The Billionaire's Vinegar

by Benjamin Wallace

  He was new to his job as head of Christie’s fledgling wine department, and nervous. He couldn’t sleep, so he opened My Life and Loves, the sexually explicit memoirs of Frank Harris, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century womanizer and magazine editor.

  When the sun came up, Broadbent descended to the cellars. They were directly beneath the flagstones of the main hall, and organized into bins, columbarium-like walls of stone niches containing not ashes but wine. Everything was covered in dust, but it didn’t matter. In houses like this, the bottles didn’t have labels; you knew what was in them through a combination of bin labels and cellar books. One wall at a time, moving top to bottom, left to right, Broadbent wrote down the inventory: the Madeiras, claret, Port, Champagne, and some weird old liqueurs.

  As he was leaving, Lord Linlithgow mentioned that his neighbor Harry, sixth Earl of Rosebery, was “getting on” and had a cellar full of old claret he might be happy to unload. The marquis handed Broadbent a scrap of paper with a list of wines. It was impressive. Lord Rosebery was the son of Hannah de Rothschild, and his cellar consisted mainly of pre-phylloxera Lafite. Phylloxera was the yellow root louse that devastated Bordeaux’s vineyards in the late 1870s. Eventually, winemakers survived the epidemic by grafting French vines onto American rootstocks, which were immune to the pest. (The susceptibility of ungrafted European vines, on the other hand, explained in part why Jefferson’s and Filippo Mazzei’s 1770s experiments with them in the United States had failed.) Many connoisseurs believed that the wines of Bordeaux had never again attained their earlier level of quality and ageability. For such collectors, a trove of pre-phylloxera first growths was the Grail.

  Soon after his visit with Lord Linlithgow, Broadbent returned to Scotland to visit Lord Rosebery’s pile there. This one, Dalmeny, had its own golf course. The butler led Broadbent to the cellar, a stone room with a gravel floor and slate bins. There were rows upon rows of double magnums of 1865 Lafite, enormous bottles that put Broadbent in mind of the howitzer shells he had seen during his stint in the Royal Artillery. He packed what he could fit into his car and hurtled down the A1 motorway to London. Next he visited Mentmore, Lord Rosebery’s home in Buckinghamshire, where the front hall contained an enormous table displaying Lord Rosebery’s many hats and walking sticks, all neatly arrayed. The cellars here were much larger than those at Dalmeny, and Broadbent spent a full day cataloging the contents. He took a break only to have lunch with Lord Rosebery and his wife, who bickered as if he weren’t there.

  On Thursday, May 31, 1967, in the Great Rooms at its King Street headquarters in London, Christie’s held its first “Finest and Rarest Wines” sale. The selection, which, besides the cellars of Linlithgow and Rosebery, included lots from “Amiya, Dowager Countess of Sandwich” and “the Right Honourable the Lord Brunt-isfield,” was a dream for collectors. There were quaint, lopsided, mouth-blown bottles of oddities like eighteenth-century Milk Punch, extract of absinthe, 1830 Tokay, and Sandeman’s 1911 Coronation Vintage Port, as well as several nineteenth-century bottles of a strange, flat Champagne called Sillery that was once popular with the British upper class. Most coveted was the collection of pre-Phylloxera Bordeaux, 164 of the best wines in the best vintages, in the most desirable bottle sizes.

  In Bordeaux, big bottles could range from magnum (the equivalent of two bottles) to Marie-Jeanne (three bottles) to double magnum (four bottles) to Jéroboam (six bottles) to Impériale (eight bottles). In Burgundy and Champagne, older Jéroboams were called Rehoboams, an Impériale was called a Methuselah, and even bigger bottles existed, including a Salmanazar (twelve bottles), a Balthazar (sixteen bottles), and a Nebuchadnezzar (twenty bottles). Collectors loved these—for their rarity, for their drama, and for the fact that wine aged more slowly in them. In the Rosebery sale, the Lafites alone included nineteen magnums of 1858, a magnum of 1864, two Jéroboams of 1865, and forty-four magnums and seventy bottles of 1874. The sale, in a single stroke, established Christie’s wine department as a seller of rarities, ushered in a new age of wine collecting, and positioned Michael Broadbent as its public face.

  TRADITIONALLY, WINE HAD left France for foreign markets in sixty-three-gallon casks known as hogsheads. British gentlemen would store these casks and drink their way through one before ordering another of its kind. Sir Robert Walpole, the eighteenth-century prime minister, had a cellar full of them; he particularly liked Margaux and Lafite.

  It was during the quarter-century preceding Thomas Jefferson’s visit to Bordeaux—the same period when the cylindrical, cork-stoppered, easily stacked glass bottle became common and opened the way to long-term storage and maturation of claret—that the English adopted the custom of laying down bottles to drink years later. English gentlemen subdivided their cellars into bins, each big enough for three hundred bottles (the equivalent of a hogshead). They labeled the bins with château name and vintage, and filled them with bottles that were motley in appearance. These were unlabeled bottles filled from casks by a gentleman, or more likely his butler. (After 1850, they would be joined by labeled bottles filled by middlemen such as Bordeaux or London merchants, and, less frequently—until the 1920s—labeled bottles filled at the châteaux themselves.)

  Inevitably, cellaring of wine trickled down to the middle classes. The practice was popular enough by the 1760s that the same Pall Mall bookseller who had published Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary came out with a book for recording wine purchases. The Cellar-Book, or Butler’s Assistant, in keeping a Regular Account of his Liquors sold well enough to generate several editions.

  Exactly which wines the English laid down stayed remarkably constant. The passion they and the Scottish nobility shared for first-growth claret approached an addiction. Lafite, in particular, enjoyed a special status both in Bordeaux, where in all the early classifications it was ranked first among firsts, and in Britain, where it was the preferred wine of the peerage. Below these four was a broader, increasingly articulated hierarchy of growths. In 1787, Jefferson mentioned three tiers, around 1800 a fourth tier was named, and around 1820 a fifth.

  This unofficial five-tier stratification of Bordeaux’s wines would be codified thirty-five years later. With the Paris Universal Exposition approaching, Napoleon III charged the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce with drawing up a list of the best. The chamber turned this over to the region’s brokers, who, to avoid the indelicacy of picking favorites, instead drew up a list merely of the most expensive wines, and arranged them by price. The resulting Classification of 1855 formalized a numerical ranking of sixty-one of the most sought-after reds. Below the four first growths were fifteen second growths, fourteen third growths, ten fourth growths, and eighteen fifth growths. All of the wines came from the so-called left bank, west of the Garonne River. The predominantly merlot-based right-bank wines, which would become revered in the second half of the twentieth century, weren’t even mentioned.

  At the same time, a separate classification of Sauternes confirmed Château d’Yquem’s unchallenged position as the king of sweet white wines. A large part of Yquem’s reputation had to do with its extremely low yield: seventy gallons to an acre, compared with more than four hundred for a leading red wine. Put another way, a single vine can produce an entire bottle of dry red wine; it produces just one glass of Yquem. The wines of Sauternes relied on the phenomenon of “noble rot,” or botrytis, a fungal infection that, under precisely the right weather conditions, withered the Semillon grape to create an unctuous wine of unparalleled richness. The glory of Yquem was affirmed four years later when Russian Grand Duke Constantine, the czar’s brother, placed an order for four barrels of the 1847 vintage of Yquem, paying 20,000 gold francs, four times the going rate. The purchase spread Yquem’s fame and sent its market value soaring.

  For Bordeaux, 1858 to 1878 was a belle epoque, blessed with favorable weather and a succession of excellent vintages. The advent of railways and steamships opened virgin markets. Gold rushes minted new millionaires. The 1860 trade treaty between Britain and France
negotiated by Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone, himself a claret man, reduced the tax on Bordeaux wine by 95 percent and led, over the next fifteen years, to an eightfold growth in British claret imports. Bordeaux’s own wine production, over the same period, grew two and a half times, from 50 to more than 132 million gallons. The boom, which came to an end only with the arrival of phylloxera, funded the building of scores of grand châteaux, adding to the region’s mercantile luster.

  And so in the eighteenth century had begun a long migration, an annual diaspora of Bordeaux’s most precious wines to the scattered cellars of claret lovers. Most of the wine sold fast and was drunk just as quickly. In 1788, wine from the 1784 vintage was already a rarity; Haut-Brion had only four hogsheads remaining, and demand for the vintage had pushed the price up to three livres per bottle. As early as 1829, a writer skeptical of advertisements for bottles from the famous 1811 “comet vintage” noted that, given its high quality and a relatively small crop, “it admits of a doubt whether even in the cellars of the richest individuals, any quantity to speak of now remains of the wine.”

  Nonetheless, vintages that were scouringly tannic when young could take decades to become drinkable, and wealthy claret drinkers held on to unusually abundant and ageable vintages. Subterranean deposits of fine Bordeaux began to accrete, like some patchy geological formation, into a far-flung stratum of old wine.

  Some was kept by the châteaux. Starting in 1798, Lafite began compiling a vinothèque, or wine library, with examples of each of the château’s vintages. A few bottles of 1797, the first contribution to the vinothèque, remain at Lafite, and are the oldest bottles in its cobwebbed cellar. The oldest bottle in Margaux’s vinothèque, by contrast, is an 1848. Some of the wine went to the cellars of the premier restaurants in France. And much of the wine was exported.

  Throughout the nineteenth century, the largest markets for claret were in flux. During the 1850s, the United States was the best customer. From 1860 to 1890, Argentina, flush with beef and wheat money, claimed that role. But most of the wine going to the Americas was lesser stuff, not the expensive first growths that merited cellaring for decades. Those remained the province of the British. Over the century following the 1855 Classification, untold tons of the top growths found their way across the Channel into the cellars of private houses, wine merchants, and ancient colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Very often it was Lafite.

  It was not uncommon for deposits to these cellars to outpace withdrawals. Original purchasers died, leaving stocks of wine that their children or grandchildren might have less interest in. By the middle of the twentieth century, England and Scotland had come to be riddled with underground repositories of precious old vintages. They were just waiting for someone to come along and notice.

  MICHAEL BROADBENT WAS born into a Yorkshire mill-owning family, and was twenty-two before he tasted a top wine. On a summer evening in 1950, a doctor who was a friend of the family served him 1937 Yquem with nectarines. At the time, Broadbent was an indifferent architecture student at the University of London. Two years later he was drifting when his mother spotted a newspaper ad for a “wine trainee” with a merchant named Tommy Layton.

  His first year in that sadly paid job, Broadbent pawned his stamp collection to make ends meet. That autumn, at Layton’s suggestion, he began taking notes on every wine he tasted. He never stopped. Over the next fourteen years he rose to national sales manager of Harvey’s of Bristol, a prominent merchant. Then, in 1966, Broadbent heard that Christie’s was going to start selling wine. Sending off an energetic letter to the auction house—he announced the salary he would require—he persuaded them to let him found the new department.

  Broadbent did not invent the secondary market for old wine, but he did reinvent it. Wine had been sold starting with Christie’s first auction in 1766, and first growths had been a staple of its auctions from 1787 on. Over the centuries, Christie’s had auctioned off the cellars of kings, prime ministers, and other grandees, among them the Duke of York, Edward VII, and Benjamin Disraeli (whose homeopath, in treating the prime minister’s asthma and gout, prescribed Lafite). But Christie’s was bombed to the ground in the Second World War. After it was rebuilt, the sale of art, antiques, and jewelry resumed, but not wine. The market had been dormant for a quarter of a century when Broadbent arrived.

  Rosebery was a harbinger. That first season, Broadbent’s department held thirty-two sales, which fetched around $600,000. By 1978 the numbers would be up to forty-four sales and a turnover of nearly $5 million. Broadbent was like the man who arrived at a gold rush before it was a rush. He was first to the dig site, and over the next fifteen years he engaged in a frenzy of tomb-raiding. His most spectacular discoveries were nearly all in England and Scotland. Beneath the Earl of Strathmore’s Glamis Castle, in a damp cellar with a freakishly constant temperature of 49 degrees Fahrenheit, he found forty-two magnums of 1870 Château Lafite.

  Where Christie’s had been a full-service auction house from its founding, Sotheby’s, which was twenty-two years older, had begun as a bookseller, and had only diversified in the early 1900s. Before Christie’s Rosebery sale, Sotheby’s had handled an art-and-furniture sale for the Rosebery clan, and the poaching of this client awoke Christie’s rival to the fact that, though the sums of money involved were relatively small, a wine department gave an auction house an edge in attracting new business and fully servicing existing clients. The Glamis sale, in 1970, stirred Sotheby’s to action. Glamis Castle was owned by the Bowes-Lyon family, one of whom sat on Sotheby’s board. That year, Sotheby’s launched its own wine department.

  Michael Broadbent’s life was awash in wine, but it wasn’t all raised-pinky soirées. Auctioneering can be at once among the most patrician occupations and among the least glamorous. Even eminent gavel-bangers may double as glorified stockboys, cataloging and packing up the contents of moldy, spider-ridden basements and attics. And Broadbent’s wife, Daphne, and their two children were often by his side. Easter holidays meant trips to the wine country. Weekends might be spent on hands and knees in damp, grubby, medieval cellars in France, Hungary, and elsewhere, dodging white salamanders that had never seen the sun, while assembling cardboard boxes and filling them with bottles as soon as Broadbent had cataloged them.

  He was a man of habits, most of which involved drinking or work related to it. Every Sunday morning Broadbent could be found in bed, writing his monthly column for Decanter, an English wine magazine. Mealtime conversation was wine talk. Starting at age seven, the children were served wine with dinner (only on special occasions were they allowed the option of drinking orange juice or Coke instead). Emma found it a bore, and, after giving the wine business a short try, became a lawyer and later a judge. Bartholomew cottoned to it more; at fifteen, at Château Latour, he drank an 1865 that was a revelation. Michael Broadbent was a staunch observer of that archaic British midmorning pick-me-up known as elevenses; every day he could be found, before noon, enjoying a glass of dry Madeira, German white wine, or Champagne. At 2:45 p.m., he would take a twenty-minute nap. Toward evening he would have a glass of Champagne or Tio Pepe sherry, several glasses of claret, and perhaps a vintage Port. If the regimen sounded like that of a lush, the truth was that Broadbent practiced moderation. He drank often, but he sipped, and he was an evangelist of wine’s preservative properties. His frenetic cycling didn’t hurt, either.

  As a result of his meticulous record-keeping, he could tell you that he had tasted more than 40,000 wines as of the mid-1980s. That was more wines than most people had ever consumed, and more old wines than anyone alive. He could tell you the best wine he ever drank (an 1870 Lafite in magnum), the wine he would want if he were marooned on a desert island (a Terrantez 1862 Madeira by HM Borges), the oldest wine he’d ever drunk (a 1653 German hock), and his favorite producer (Lafite). It wasn’t just Lafite’s wines that put Broadbent in mind of the fairer sex; he felt that the vineyard site itself had “almost an erotic shape.”

  F
irst-growth claret, from vineyards on Bordeaux’s left bank, was at the center of Broadbent’s auctions, but since the 1855 Classification the stodgy Bordeaux aristocracy had grudgingly acknowledged the parity, in reputation and price if not official status, of a handful of other wines. Cheval Blanc, made in the medieval town of St. Emilion, across the Dordogne River from Bordeaux, and unusual for being produced mainly from the cabernet franc grape, ascended to the first tier via two legendary vintages, 1921 and 1947. Also on the right bank, Pétrus, a merlot-based wine from Pomerol traditionally favored by the Belgians, won the attention of the powerful English market with its 1947 vintage. And Mouton-Rothschild gained actual premier status in 1973 when, by dint of assiduous lobbying, Baron Philippe de Rothschild persuaded the French government to take the unprecedented step of elevating the estate from second to first growth.

  As Broadbent’s auctions gained in popularity, the price of old wines bounded upward. In the first five years of the new auctions, Latour 1949 and Mouton-Rothschild 1945 more than quadrupled in price. Lesser wines jumped 200 and 300 percent. Rising values led more people to wonder whether granddad’s old bottles, which had been gathering dust in the cellar for years, might be worth something, and perhaps this Christie’s chap might like to come and take a look. It was usually the Christie’s chap. Sotheby’s wine department, having launched four years after Christie’s, had been playing catch-up ever since.

  Broadbent was a natural at auction-house hyperbole, and seemed to wring a new record out of every sale. There was always a particular wine or vintage or combination of wines and vintages that, defined in just the right way, had achieved a never-before-seen price or volume record. There was, for instance, the Christie’s sale featuring one hundred dozen bottles of the 1967 vintage of Yquem, “certainly the largest quantity of any one vintage of any fine mature white wine ever to appear at auction.” It was all in how narrowly you sliced the numbers, and Broadbent was a master with the knife. The only thing that attracted more press coverage than price records was especially old and rare wines, and Broadbent excelled at producing these, too.