The Billionaire's Vinegar

by Benjamin Wallace

  It was as if you were allowed to know Rodenstock only so well. There was always a distance. At the first year’s tasting, near Rodenstock’s hometown of Essen, the guests were all business acquaintances; no family members or childhood friends were present. After a tasting of eighty wines, even people who spat were inevitably looser and more outgoing; Rodenstock, seemingly unaffected by the alcohol, would be as closed-up as ever. No one knew anything about his family. Woschek, who considered himself a good friend of Rodenstock’s and who was poised to become his father-in-law, wasn’t even sure whether Rodenstock had siblings. People gossiped about his name. The Rodenstocks were a prominent optics family in Germany, and Hardy, without ever claiming to be a member, did little to correct the assumption that he was.

  In those early days it seemed to his friends that Rodenstock’s main sources for old wines were the auction houses of London and Zurich, as well as the cellars of Paris merchant Nicolas. As his tastings made news, though, Alles über Wein began to receive letters from people, especially in Germany, saying they had private cellars and wondering how they could get in touch with Rodenstock. He was also a ferocious networker, sending letters to hundreds of wine dealers and châteaux and merchants. The history of wine was full of examples of bottles surfacing in unusual places, and Rodenstock was competing on, or beneath, the same fields as Christie’s and Sotheby’s. It made sense that he, too, would come upon rare finds.

  THE JEFFERSON BOTTLES outshone any of his previous discoveries. Rodenstock was an insatiable consumer of wine-related media, and Jefferson’s connections to wine were not a secret. In the 1980 inaugural edition of his big book, Michael Broadbent had quoted Jefferson to describe the 1784 vintage of both red Bordeaux and Yquem. In 1984, Decanter had published an article on the subject titled “America’s first wine expert.” In its first issue of 1985, Alles über Wein referred to Jefferson’s 1787 list of the leading Bordeaux châteaux. Rodenstock himself had written a long article about Yquem two years earlier, in which he talked about Jefferson’s orders of Yquem. At the time of the discovery of the bottles in 1985, he told Heinz-Gert Woschek that they had belonged to Jefferson. Nonetheless, in a letter the following year Rodenstock would state that “the identity of the initials Th.J. had no meaning to me at first.” Still later, he would repeatedly say that it was Comte Alexandre de Lur Saluces, whose family had owned Château d’Yquem since before Jefferson visited Bordeaux, who first suggested that Th.J. might stand for Thomas Jefferson.

  That May 3, Lur Saluces hosted a group at the Château. The Commanderie des Grands Boutilliers de France was a small fraternity of wine enthusiasts, including Rodenstock, and on this occasion, without any advance notice, he declared that he had brought with him a bottle of 1787 Yquem. Rodenstock then proceeded to open it, first breaking through the outer layer of protective wax that he had added after finding the bottles, then through the original sealing wax. And then, ever so carefully, he drew the cork.

  “This suite of events sufficed in itself to fill me with joy,” Lur Saluces wrote later that year, in a letter to Richard Olney, the expatriate American painter and cookbook author. “But the astonishing thing is that the wine was excellent…not only liquorous and still alcoholic, but very harmonious. I was stupefied to discover something so vibrant and so alive, so characteristic of a great Yquem vintage.”

  In his own notes, Rodenstock recorded that the wine was “excellent,” “dark in color,” and “sweet with a tremendous long finish.” To Rodenstock this was a “historic event,” not least because it proved that, contrary to received wisdom, noble rot existed before 1847. Before leaving the château, the group agreed to taste a 1784 Yquem that fall.

  On June 14, Rodenstock himself wrote to R.de Treville Lawrence III, who edited a newsletter for the Vinifera Wine Growers Association, a group of Virginia winemakers. Rodenstock described his Paris find (“These wine bottles are from Thomas Jefferson’s wine collection” ) and stated, “I have sealed all the bottles.” The letter was accompanied by a photo, which showed a 1784 Yquem capped with a fresh knob of wax and labeled with a slip of paper, signed by Rodenstock, announcing that the bottle had been sealed on the sixteenth of April that year.

  News of the bottles first broke in America through a press release issued on October 11 by the VWGA, and a note appended to the simultaneously published report by the VWGA Journal’s Lawrence gave the first inkling that the discovery might be controversial. “Questions will no doubt arise regarding the finding of these rare wines enjoyed by Jefferson 200 years ago: 1. Where was the wine found in Paris? How was it preserved? 2. The numbers on the etching on the bottle appear in a more modern style. The copy of his initials appear [sic] accurate and could have been put on the bottle after he received them in Paris. 3. In checking with the present American Consul General William S. Shepard, Bordeaux, and The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Monticello, neither are aware of extant bottles of Jefferson’s wines.”

  Three days later the second Jefferson bottle was opened. For the first time Rodenstock had decided not to hold his annual tasting at Fuente, instead choosing Die Ente vom Lehel, a Wiesbaden restaurant that was among the best in Germany. It was larger than Fuente and able to accommodate more guests. It also employed a young sommelier to whom Rodenstock had become close, and its wine list was without parallel in the country. Beautifully illustrated, the list contained a paean to Yquem written by none other than Rodenstock, who said that in a bottle of Yquem “the entire act of making love occurs…lust for life and depravity…melancholy and lightheartedness…poison and antidote.”

  The tasting took place on October 14. Lur Saluces was again present. So was Broadbent, who wrote about the 1784 Yquem in his notebook: “In the decanter the wine had a deep, luminous old gold colour but in the glass was a paler perfect amber, bright and lively. The nose was perfect: gentle, scented vanilla, no oxidation, not a trace of acetification, no faults. After 20 minutes the remains in the glass had an indescribable fragrance. On the palate the wine was still sweet with perfect body and balance, flavour of ripe peaches and cream, excellent acidity and dry finish.”

  Later that day, Broadbent and Rodenstock were sitting at a table when Broadbent made a suggestion. Why not let Christie’s auction off one of the Jefferson bottles? Christie’s had never sold a claret this old, certainly not one that was certifiably from a specific château and a specific vintage. And the Jefferson engraving made it unprecedented. Even the rarest wines were commodities—a now-uncommon bottle might have begun as one of one hundred thousand—but the etched initials placed these bottles in the realm of singular, if drinkable, art. Broadbent was determined that Christie’s should have a chance to auction one off, and Rodenstock agreed to consign a bottle for sale. Soon after, Broadbent flew to Munich, where Rodenstock met him at the airport and handed him a silver metal briefcase.

  CHAPTER 5

  PROVENANCE

  IT LOOKED VAGUELY LIKE A WINE BOTTLE, BUT NOT one resembling anything for sale in a liquor store. Broadbent was back in London after collecting the bottle in Munich, and now, for the first time, he could study it at leisure. The glass had a green-amber tint. The bottle’s shape was feminine. At the waist, it bellied gently. Shoulders eased languorously into neck. A rough wax cap offered a first line of defense against air penetrating the cork. Besides the archaic features, the bottle had an obvious patina of age. Calcified cellar dirt was caked halfway around it. Elsewhere, the glass was spackled with a spidery, dun-colored dust. On a section of the bottle’s trunk where the glass still showed, the engraved numerals 1787 were visible. Below, in a looping script, was etched the antique spelling “Lafitte.” Still closer to the bottle’s base was the cryptic abbreviation “Th.J.”

  A 198-year-old bottle of Lafite was beyond rare; one that had once belonged to America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, was stunning. Broadbent knew that a bottle this unusual required a higher level of scrutiny than any he had previously auctioned.

  Provenance—the chain of c
ustody from a wine’s creation through its consignment to the auction house—was always a concern. Mainly this was because with mature wines, condition was the number-one determinant of whether a bidder was acquiring a transcendent sensory experience or a bottle of ghastly swill. As a result, condition dramatically affected how much money a bottle fetched at auction. Two bottles of the same thing, one with wine into the neck, the other with wine only to mid-shoulder, could go for surprisingly different prices. Sound provenance was also critical to an auction house’s reputation. Sell too many wines that disappointed, and you could lose the trust of customers. Broadbent had a strong incentive to be vigilant.

  In compiling years of Christie’s catalogs, he had helped to codify a vocabulary of wine condition that was now commonly used in the business. How pristine a label looked and whether or not the wine was “OWC” (in its original wooden case) were both clues to how it had been stored. But the primary indicator of condition was ullage, or fill level, the amount of headspace between the base of the cork and the surface of the wine. This gap could vary significantly, and to standardize the differences, Broadbent used eight descriptors, from “high fill” to “mid-shoulder” to “below low-shoulder,” with matching illustrations.

  Ullage meant wine had evaporated. After a few decades of aging, a certain amount was to be expected with even the most carefully stored bottles. But too much headspace suggested a faulty seal, a point of ingress for a stream of oxygen that might have wrought bacterial havoc. Past a certain point, ullage itself could be destructive. As the ratio of air to liquid in a bottle increased, the likelihood of accelerated aging, and possible spoiling, went up. This was why wine was bottled with a high fill, and why the best châteaux extended customers the courtesy of periodically topping up bottles with the same wine, to keep headspace to a minimum. The wine in the 1787 Lafite bottle was well into the neck, a remarkable level for wine so old.

  A second provenance concern, less often problematic, was authenticity. The problems that existed in Jefferson’s day hadn’t gone away, and the recent history of wine had in some ways been an arms race between cheats, on the one hand, and consumers and honest winemakers on the other. France had passed appellation-control laws in order to combat adulteration by unscrupulous winemakers, and winemakers had taken to château-bottling in order to guard against shady middlemen. Bottles made it harder to fake wine, but not impossible, especially when it was an inside job. When Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, during World War II, placed an order for some cases of Mouton, workers at the château glued Mouton labels on bottles of ordinary wine. As a handful of leading brands emerged, outright fabrication of wines and vintages took place: fake Mouton 1894 appeared on the Bordeaux market in 1904, and in 1914, “Latour 1900” showed up in the French grocery chain Félix Potin selling at one-third the going price.

  With wine, the distinction between real and fake could be elastic to the point of philosophical. Where the authenticity of, say, paintings was straightforward—a Monet either was by Monet or was not—there were degrees and kinds of vinous imposture. Maybe a bottle of Mouton contained Mouton, but in a vintage inferior to the one named on the label; maybe it contained a blend of the ostensible vintage and a lesser vintage; maybe it contained another, cheaper wine; maybe it contained something altogether different from wine.

  Starting in the early 1980s, counterfeiting at the high end of the wine market became more common. In 1982 an enterprising twenty-nine-year-old California man by the name of Louis A. Feliciano was arrested after he commissioned a printer to make wallpaper with the repeating image of the Andy Warhol–designed label from the 1975 Mouton-Rothschild. Feliciano cut it up into labels and applied them to bottles of bulk California wine and of the much less valuable 1974 Mouton. Eventually, after New York wine merchant Michael Aaron helped the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms conduct a sting operation that included phone taps, Feliciano was arrested at LaGuardia Airport.

  Later, a price bubble caused by frenzied demand for the 1982 vintage itself, together with the rise of so-called trophy wines, proved irresistible to would-be forgers. Though some of the frauds were detected, wine bottles without labels were largely interchangeable to the eye, their contents uncheckable without opening. The wine business operated on trust to a far greater extent than many of its members liked to admit publicly.

  At Christie’s, Broadbent had handled enough old bottles to know that this one was legitimately old. It was mouth-blown in a shape typical for the period and characteristically uneven in thickness, the glass chunky in some places, thin as eggshell in others. If there “was any jiggery-pokery,” Broadbent thought it would be in the engraving, so the first thing he did was show the bottle to Hugo Morley-Fletcher, Christie’s porcelain and glass expert.

  Broadbent said nothing and sat back and waited for Morley-Fletcher’s appraisal. The expert agreed that there was no doubt that the bottle was the real thing, and confirmed that the letters had been wheel-engraved, the standard technique in the late eighteenth century. A friend with whom Broadbent played music at his weekend house near Bath, and who happened to be an expert on engraving, added that it would be impossible to drill on glass so old. Next, Broadbent had a handwriting expert from the British Library assess the style of lettering; he confirmed that it was characteristic of the period. The cork, Broadbent himself opined, “appears to be original,” and he took added comfort from a scientific examination of the 1787 Yquem that Rodenstock had commissioned, reporting that “[t]he cork was found to be the original and the wine had an excellent constitution.”

  As for the Jefferson connection, Broadbent consulted Jefferson and Wine, an anthology of articles assembled by the editor of the VWGA Journal that detailed various aspects of Jefferson’s interest in wine as well as some of the orders he had placed for first-growth Bordeaux. From these, Broadbent drew his unequivocal conclusion, in the auction catalog, that “Th.J. are the initials of Thomas Jefferson.”

  Whether the wine would be drinkable or not, and, if it was, what it would taste like, was a whole other matter. The 1784 and 1787 vintages of Yquem opened by Rodenstock earlier in the year had drawn rave reviews. But that most concentrated of the Sauternes dessert wines, with high alcohol and residual sugar, was better constituted than red table wine to withstand the vinegarizing ravages of bacteria.

  Red wine was different. No merchant or wine writer was going to say, of the 1982 vintage: “Drink now through 2182.” The finest Bordeaux might peak after twenty years, stay on that plateau for another fifteen, and then begin to decline. Yet old-wine drinkers routinely opened bottles that were more than a hundred years old and spoke of them as if they were still in their prime. How was this possible?

  It was true that some of the wines Broadbent had turned up in pristine castle cellars had been untouched for more than a century and still dazzled tasters. But such wines were outliers, and the oldest was only 130 years or so. Even the best were appreciated more by the mind than the tongue or nose. They garnered faint praise, like “still very much alive.” The best Baron Elie de Rothschild had been able to say of the 1799 Lafite opened at Marvin Overton’s seminal vertical tasting in Dallas in 1979 was, “It’s wine.”

  It was also true that some bottles from the cellars of great French restaurants and of the châteaux themselves had proved drinkable, and even pleasurable, after 150 years or more. In 1969, Steven Spurrier, an English merchant who would soon open a popular wine store in Paris called Caves de la Madeleine, attended a dinner at Restaurant Darroze, a three-star in Villeneuve, at which an 1806 Lafite was poured. It was, he recalled more than three decades later, “still red, definitely a bouquet of wine, almost reminiscent of Lafite.” At Overton’s Lafite vertical, Broadbent tasted the same 1799 faintly praised by Elie de Rothschild and noted that it was “very much alive: fabulous colour, warm palish tuilé (the colour of a sun-faded old tile in Provence); a gently fragrant bouquet, with a touch of decay when first opened which cleared, held and even developed in the glass;
light though still a meaty little wine, faded but fascinating, the finish a little dried up and tart.” But wines this ancient had invariably been recorked at least once, their lives extended by topping up, often with younger wines, and by the replacement of their old corks with new ones.

  Of course, many old wines disappointed. You never knew, until you opened it, how a bottle would be. When Broadbent tried an 1875 Margaux, he rhapsodized about its “extraordinary nose like crystallized violets and clean bandages!” At another event, however, he glumly lamented the state of an 1858 Mouton, wincing at its “incredibly awful creosote, tarry smell” before jotting in his notebook the ultimate condemnation: “Not tasted.” One of his favorite stories involved a bottle of 1898 Lafite and the legendary Napa Valley consultant André Tchelistcheff. At one of the Heublein auctions run by Broadbent, the four-foot-eleven Tchelistcheff had sampled the old wine and told the room, in his émigré’s Russian accent, “Tasting old wine is like making love to an old lady.” After a dramatic pause, he had continued, “It is possible.” After another pause: “It can even be enjoyable.” Then, following one last sip: “But it requires a leetle bit of imagination.”

  To an extent, the very unpredictability of old wine was part of its allure. Even wines with platinum provenance, and which had been unmoved and lain side by side for decades, could vary dramatically. That element of surprise was thrilling, and fascinating, to some collectors. But it was disappointing, even crushing, to spend thousands of dollars on a bottle of wine that turned out to be long gone. If you couldn’t afford to take that risk, you wouldn’t be very happy collecting old wine.

  From a salesman’s standpoint, a never-breached bottle of 1787 had an aura of authenticity that a topped-up bottle did not. But a never-topped-up bottle stood less chance of being drinkable. Broadbent’s challenge was to resolve this conflict, at least in bidders’ minds, emphasizing the authentic oldness while, at the same time, making the best possible case for drinkability.