetoric (Broadbent describes one wine as redolent of chocolate and "schoolgirls' uniforms"). Investigating wines so old and rare they could taste like anything, he playfully questions the very foundations of connoisseurship. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.John Charles - Library Journal
In 1985 in London, the Forbes publishing family paid more than $150,000 for a nearly 200-year-old bottle of ChAoteau Lafite Bordeaux rumored to have once been owned by Thomas Jefferson. The bottle was part of a collection unearthed by German wine entrepreneur Hardy Rodenstock. At first only a few doubted the authenticity of the wine, but over time, as more bottles from the same cache were sold, the questions about Rodenstock and his Jeffersonian bottles kept coming. Wallace, a journalist who has written for magazines such as Food & Wine and Philadelphia, has crafted a richly intriguing tale of wine collecting, Thomas Jefferson, and the rivalry between the wine departments at Christie's and Sotheby's, following the trail of Rodenstock and his famous "discovery." With the same deliciously entertaining blend of history, mystery, and wine found in Don and Petie Kladstrup's Wine and War, Wallace's book is highly recommended for public libraries.
Kirkus Reviews
Elaborate account of a delicious hoax played on the world's wine experts and fabulously wealthy. According to magazine writer Wallace, a chummy partnership between two well-connected Europeans largely created the interest in historic vintages that reached its apogee in 1985 with the $156,000 purchase by the Forbes family of a 1787 Chateau Lafite engraved with the initials "Th.J."-i.e., Thomas Jefferson. Michael Broadbent was the suave founding director of Christie's wine department, which had come to dominate the global market in old and rare wines to the tune of millions of dollars. Broadbent's palate was considered the most experienced in the world, and he scoured the cellars of his aristocratic acquaintances to unearth rare vintages. The purported Jefferson bottle was consigned to Christie's by German collector Hardy Rodenstock, who spun a hazy story of workers tearing down a house in Paris, breaking through a false wall and happening upon a cache of extremely old wines. Jefferson, America's first wine connoisseur, lived in Paris from 1784 to 1789 and began buying directly from the chateaux; with France disrupted by revolution, this particular order apparently didn't make it back to Monticello. Rodenstock boasted that he had purchased two dozen engraved bottles of 1784 and 1787 vintages of Lafite, Margaux, Yquem and Branne-Mouton (all of which dribbled to market), but he would not divulge the seller, and the wine's provenance came under suspicion. Wallace traces various attempts to determine the bottles' authenticity, including analysis of ullage (fill level), cork, label, engraving, bottle and the taste of the ancient liquid, often doctored by adding later vintages. The author offersa revealing look at the influx into the esoteric field of wine connoisseurship of major-player egos and big money, which created a tricky and rarified market similar to that for expensive art-and encouraged fakes in both. Rote journalism injected with considerable padding, but there's no denying the appeal of this enthrallingly mad and recondite subject. Agent: Larry Weissman/Larry Weissman Literary
See also: Éditions Éthiques dans les Affaires :une Approche Philosophique
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