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The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine
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Item Description...
Overview
Describes the 1985 purchase of a bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux for $156,000, the mysterious background of the wine, and the enigmatic wine collector who discovered the bottle, once supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson, in a bricked-up Paris cellar.
Publishers Description
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.
“Part detective story, part wine history, this is one juicy tale….as delicious as a true vintage Lafite.”
—Business Week
“Splendid...A delicious mystery that winds through musty European cellars, Jefferson-era France and Monticello, engravers' shops, a nuclear physics lab, rival auction houses and legendary multi-day tastings conducted by the shadowy German who had discovered the Jefferson collection...Ripe for Hollywood.”
—USA Today
“This is a gripping story, expertly handled by Benjamin Wallace who writes with wit and verve, drawing the reader into a subculture strewn with eccentrics and monomaniacs...Full of detail that will delight wine lovers. It will also appeal to anyone who merely savours a great tale, well told.”
—The Economist
"A page-turner…What makes Wallace's book worth reading is the way he fleshes out the tale with entertaining digressions into Jefferson's wine adventures, how to fake wines (who knew a shotgun blast could make a bottle look old?) and dead-on portraits of several major wine personalities who intersected unhappily with the wines.”
—Bloomberg
"Wallace's depiction of rabid oenophiles staging almost decadent events to swill rare wine, knowingly depleting the reserves, are as much fun as the mystery."
—The New York Daily News
“A riveting wine history, wine mystery, and more.”
—Dana Cowin, editor in chief of Food & Wine
"For anyone with at least a curiosity about precious old wines and the love of a good story, this well-crafted piece of journalism may prove as intriguing and enjoyable as a fine old Bordeaux.”
—Seattle Times
"The season's wine reading cannot get off to a better start than with The Billionaire's Vinegar, one of the rare books on wine that transcends the genre ...Though the story is the collector's world, the subject is also greed and how it can contort reality to fit one's desires. It's been optioned for Hollywood. I hope the movie's as good as the book.”
—Eric Asimov, The Pour, New York Times
“It is the fine details--the bouquet, the body, the notes, the finish--that make this book such a lasting pleasure, to be savored and remembered long after the last page is turned. Ben Wallace has told a splendid story just wonderfully, his touch light and deft, his instinct pitch-perfect. Of all the marvelous legends of the wine trade, this curiously unforgettable saga most amply deserves the appellation: a classic.”
—Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman and A Crack in the Edge of the World
“The Billionaire's Vinegar is the ultimate page-turner. Written with literary intelligence, it has a cast of characters like something out Fawlty Towers meets The Departed. It takes you into a subculture so deep and delicious, you can almost taste the wine that turns so many seemingly rational people into madmen. It is superb nonfiction.”
—Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights
BENJAMIN WALLACE has written for GQ, Food & Wine, and Philadelphia, where he was the executive editor. He lives in Brooklyn. Visit his website at BenjaminWallace.net.
Chapter 1
Lot 337
A hush had come over the West Room. Photographers' flashes strobed the standing-room-only crowd silently, and the lone sound was the crisp voice of the auctioneer. To the world, Michael Broadbent projected a central-casting British cool, but under the bespoke suit, he was practicing a kind of mind control that calmed him in these situations. The trick was to focus narrowly, almost autistically, on numbers: lot number, number of bidders, paddle numbers, bid steps.
Even after all these years, he still found it bracingly creative to conjure excitement out of a heap of dirty old bottles. No matter how many of them the fifty-eight-year-old Broadbent might see, he retained his boyish sense of marvel at the longevity of wine. Inert antiques were all very well, but there was magic in old wine--a mysterious and wonderful alchemy in something that could live and change for two hundred years and still be drinkable.
Auctioneer was Broadbent's most public role, but it was only one of his distinctions in the wine world. In London he cut a familiar figure, pedaling to work each day on his Dutch ladies' bicycle with basket, legs gunning furiously, a trilby hat perched on his head. Often he was elsewhere, and he kept up a brutal schedule. As founding director of the Christie's wine department, he had spent the last two decades crisscrossing the planet, cataloging the dank and dusty contents of rich men's cellars, tasting tens of thousands of fine wines, and jotting his impressions in slender red hardcover notebooks. Those unassuming scribblings amounted to the most comprehensive diary of wine ever recorded. That diary now consisted of sixty of the Ideal notebooks, and he had collected them in a published tome that was the standard reference on old wines. Under Broadbent's direction, Christie's had largely invented and come to dominate the global market in old and rare wines. While Christie's as a whole was smaller than its great rival, Sotheby's, its wine department was more than twice as big, bringing in 7.3 million the previous season.
Broadbent's peers in the trade acknowledged that his palate was the most experienced in the world. His pocket textbook on wine tasting, the definitive work of its kind, was in its eleventh edition, having sold more than 160,000 copies, and had been translated into eight languages. Any collector hosting an event that aspired to any seriousness made sure to invite Broadbent and his famously sensitive nose. When he arrived at a wine gathering, if so much as a trace of woodsmoke or the merest whiff of cigarette ash besmirched the air, Broadbent would scrunch up his nose, and everything would come to a halt while windows and doors were flung open.
A lean six feet tall, Broadbent had a fringy sweep of whitening hair, and his smile, distinctly hail-fellow-well-met, was tempered by the cocked eyebrow of a worldly man. He looked more aristocratic than many of the dukes and princes alongside whom he sat on Christie's board of directors.
When Broadbent tasted, he would lay his wristwatch next to his little red notebook, so that he could time the wine's changes in the glass. During lulls, if a piano was on hand, he might charm guests with some Brahms, or he might go off by himself to sketch the local scenery.
He was happy to opine, at these tastings, on the wines under consideration. He had a knack for putting wine into memorable words. Sometimes he borrowed from literature, describing one wine as "black as Egypt's night." More often, he minted his own rakish descriptions, seeing a woman in every wine. A '79 P€trus reminded him of Sophia Loren: "You can admire them, but you don't want to go to bed with them." A double magnum of '47 Cantenac-Brown evoked chocolate and "schoolgirls' uniforms."
The taste of the wine he was selling right now in London, just past 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, December 5, 1985, was impossible to know. December 5 had special meaning for Broadbent; it was the same date that James Christie, in 1766, had held the auction house's very first sale. Moments earlier, Broadbent had stepped up to the rostrum in a three-piece suit with a pocket square, and peered out at the room through his eyeglasses.
Lot 337 was the first item of the afternoon session and had been carefully removed from its green felt berth in a glass case nearby. Lucy Godsal, a secretary in Broadbent's office, held the bottle aloft for the room to see. She looked very Christie's--blond, headband, pearl necklace--and Broadbent liked her; she was smart, hardworking, and pretty.
Broadbent had never sold anything quite like this before. A Ch€teau Lafite from 1787, it was the oldest authenticated vintage red wine ever to come up for auction at Christie's. And that was the least of its merits. The bottle was engraved with the initials "Th.J." As Broadbent had described it in the auction catalog, "Th.J. are the initials of Thomas Jefferson." Almost miraculously, the bottle was full of wine and appeared to have survived two centuries intact. The container itself was beautiful and distinctive. "This is one time," Broadbent quipped to the crowd, "when the buyer will get something back on the bottle."
The admittedly fragmentary tale of how the bottle had been found only added to its mystique. According to Hardy Rodenstock, the German collector who had consigned the bottle to Christie's, in the spring of 1985 workers tearing down a house in Paris had broken through a false wall in the basement and happened upon a hidden cache of extremely old wines. The Lafite, inscribed with the initials of the Founding Father, who had lived in Paris from 1784 to 1789 and was the foremost American wine connoisseur of his day, had been among them.
The integrity of the seals, and the high fill levels, Rodenstock had told Broadbent, were remarkable for their age. The cellar had been almost hermetically preserved, its steady temperature in the sweet spot of 50 to 57 degrees Fahrenheit. Rodenstock theorized that the bottles had been walled up to protect them during the chaos of the French Revolution, and had lain undisturbed for two hundred years.
Not surprisingly, Rodenstock refused to divulge the precise location, the exact number of bottles, or anything else about the discovery, despite Broadbent's entreaties. Rodenstock was the leading private collector in Europe, and he had already made a name for himself in rare-wine circles as an unusually skilled bottle hunter. Though he was a longtime customer of Christie's, Rodenstock was a competitor when it came to obtaining private cellars. Private-cellar purchases were often cash deals that went unreported to tax authorities. A certain reticence about his sources was to be expected.
Broadbent felt there were a couple of possibilities. One was that the bottle had indeed been discovered during the excavations of the old Marais district in Paris, much of which had recently been torn up and redeveloped. A rumor less credited by Broadbent, and which he had no intention of putting in the catalog copy, was that the bottle had been part of some sort of Nazi cellar.
Broadbent knew Rodenstock well, trusted him, and would not normally be too concerned with how he had obtained the bottle. But to Broadbent's annoyance, a historical researcher in America had recently been making noises in the press, questioning whether the bottle was in fact Jefferson's. Broadbent had conducted his own research and was satisfied that the circumstantial evidence argued overwhelmingly in favor of the attribution. He couldn't prove it, but on balance, the inducements to proceed outweighed any risk of embarrassment.
The auctioneer's delight in an object that would sell itself accounted for only half of Broadbent's excitement. There was also the oenophile's anticipation, for Lafite was Broadbent's favorite wine. He loved the way it developed in the glass, revealing new depths and facets as it breathed. He thought Lafite the acme of elegance, a racehorse beside the thoroughbred of Mouton and the carthorse of Latour. But to open a bottle as old as this was to play roulette; Broadbent couldn't help wondering what it might taste like. And how to price such an object? When cataloging it for auction, Broadbent gave the estimate as "inestimable." He was rather pleased with his pun.
A number of commission bids--those placed in advance by bidders who could not, or didn't want to, attend--had come in. Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, modern successor to the eighteenth-century vineyard, had placed a 5,000 bid; this had been so eclipsed by other advance bids that the Chateau was out of the running before the session even began. Broadbent could feel confident that a new single-bottle price record was about to be set.
In the West Room, he opened the bidding at 10,000. At first the bids came slowly, moving in 2,000 increments. A paddle would rise here. Another would bob up there. But things quickly heated up, and soon several people were raising paddles at every step.
Broadbent knew everyone in the London trade, and many of them were here in this room, but he reserved his greatest expectations for the Americans. The Jefferson connection, the strength of the dollar (it had hit a historic high earlier in the year), recent auction history--all these factors would surely tempt a deep-pocketed Yank to repatriate the bottle. Marvin Shanken, publisher of the magazine Wine Spectator, was here today, but Broadbent's highest hopes were aimed at the fellow who sat left of the center aisle from where Broadbent stood: Christoper "Kip" Forbes, the thirty-five-year-old son of publisher Malcolm Forbes.
Broadbent didn't think much of Malcolm Forbes, finding him to be a mean sort of chap. He knew that the American publisher collected first growths, the top-ranked Bordeaux reds, though only in lousy vintages. But it was undeniable that Forbes had money and would spend it for something he wanted, and Kip soon entered the bidding.
The price volleyed remorselessly to 20,000, then 30,000. At 40,000, it seemed, fleetingly, that a cap might have been reached, but the bidding resurged. Only after Kip Forbes bid 50,000--$75,000--did all the other paddles stay down. This was a new record for a bottle of wine, by a wide margin. The previous record, set the year before at an auction in Dallas, was $38,000 for a Jeroboam (equivalent to six bottles) of 1870 Mouton-Rothschild; the record for a normal-size bottle was $31,000, paid in 1980 for an 1822 Lafite. Today's price now far exceeded Broadbent's most wishful imaginings. He felt vindicated by his decision to go ahead with the sale.
He began the ritual countdown. "Any more?"
He scanned the crowd for takers. "Any more?"
Again Broadbent looked around the room, daring the bidders with his eyes to outdo Forbes. Nothing.
Then, at the rear of the room, he saw a movement.
Chapter 2
Incognito
On February 22, 1788, writing from Paris, Thomas Jefferson placed an order for 250 bottles of Lafite. In the past he would have sent the letter to one of the merchants through whom he had previously made his wine requests. But on this occasion he wrote directly to the owner of the property, having recently become wise to the dangers of doing otherwise.
Now forty-four years old, Jefferson was an especially tall man by eighteenth-century standards, topping six foot two, with an erect posture, a ruddy, freckled face, and fair, reddish hair. He had spent the last four years as American commissioner, and then minister, to France. Faint tremors of class struggle had become the insistent rumblings of the early French Revolution, and Jefferson was torn. The author of the Declaration of Independence sympathized with the poor and oppressed, while the gourmand and the architect of Monticello were drawn to the refinements of salon culture.
He had welcomed the chance to come to Europe. Jefferson's beloved wife, Martha, had died when he was just thirty-nine, leaving him a grieving widower and single father. And Jefferson had dreamed of coming to France since he was a young man. The diversions of Paris were exactly what he needed to lift him out of his depression. In contrast to his earthier fellow minister, Ben Franklin, who was legendary in the City of Light for wearing a beaver hat and biting the heads off asparagus, Jefferson fit right in.
Though he called himself "a savage of the mountains of America," in France Jefferson took to wearing a powdered wig and a topaz ring. His mansion on the Champs-Elysees was a place of blue silk damask curtains, crystal decanters, a well-stocked wine cellar, and a household staff that included a frotteur, whose sole function was to clean the parquet floors by spinning around with brushes strapped to his feet. Intoxicated with the French high life, Jefferson hosted frequent dinner parties, serving some of the best wines of France.
Jefferson was not the only Founding Father who was fond of wine. Ben Franklin, for one, kept a substantial cellar in Paris and called wine "proof that God loves us and that he likes to see us happy." But Jefferson, who had been ordering wine for many years, had recently acquired an unmatched breadth and depth of knowledge about the subject.
Not only had he learned which were the best wines, but he had also become savvy about the mischief to which an unwary consumer might fall prey. In his 1788 letter to the owner of Lafite, Jefferson spelled out his concern directly: "If it would be possible to have them bottled and packed at your estate, it would doubtless be a guarantee that the wine was genuine, and the drawing-off and so forth well done." Jefferson owed his newfound wine sophistication to a life-changing trip he had made the year before.
The time was ripe for an escape from Paris. He had become infatuated with a married English-Italian woman, Maria Cosway, but by early 1787 the romance seemed to have fizzled. In February, with his daughter Patsy safely cloistered in a convent school and his official duties in the hands of William Short, his trusted personal secretary, Jefferson embarked on a tour of France and northern Italy. He had dislocated his right wrist in a mysterious accident--historians have speculated that he was trying to jump over a fence to impress Cosway--and he justified the trip as being curative.
His itinerary also happened to take him through all of the country's major wine regions. In view of Jefferson's personal debts, which were already substantial, and the momentous challenges facing the struggling young country that was paying his way in Europe, the decision to take a three-and-a-half-month vacation could be seen as almost comically self-indulgent. Patsy Jefferson noted rather freshly, in a letter to her father a week after he left Paris, that she was "inclined to think that your voyage is rather for your pleasure than for your health."
Jefferson had been keen on wine for a long time. When he began building Monticello in 1769, at the age of twenty-six, the first part constructed was the wine cellar. |
Item Specifications...
Pages 336
Dimensions: Length: 1.5" Width: 7" Height: 10.25"
Weight: 1.3 lbs.
Binding Hardcover
Release Date May 13, 2008
Publisher Crown
ISBN 0307338770
EAN 9780307338778
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Availability 6 units.
Availability accurate as of May 24, 2012 01:48.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | A great read even for those who know little about wine Oct 21, 2009 |
I know next to nothing about wine, but it didn't stop me - and it shouldn't stop you - from enjoying Benjamin Wallace's expertly researched and wonderfully told tale about the world of high-priced, 200+ year-old trophy wine. There's the complaint registered often here on these review pages that Wallace's ending falls a little flat...that it misses a slam-dunk "Murder, She Wrote" type-ending that is called for to bring these proceedings to some type of righteous denouement.
As is often the case, that's not real life. In real life, the con man ends up picking the wrong mark...a man with a long-standing predilection for recourse via legal means and the money to outlast any adversary. It's those advantages that result in judgments that leave the con man - while not convicted - at the least "discredited." There's no sobbing "the gig is up" confession here.
Wallace's book features many excellent deep-dives on matters like Thomas Jefferson's European travels and his position as US' first premier oenophile; the wine auction business of Christie's and Sotheby's; the murky world of 'Hardy Rodenstock' (who keeps pulling Jefferson bottles out of thin air); the passions of collectors Malcom Forbes, Kip Forbes, Bill Koch and others; and other interesting topics that deepen our appreciation for the business and why this mania exists.
As Wallace notes at the end, a con involves two willing participants: the con man and his marks. The Billionaire's Vinegar shows you how the con man plays on the passion and competitiveness of these avid collectors. | | |  | Billionaire's Vinegar loses lawsuit against Michael Broadbent Oct 14, 2009 |
My father has successfully sued The Billionaire's Vinegar.
The press release reads:
The libel action centred on the book The Billionaire's Vinegar, the subject of which was the provenance of a number of bottles of wine said to have been owned by Thomas Jefferson. The book made allegations which suggested that Mr Broadbent had behaved in an unprofessional manner in the way in which he had auctioned some of these bottles and that his relationship and dealings with Hardy Rodenstock, who discovered the original collection, was suspected of being improper.
In a statement read out in open court today, Random House apologised unreservedly for making the allegations and accepted that they were untrue. It has given an undertaking not to repeat the allegations and paid Mr Broadbent undisclosed damages.
Commenting on the settlement Sarah Webb, head of Russell Jones & Walker's Defamation department, who acted for Mr Broadbent said:
"The Billionaire's Vinegar made highly damaging claims about my client that seriously compromised both his professional and personal reputation. We are delighted that Random House has today accepted that these allegations are totally without foundation and avoided the need to proceed to a full trial. My client is relieved that the good name he has built up over many years as one of the country's leading wine experts has been fully restored."
| | | | best savored slowly Sep 21, 2009 |
| A wonderful read focusing on greed, history and wine. It did plummet to a non-ending but I loved the tales of Jefferson rambling in France and the fake corks used to sell fake wine. Fun. | | | | Dry, dry, dry Sep 13, 2009 |
| I wanted to read this book because the idea of buying and selling 200 year old wine just for the sake of owning it seems ludicrous to me. As I got further into the book, I realized that the amateur wine drinker would have no idea what the author was talking about unless he had an in depth knowledge of French wines. It goes to show you that the ultra rich look at wine as a possession-Forbes got exactly what he deserved in my book. He didn't care that the wine was ruined, or even if it was genuine. I myself would love to be able to have the experience of tasting a 200 year old Montrachet or Chateau Y'quem, but doubt it will ever happen as I do not have the disposable income of the small circle of people who can afford such things. This book was utterly boring where it could have been very interesting. Don't bother. | | |  | The counterfeiting scam that rocked the wine world. Jul 15, 2009 |
"Rare wine may be the only luxury-priced commodity in the world that does not come with a guarantee of authenticity. The appearance of dishonest segments of society with only one objective, to take full advantage of the enormous opportunity that exists to make a quick buck by selling bogus wines, is not that shocking. This has always been a problem.......it is a subject that needs to be addressed."
This rather ominous warning sounded by the noted wine expert Robert H. Parker Jr. in 1996 seems to neatly sum up the state of affairs in the world of rare wines in the mid 1990's. Over the previous quarter century or so the market for old and rare wine had changed rather dramatically. It was no longer the exclusive purview of the old money men of European descent. With the world economy booming, there were lots of nouveau rich players from America and Asia who now had the money and craved the notoriety of being able to participate in this rather prestigious pastime. "The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine" tells the tale of these frenzied years that saw the price of rare wines skyrocket. Author Benjamin Wallace gives his readers a look-see into a world that only the rich and famous previously had access to. It is at once a disturbing and riveting saga.
The story of "The Billionaire's Vinegar" seems to center around a rather shadowy figure named Hardy Rosenstock. Rosenstock was a German collector who claimed to be in possession of a cache of extraordinarily old and rare wines that were discovered in 1985 in the basement of a house about to be razed in Paris. Rosenstock claimed that one of the bottles was a Chateau Lafite from 1787 which many collectors considered to be the Holy Grail of rare wines. Furthermore, Rosenstock alleged that the initials "Th. J." carved into the bottle made it likely that the bottle had belonged to Thomas Jefferson, a connoisseur of fine wine who had spent several years in Paris and who was known to have purchased large quantities of wine during his time in the city. Rodenstock consigned his highly prized bottle to Christie's for auction. The auction would be conducted by another major player in this drama, Michael Broadbent, who was the highly respected head of Christie's wine department. Before placing the bottle on the auction block in December of 1985 Broadbent conducted what he considered to be a thorough investigation of the bottle and became convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that this bottle was authentic. At the extraordinary auction a member of the legendary Forbes family purchased this bottle for the record setting price of $156,000!
Meanwhile, there were rumblings that something was amiss here. Rumors persisted that the bottle that Kip Forbes purchased for his family was a fake. Officials from Monticello (the home of Thomas Jefferson) could not vouch for the bottle's authenticity. Over the next several years more and more of the bottles associated with Rodenstock were deemed suspicious. A feud would erupt between two of the world's most prestigious auction houses. Sotherby's alleged that Christie's was handling a lot of bottles for which no provenance existed. And while all this was going on the prices for these bottles continued to escalate as more and more well-heeled collectors deemed them desirable. Although most wine afficianados went to great lengths to keep the problem under wraps the situation was clearly getting out of control and needed to be addressed.
In "The Billionaire's Vinegar" Benjamin Wallace chronicles what went down over the next two decades before many of these thorny issues would finally be resolved. You will learn the techniques of those involved in producing the faux vino. You will also meet many of the wine afficianados who became victims of these scams and the man who finally resolved to do something about it. Finally, you will discover the new techologies that would once and for all resolve many of these long standing issues. "The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine" is an exceptionally entertaining and well written book. I learned an awful lot about a topic I knew nothing about. Very highly recommended! | | | Write your own review about The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine
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