THE BILLIONAIRE’S VINEGAR
The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine.
By Benjamin Wallace.
319 pp. Crown. $24.95.
Thomas Jefferson was America’s first famous wine geek. The founding father had a lifelong infatuation with Bordeaux and regularly ordered shipments for his Virginia estate, Monticello. While living in Paris after the American Revolution, he took every opportunity to tour the major wine regions of France, to educate his palate and study viticulture. In his eight years in the White House, the connoisseur in chief, by then a respected international wine scholar, stockpiled some 20,000 bottles; in his first term alone, the wine tab has been estimated at more than $7,500 — and this at a time when entertainment expenses came out of the chief executive’s salary of $25,000.
Jefferson was a fastidious record keeper. Entries from 1788, toward the end of his official posting in Paris, reveal that he ordered 125 bottles of Château Haut-Brion for Monticello, along with a batch of provisions that included some unidentified wines. The shipments never arrived. Or did they? In 1985, a bottle engraved with the initials “Th. J.” found its way to Christie’s auction house in London. Although not unassailably authenticated, it went on the block anyway, fetching a price of $156,000.
In his captivating book, “The Billionaire’s Vinegar,” Benjamin Wallace follows the twisting trail pitting those who maintain that the bottle — and others from the same lot — is the real thing against those intent on uncovering a scam. In the process, he explores the world of wine counterfeiters, who are ever more skilled thanks to modern technology. But the good guys have some tools too, like thermoluminescence and scintillators, which allow scientists to detect trace elements of radiation in wine sediment, thus establishing its true age.
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. At the same time, Wallace explores the contradictions in the lives of rich, presumably savvy businessmen (there isn’t a single female collector in the book) who squander hundreds and thousands of dollars on old wines that may be unpalatable — or, worse, counterfeit.
Even before the auction, rumors abounded that the Jefferson bottle was a phony and that the miscreant responsible was a dodgy character named Hardy Rodenstock, a onetime pop band manager and high-stakes wine collector. For decades, Rodenstock had displayed uncanny luck in “discovering” rare and coveted wines, some under questionable circumstances. Even as evidence mounted that his gold mine was little more than gravel — in his former home, investigators found blank wine labels, old corks and empty bottles — he refused to disclose precisely where he’d made his discovery. Although William I. Koch, the heir to an oil fortune and the owner of several “Jefferson” bottles, has sued Rodenstock, he has ignored the court orders and stayed in Europe. As for the remaining bottles, most rest in those private cellars, priceless conversation pieces.
REFLECTIONS OF A WINE MERCHANT
By Neal I. Rosenthal.
Illustrated. 257 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.
For more than 30 years, Neal I. Rosenthal, a New York-based wine importer, has been an avid, at times argumentative, advocate of traditionally made wines — those created by family-run, small-scale artisans who reject the type of technical legerdemain that allows modern winemakers to produce flabby, fruit-drenched products for mass-market appeal. In other words, McPinots. “The best of wines always proudly tell you from where they come,” he maintains in “Reflections of a Wine Merchant,” adding, “I would also argue that some of the greatest of wines have fallen into the trough of standard swill, attractively packaged, manufactured to impress, but lacking the individuality and intelligence that were part of their respective patrimony.” Scotch and water anyone?
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