The Billionaire's Vinegar

by Benjamin Wallace

  CHAPTER 8

  THE SWEETNESS OF DEATH

  TOWARD THE END OF APRIL 1986, THE JEFFERSON table had to be returned to the Maryland Historical Society, and the Forbes Galleries staff rearranged the exhibit. They moved the 1787 Lafite to a case in the adjacent gallery. Soon after, wine merchant Bill Sokolin, who owned a shop at the corner of Madison Avenue and 34th Street, came to see the bottle. He was struck immediately by how it was stored.

  The bottle basked under a spotlight.

  Its environment was approximately the opposite of ideal cellar conditions.

  Sokolin went over to a security guard and asked him to inform the Forbeses that they really needed to store the wine differently.

  Not long after that, a member of the curatorial staff was removing the bottle from its case for a photo shoot when she noticed that something wasn’t quite right. The bottle was a dark green, but despite its murkiness, she could see something floating in the wine. She looked more closely.

  It was the cork.

  The light had baked it, causing it to shrivel and slip.

  Horrified, curator Margaret Kelly called Michael Broadbent for advice; he was, she recalled later, “surprisingly unhelpful.” Since the bottle wasn’t for drinking, he advised her simply to put a new stopper in it.

  The Forbes family was concerned, but once they determined that there was nothing more to be done, that was that. From the beginning they had felt that what they had in their hands was not a bottle of wine but a piece of Jeffersoniana, a historical curiosity. There was never any intention of drinking it, notwithstanding the suggestion by their friend Ernest Gallo that they sample the wine by sliding a hypodermic needle through the cork. Even if there was a slim chance that the wine was potable, they had no illusions that its taste could stand up to the price tag. Better to leave it undisturbed in its glass tomb, cork bobbing in the liquid. The wax seal remained intact. And so, even after the cork fell in, the place for the bottle remained not their wine cellar but the presidential memorabilia display in the galleries.

  The incident became a source of much merriment and derision among those observers to whom the purchase had been an extravagant folly, as well as among those rarefied wine devotees who had felt the wine was wasted on a vulgar, nouveau-riche American. It played right into Anglo-condescension, and the well-publicized event was unlikely to help the bottle’s resale value. Still, the likelihood that there was a meaningful distinction to be made between the taste of the wine pre- and post-spotlight was slim.

  In truth, very little was known about exactly what might take place in a bottle of wine sealed for two hundred years. The kinds of authenticated samples needed for studying older wine were costly, and few commercial interests—potential sources of research funding—were at stake in the question of bottle age. Scientists’ knowledge of what happened in a bottle stopped at about fifty years. Wines older than that were uncharted territory, leaving unsolved the puzzle of how something could become more valuable by rotting.

  Crudely, the molecular changes known to unfold in a sealed wine bottle that has been laid down for years involve the gradual interaction of oxygen and wine. Simple chemical compounds break down and recombine into more and more complex forms called polymeric phenols. Acidity and alcohol soften. The largest compounds—the harsh, astringent tannins—drift down into a carpet of sediment, taking with them the saturated, inky pigments. They leave behind a mellowed, unfathomably subtle flavor and a brick-red hue. Everything knits together, resolving into an ever finer complexity expressed fragrantly in the wine’s bouquet.

  At least that’s how it is supposed to work. Just as oxygen yellows newspapers and browns sliced apples, it spoils wine, but the process is more complex. There is also a beneficial oxidation that helps a wine mature. Paradoxically, wine is improving even as it is being destroyed; time will kill a wine, but is also necessary to make it great. This dual process is visible after a bottle has been opened. Aeration of wine—whether by decanting a bottle, swirling one’s glass, or sloshing a mouthful around—is a form of controlled oxidation. The aim is to improve the wine by helping it open up after its long confinement in bottle. Leave an uncorked bottle or glass out too long, though, and it will be ruined.

  The trick that the greatest old bottles of wine pull off is keeping long enough to blossom. The tiny amount of air in a bottle of wine, the porous cork that allows a slow exchange of oxygen over decades, the coolness of a cellar that decelerates chemical reactions in the wine, the humidity of a cellar and horizontal storage that ensure a cork stays moist and maintains a seal—all these practices are aimed at fostering beneficial changes while deterring destructive ones. A wine is considered mature when it has maximized its flavor possibilities but has not yet begun to deteriorate.

  There are certain truisms about how wine ages. Big bottles are believed to age more slowly than small ones, because the ratio of oxygen to liquid is lower. Wine in cooler cellars ages more slowly than wine in warmer ones. More-tannic wines take longer to come around than more-supple ones. High-alcohol, high-sugar, and high-acid wines—fortified wines such as Port and Sherry, sweet wines like Sauternes and Tokay, the deliberately heated Madeira, acidic wines including certain Rieslings—all live longer than table wines because their strength inhibits the development of bacteria.

  The genius of Madeira, a sea turtle of a wine with an almost infinite lifespan, is that oxidation is the goal. “You take a wine and oxidize the crap out of it,” in the words of Andrew Waterhouse, a chemist at the University of California, Davis. Madeira, like many kinds of wine, was discovered by accident, when ships’ captains noticed that barrels of wine from the eponymous Portuguese island that had gone around the world in their holds, with lots of heat and sloshing around, tasted pretty good. Soon this was done deliberately, and it became common for advertisements for barrels of Madeira to boast of the miles they’d traveled, the distant ports seen. Later, and more cost-effectively, white wine would be deliberately cooked for between three months and a year, either naturally in tin sheds under the tropical sun, by pumping hot water through steel pipes in tanks containing Madeira, or by putting Madeira-filled casks in heated rooms. It was impossible to ruin something that had, essentially, perfected the taste of ruin. Further oxidation is simply making a Madeira more like itself. (Apparently inspired by Madeira’s example, in the nineteenth century the manager of Château Lafite, a Monsieur Goudal, sent fifty bottles of the 1846 Lafite on a sea voyage around the world in an effort to accelerate their aging.)

  With still wines, you cannot stop the undesirable process of oxidation, you can only delay it. Therefore the young bottles of wine with the greatest chance of achieving an exalted state are those with both preservatives (tannins) and potential (phenols). The red wines of Bordeaux’s left bank are among the most ageable because their predominant grape, cabernet sauvignon, contains extremely high levels of phenols and tannins. The bottles that have proven, over long history, to be considered the greats—1870 Latour, say—were undrinkable in their youth.

  Because the tannins serve as an antioxidant, once they start clumping together and falling out of the wine, this line of defense against further oxidation begins to give way. At this point a wine’s fruity character begins to disappear, and the wine is said to “lose its fruit.” Eventually, a wine becomes so leached of its original vitality that it is called faded at best, but more likely “maderized” or something worse. The Forbes bottle, two hundred years old and recently exposed to light, heat, and possibly oxygen, was almost certainly something worse.

  THE FORBESES HAD not planned to taste the wine. Now, clearly, no one would. The question of how a red wine from the Jefferson-bottle cache might taste would have to wait for another of the bottles to provide an answer. But for Rodenstock and Broadbent, the stakes had heightened, and Broadbent was worried. In the six months since the Forbes sale, questions about the bottle had multiplied. Answers to at least some of them were promised by a tasting on June 3, 1986, when a 1787 Branne
-Mouton from the cache was opened at Château Mouton-Rothschild.

  In 1985, few wines were as highly priced in the market as Mouton-Rothschild, but in 1787, when it was known as Branne-Mouton, the vineyard had been mentioned only in passing in Jefferson’s diaries, and then as a third-tier property. In the 1855 Classification, it was named a second growth. The French branch of the Rothschild family bought the vineyard in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it was the magnetic and multitalented Philippe de Rothschild (champion race-car driver, film producer, translator of Elizabethan drama into French), who took it to new heights of excellence and fame. He led Bordeaux in being the first to château-bottle his entire production (in 1923), brought a marketing touch unique in the fusty Médoc when he began using a famous artist—Braque, Picasso, Warhol—to design each year’s label, and won the only significant change ever made to the 1855 Classification when he persuaded the French government to elevate Mouton to first growth in 1973. He also kept up the long-standing rivalry between Mouton and his cousins’ Lafite, famously serving curry with the rival wine at a luncheon, a tactic certain to obliterate any subtleties of Lafite’s taste. Rothschild’s insistence on setting the opening price for Mouton’s new vintages higher than Lafite’s had been a primary cause of the early-1970s price spiral in Bordeaux.

  Mouton had been one of the so-called “wines of the vintage” in 1982, a bumper year that brought unprecedented speculation into the Bordeaux market. Rodenstock had visited the château in 1984 and written a long article about Mouton for Alles über Wein. The presence of Mouton among the Jefferson bottles was an extraordinary stroke of fortune.

  The idea for the event at Château Mouton-Rothschild was Rodenstock’s. As with the Yquem opened at Yquem the year before, he liked the notion of bringing this Mouton home to taste in its birthplace with the great baron himself. The bottle had been brought to the château by hand, six weeks earlier, and left standing upright, to allow enough time for the sediment to settle to the bottom. It had been locked away in the baron’s personal cellar, to avoid a cellar staff person’s reflexive laying of the bottle on its side. Just to make sure, a sign was placed next to it enjoining anyone from moving it. The château had the best collection in the region of nineteenth-century Bordeaux, but the oldest bottle of its own wine was an 1853 (the year the Rothschilds bought the property), and it had been acquired just a few years earlier, at Christie’s.

  Among the nineteen tasters who attended were several of Hardy Rodenstock’s German cronies, including Mr. Cheval Blanc, Herr Pétrus, and Magnum Uwe. Michael Broadbent arrived just as the tasting was beginning, wearing gray flannel slacks, a blue blazer, and, shrewdly, a Mouton necktie. He promptly began retelling the story of the Forbes cork fiasco.

  The group crossed the gravel walkway to the cellar slowly and solemnly, as at a funeral. Leading the way in blue overalls and Adidas sneakers, a candle in his hand, was the aged cellarmaster Raoul Blondin, lower lip petrified in a shrugging Gallic pffftttt. Blondin said that the wine would be “passé. Zéro.”

  The bottle was in the shape of a flask, with shoulders in a Burgundy-style slope. Etched in the glass were “Branne Mouton 1787” and “Th.J.” A wax bulb sealed the top. There was significant ullage, the wine’s surface nearly three inches below the bottom of the cork. Everyone looked intently at the bottle. Broadbent opened his notebook and began recording his impressions. “Level?” he said aloud. “Ah, mid-shoulder. Very interesting.”

  Rodenstock had brought with him Ralf Frenzel, the young sommelier of Die Ente in Wiesbaden, who was a kind of personal wine steward and surrogate son to him. Frenzel carried the bottle upstairs and out onto a gravel path near the original patch of vineyard called La Motte. He placed it in a bowl on the ground, crouched in front of it, and gently began tapping at the wax seal with an antique sommelier’s hammer given him by Rodenstock. Though only in his twenties, Frenzel knew what he was doing. The soft percussion of his tool dislodged the cork, which plopped into the wine.

  Then came the sound of glass cracking. A lateral hairline fissure opened, a few inches from the bottle’s base. Wine seeped out into the bowl.

  “Schnell! Schnell!” the Germans cried.

  En masse, the group hurried back down into the cellar to get a decanter Rodenstock had brought, a hollow glass bust of George Washington with a cork in the crown of his head. It was vital that the wine be removed from contact with the cork and the wax that had collapsed inward with it, before either could corrupt the wine. And the crack threatened to expand. Frenzel carefully but quickly decanted the rest of the wine, then the group relocated again to the tasting room.

  Now that the wine was safely transferred, the Médocain sun filtered dimly through its murk, and it was possible to assess the color. It was in no sense red. The body of the wine was molasses brown, the rim amber. All to be expected in a wine so old. But the concentration of color was improbably youthful.

  “Extraordinaire!” several of the French murmured.

  The hue reminded Broadbent of a 1900-vintage Bordeaux. It had a sheen that an oxidized wine would not.

  Frenzel wasted no time, pouring it out into glasses. Baron Philippe was sick and bedridden, the guests were told, and his grandson Philippe now lifted his glass and asked if it would be all right to take it to his grandfather upstairs. He then departed to share the precious gift with the baron, who in truth was not there because he refused to meet with the Germans; his first wife had died in the concentration camp at Ravensbrück.

  The smell of the wine was restrained at first—even the hypersensitive Broadbent found it scentless. There was none of the acrid tang of vinegar or the deep mustiness of oxidation. There was nothing. Broadbent was surprised. In spite of his touting of the Forbes bottle, and his earlier suggestions that it might have survived the centuries in drinkable form, he knew it was nearly impossible for a red claret to do so.

  This one had a relatively low fill level, had been untouched for two hundred years, and had been stored who knew where. “But at this age,” as Broadbent put it later, “no news is good news.” And, after four minutes, the wine had a discernible fragrance. It blossomed, filling the room with a kind of sweetness. Was it the proverbial sweetness of death? As the tasters plunged their noses into the depths of their glasses, they found that the bouquet kept changing. After ten minutes it had what Broadbent described as “a rich, warm, wholemeal, gingery smell.”

  “Dunked gingernuts,” he remarked.

  “Lovely coffee,” Rodenstock intoned.

  Jancis Robinson, an English journalist who was the only woman present, was taken aback. Over forty-five minutes, the wine kept getting more delicious, a feat “even for a young wine,” as she later put it. “This relic of pre-revolutionary days” was “richly juicy and fighting fit” and “the most exciting liquid I ever expect to drink.” An hour after the pour, Broadbent found cabernet flavors in the nose. On the palate, he experienced “a beautifully sweet rich wine, with good body, extract and absolutely perfect acidity and balance. The flavour had hints of coffee and caramel, the effects of a long but sublime form of oxidation in the bottle, and it was delicious to drink.”

  “I’ve never tasted anything like it,” Raoul Blondin said, over and over. The last drops of wine in the decanter were trapped at the tip of George Washington’s nose, so Blondin tipped the cracked bottle upside down, emptying its viscous dregs into a giant glass and tasting it. “It’s delicious,” Blondin said. “No bitterness. They wouldn’t have done any egg-white fining in those days, you see.” Such fining, more common in modern times, was a technique in which egg whites were stirred into wine, before bottling, to help precipitate out coarse solids. The result was clearer, more stable wine, and a sediment that could have an unpleasant astringency.

  Blondin was in his mid-seventies, and had tasted many of the oldest vintages of the wine to which he had devoted his life, but none was as old, or noteworthy, as this one. He reveled in the symmetry of the bottle’s being opened right next to t
he vineyard whence it had sprung, the plain known as the Carruades, which had originally constituted the whole of the property. He passed the glass around. When it got to Robinson, the dominant smell note was a blend of sundry colognes and tonics transferred from the hands and faces of all the Germans who’d already handled it. It made it hard for her to absorb the wine’s essence, but she was still impressed by its high quality.

  Young Philippe Sereys de Rothschild returned and reported that his grandfather, who had shared his maître de chai’s skepticism that this wine could possibly be drinkable, was amazed and delighted. (The baron would die a week later.) Rodenstock was clearly pleased with himself, nodding his head and smiling inscrutably as he said, “The Paris cellar was so effectively blocked up, it was almost hermetically sealed, you see.” Broadbent, whose jaded palate made him cool and detached about most wines, was almost manic, probably as much because the wine vindicated his and Christie’s imprimatur for the Forbes bottle as because the wine was inherently exciting. “I thought it would be a bit acidic, a bit decayed, but there wasn’t a trace. If there was any doubt, forget it. This wine is genuine. No doubt about that.”