After tasting such an antique, it was time for something younger: an 1858 Mouton. “It tasted so light, so modern after its predecessor,” Robinson later recalled. Then Rodenstock showed off a bottle he had in the trunk of his car: a Jéroboam of 1945 Pétrus.
It was time for lunch, which was served next door at Philippine de Rothschild’s petit château, decorated in the Louis XVI style. An 1865 Margaux would be among the wines to be drunk. Rodenstock mentioned that he had a complete vertical of Mouton from 1945 to 1982. He suggested opening the ’45 Pétrus Jéroboam, but this idea was scuttled by grandson Philippe, who suggested it would be a waste to drink it without having decanted it sufficiently ahead of time. An equally likely reason was that powerful right-bank Pétrus might well show up the elegant left-bank wines.
Broadbent, who had a dinner to attend in London that evening, flew out on a 2:25 p.m. flight. He felt reassured by the day’s events. The cork’s collapse, as suggested by the Forbes bottle’s fate, was a reliable feature of old wines. The Mouton bottle’s cracking suggested there was no way that an engraving could have occurred recently. Even Blondin’s comment about the lack of fining in the eighteenth century was a reminder that wine, in Jefferson’s day, was for early drinking; the 1787 vintage would have been bottled in 1788 and ready for consumption in 1791. “[M]ost of the party anticipated a funeral. It turned out to be a resurrection,” Broadbent crowed in a Decanter article headlined “No More Doubts.”
CHAPTER 9
SALAD DRESSING
BEFORE THE FORBES AUCTION, BROADBENT HAD SAID the 1787 Lafite was probably the only bottle “of its kind” that would ever come up for sale. Arthur Woods, Broadbent’s Decanter letters-page tormentor, was having none of it. “One now supposes that after a discreet interval another bottle will appear for auction,” he wrote in June 1986; “next December or early in 1987 perhaps?”
As it happened, in December, one year to the day after the Forbes sale, Michael Broadbent auctioned off another of Rodenstock’s Jefferson bottles. This time he was selling a 1784 Yquem, the same wine that had piqued his interest when Rodenstock opened one at the October 1985 tasting in Wiesbaden. In the catalog, Broadbent called it “the last but one bottle of 1784, and the only occasion this vintage is ever likely to come on the market.”
In spite of Monticello’s doubts, and the unfortunate incident with the Forbes cork, the Mouton tasting six months earlier had benefited Broadbent and Rodenstock in two ways: it had authenticated the wine while adding to its value by finding it drinkable; and this new bottle was an Yquem—a Sauternes with a greater chance of surviving than a red wine—and of a vintage that had already been opened successfully. It had a track record, which Broadbent distilled as “perfect in every sense: colour, bouquet, and taste.”
Broadbent also happily reported that a German laboratory had analyzed the bottle opened earlier. “[T]he wax, the cork, and the wine have been rigorously examined by Professor Eschenauer whose methods are said to be the most acceptable, reliable and accurate,” Broadbent wrote in the catalog for the December 1986 sale. With the bicentennial of Jefferson’s visit to Bordeaux just months away, the moment seemed too perfect not to put another Jefferson bottle on the market.
As with the Forbes/Shanken match-up one year earlier, the contest on Thursday, December 4, 1986, rapidly narrowed to two serious bidders. After bidding £35,000, the owner of a wine shop in Syracuse, New York, was sure the bottle was hers, but then a buyer in the front row, an olive-skinned man with glossy ringlets of black hair and a small mustache, topped her and won the bottle for £39,600, or $56,628.
The buyer gave his name as Iyad Shiblaq, and identified himself to reporters as a Jordanian Muslim. He took pains to say that the bottle was not for himself, as his religion required him to be a teetotaler. He said he was buying the wine for “a friend of mine in New York” who had given him £50,000 to bid. Shiblaq wouldn’t name the friend, saying he had “no idea what he is going to do with” the bottle and that the friend simply wanted it “because of the label.” Shiblaq then rushed away without answering further questions.
This Jefferson bottle, too, set a record: it was the most expensive white wine ever sold. Like the Forbes purchase, it made news around the world. A transatlantic guessing game commenced as to the identity of the mystery buyer. On December 5, the New York Post’s Page Six floated several names, including Malcolm Forbes, William Zeckendorf Jr., and Daniel Rose (both of the latter were Manhattan real-estate developers), investment banker Ed Marks, and Dodi Al-Fayed, son of Harrods owner Mohammed Al-Fayed, who years later would die in a car crash with Princess Diana. All denied it, and the Post concluded that none was the buyer.
“WHOOPS!” Page Six corrected itself the following day. The buyer was Al-Fayed, after all. “Wine is meant for drinking,” a Christie’s specialist named John Boodle had opined after the auction. “It is not a thing of beauty. You can’t hang it on the wall.” Now, Al-Fayed’s spokesman told Page Six, “He’s just going to keep it as if it were a piece of art.” Christie’s said it might auction another Jefferson bottle soon.
THE SHIBLAQ/AL-FAYED purchase came at a moment of broadening American awareness of Thomas Jefferson’s interest in wine. The first serious attention paid to his precocious connoisseurship had occurred in 1976, during the national Bicentennial, when the Wine Museum of San Francisco put on an exhibit called “Thomas Jefferson and Wine in Early America.”
Jefferson had planted scores of grape varieties at Monticello, and in many ways had foreshadowed the kind of systematic experimentation that eventually led Robert Mondavi to revolutionize American winemaking in the 1960s and 1970s. Now it was primarily citizens of his home state who led the way in dusting off this forgotten aspect of Jefferson’s life. In 1976 the Virginia Wine Growers Association, which would later break the news in the United States about the Rodenstock discovery, published its Jefferson and Wine anthology. The same year a winery called Barboursville opened in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, around the ruins of one of the five homes Jefferson had designed in his lifetime; it named a wine Octagon after the shape of some of the rooms. (Virginia’s wine industry would soon take off, expanding from six wineries in 1979 to forty-one in 1991 to 122 in 2006.) In 1982 a former National Security Agency linguist of Virginian extraction opened a winery called Monticello in the Napa Valley, and included a Jefferson Cuvée cabernet among its bottlings.
This rediscovery of Jefferson and wine came to a head in the mid-eighties, around the time of the record Forbes purchase. Monticello itself, in 1985, copied Jefferson’s planting of 1807, sowing twenty-one of the twenty-three varieties of white and red grapes (French, Italian, domestic) Jefferson had planted in the quarter-acre northeast vineyard. In 1986 a winery named Jefferson Vineyards came out with its first vintage; it was made from grapes grown on the neighboring land once worked by Filippo Mazzei, the Italian wine grower Thomas Jefferson had sponsored.
With the bicentennial of Jefferson’s 1787 visit to Bordeaux approaching, the scattered group of people with a particular combined interest in both wine and Jefferson arranged a series of celebrations. Travel agencies promoted tours of French wine regions visited by Jefferson. Treville Lawrence, editor of the VWGA Journal, approached Monticello about the possibility of either Hardy Rodenstock’s opening a bottle there or of the VWGA and Monticello jointly auctioning the bottle to benefit the VWGA. Monticello’s board of directors turned down the request. “The major problem relates to a doubt in our mind about the Jefferson connection,” director Dan Jordan wrote in a letter to Lawrence, “but the tradition here has also been to generate revenues in ways other than auctions.”
Edward Lollis, the American consul to Bordeaux, spent more than a year researching and organizing a slate of events that roughly tracked the dates of Jefferson’s visit. In a small triumph of amateur scholarship, Lollis deduced an explanation for Jefferson’s epistolary mention of seeing Latour’s vines, given the lack of evidence that Jefferson actually visited the estate
. Latour’s vines grow near the Gironde, and Jefferson, an able flatterer, could plausibly imply he had glimpsed them as he sailed north along the river away from Bordeaux.
Things kicked off on March 28, 1987, with a black-tie dinner at the Château de Clos de Vougeot, in Burgundy, keynoted by the president of the Jeffersonian Wine Grape Growers Society in Charlottesville, Virginia. On June 1, the American ambassador to France traveled from Paris to Bordeaux, where a changing-of-the-cork ceremony was scheduled to take place at Château Lafite for a 1787 Jefferson bottle still in the possession of Rodenstock. The same day, Château Haut-Brion unveiled a plaque honoring Jefferson’s visit two hundred years earlier. In the afternoon, at the downtown building that had once been the Palais Royal and now housed the Chamber of Commerce, a Jefferson impersonator spoke, and the “world premiere” of an American Express tourism video, “Bordeaux at the Time of Jefferson,” was screened. In the final scene, filmed using a helicopter, a group of wine bottles rose into the sky.
Three weeks later, during Vinexpo, the massive trade show which brought the wine world to Bordeaux every other summer, Lollis welcomed visitors to the American consulate for a tasting of 140 wines from seventy-one American wineries. Jefferson had dreamed of this: the wines—whites downstairs, reds upstairs—came not only from Napa, but also from Missouri and some ten Virginia wineries. Christie’s, meanwhile, had announced that it would sell a third Jefferson bottle at Vinexpo.
ON THE FIFTH and final day of the trade show, two and a half hours into a four-and-a-half-hour, four-hundred-lot auction, Christie’s put the Jefferson bottle on the block. This one was a 1784 Margaux (the engraving said “Margau”) and was a 375-milliliter half-bottle shaped like a mallet. The fill came almost to the top of the shoulder. Michael Broadbent quoted from two Jefferson letters that referred to his buying 1784 Margaux, and opened the bidding at $21,600.
The bids quickly added $5,000 to the asking price. One of the leading contenders, an absentee buyer who had left a commission bid authorizing Broadbent to raise the paddle on his behalf, was Marvin Shanken. Though thankful not to have spent $156,000 on the 1787 Lafite, the publisher of Wine Spectator was still annoyed that he had gone home empty-handed. When Broadbent called to say that another Jefferson bottle was coming up for auction, Shanken prudently decided to stay away from the saleroom but told Broadbent to bid up to $30,000 in his name.
When the price hit $26,600, a phone buyer, whom Broadbent identified to the room only as an Arab “bidding for a friend,” countered with $28,300 before dropping out in response to Shanken’s automatic bid of $30,000. Shanken had his bottle, and yet another record had been set. This one was for the most expensive half-bottle of wine ever bought.
A writer for Shanken’s magazine, in an article about the auction, seemed suspicious of the mystery bidder who had dropped out only when Shanken’s limit had been reached. So was Shanken. “You know what?” he said later. “In the auction business, you never know. Who knows even if there was another bidder?”
Before Shanken would take delivery of the bottle, he insisted that Broadbent have it recorked at Margaux, both to avert a repeat of the Forbes spotlight debacle and to validate the wine’s authenticity. Estate director Paul Pontallier, fearful of the bottle’s fragility and uncertain of its origin, wouldn’t touch it. The bottle stayed in Bordeaux until Broadbent was able to return in August. Then, with the cellarmaster and Pontallier looking on, Broadbent performed the operation himself.
Broadbent first removed the capsule by chipping gently at the wax (the bottle’s glass neck was thicker than that of the bottle broken at Mouton). When he removed the cork, which was black and wizened, its length surprised him. He poured a little of the wine into a glass, and he and the other two men each sampled it. “Despite its oxidation, the colour was a fairly healthy orange-rimmed red brown,” Broadbent noted, “with just a whiff of what clearly might once have been a marvellously rich wine.”
Except for a Rodenstock-sourced 1771 Margaux he had been served that May, this 1784 Margaux was the oldest dry red wine Broadbent had ever tasted; the Mouton he had drunk was a 1787, and the 1784 a sweet white Yquem. Without topping the bottle up, Broadbent delicately eased in a new wedge-shaped cork he had brought with him. Then he heated some wax, gently dipped the neck and cork into it to form a seal, and gave the bottle a twirl. To his relief, it didn’t break. When Broadbent called Shanken to say “mission accomplished,” he reported that “you could still taste the fruit.” Broadbent slipped a sock over the bottle, secured it in a wooden box, and carried it by Concorde, at Shanken’s expense, to New York.
Shanken’s purchase made less news than had its higher-priced forerunners, but lent important new credibility to the Jefferson bottles. Forbes and Shiblaq/Al-Fayed were rich, showy, wine-world outsiders. Their bottles were bangles. Shanken was something else. As the owner, publisher, and editor of the premier wine magazine in a country increasingly obsessed with wine, his decision to buy a Jefferson bottle was meaningful. And his purchase, unlike Forbes’s, came after the scholarly doubts about the Jefferson attribution had been well aired. If Shanken still believed the bottle was for real, then it was no longer just Broadbent and Rodenstock and Château d’Yquem standing behind the cache. Margaux’s willingness to let Broadbent recork the bottle at the château—thereby bestowing its official imprimatur—provided still another blue-chip endorsement.
BROADBENT SOON HAD a chance to taste two more of the Jefferson bottles. At Rodenstock’s annual tasting in September 1987, this one at the Arlberg Hospiz Hotel in western Austria, the German opened a 1787 Margaux. “Slight ullage,” Broadbent noted, “wizened black cork, thick, gritty, puce-coloured sediment, the wine itself deeper than expected; little nose at first but exposure to air revived it quite sweetly; richly flavoured, well balanced.”
The following year, Rodenstock traded a Jefferson bottle to Lloyd Flatt, a fifty-year-old member of the Group who was planning a monumental tasting. Flatt, who lived in New Orleans, was routinely described by wine writers as an “aerospace consultant,” but he was widely rumored to be involved in the design or sale of weapons. (“He bragged that he sold the Argentines the missile that sank the British cruiser in the Falklands,” recalled a guest who attended his tastings.) Flatt was lean and tall, with a neatly trimmed beard now going gray. His customary outfit of a tailored suit dapperly offset the triangular black patch he had worn over his right eye since a childhood accident. A little boy once walked up to him at an airport and asked if he was a pirate. “Yes,” Flatt responded, in his native Tennessee drawl. “Now go away.”
Flatt had begun buying wine in the late sixties, at Heublein in the United States and Christie’s in London. He thought nothing of setting his alarm for 3:00 a.m. in order to arrange a phone connection to a morning auction in England, and he scoured wine shops around the world. His bottles were nearly all French, and most of those were Bordeaux classed growths. Flatt owned lots of nineteenth-century vintages, and he liked big bottles. Among his most prized wines were a Jéroboam of 1929 Mouton-Rothschild, and double magnums of 1806 Lafite and 1953 Pétrus. Flatt claimed to have tasted more vintages of Pétrus than anyone alive. Later he added Burgundy, aged Champagne, Port, and eaux-de-vie to the mix. He didn’t buy just any old wine, only bottles he felt had impeccable provenance. By the 1980s, the collection at his house on Ursuline Street in the French Quarter was so big that he moved to another house nearby, air-conditioning the vacated house at 55 degrees, installing neutral lighting to facilitate accurate color appraisal, and filling the house entirely with wine.
It was not a museum cellar. Flatt liked to say that he wrote off the cost of a bottle upon purchase, so that even if it appreciated in value, he wouldn’t feel inhibited about popping it open. For people like Flatt, who drank wine almost as ardently as he bought it, wine did not offer the usual psychological balm of compulsive collecting: the satisfaction of completeness, the security of ownership. Wine was different from paintings or stamps or cars. Its very purpo
se was to be consumed, to register sense impressions and then disappear. It was also, of course, more social. Sharing meant sharing—not, as with paintings, having visiting hours, but actually giving away some of one’s possession.
But even if Flatt’s cellar was meant for drinking, with a rumored 30,000 bottles it was undeniably excessive. This was one of the tacit rules of supercollecting: steadfastly declare that you buy your wine for drinking, not for collecting, despite owning far more bottles than you could ever possibly drink. Another: preach about wine as the drink of moderation while, at the same time, reeking of personal eccentricity. Flatt lived both axioms.
He had attended many of the events organized by fellow members of the Group, and these tastings, like those of their German counterparts, had become trials of one-upmanship, their scale and scope expanding every year. “You’d say to yourself, ‘I haven’t had that. I want that. I must have that,’” Flatt said later. “It became very competitive.”
By the late eighties, Flatt had hosted sprawling verticals of Pétrus, Mouton, Cheval Blanc, and Ausone, which was the one other St. Emilion wine considered to be Cheval’s equal. But the tasting of Lafite that Flatt decided to throw in October 1988 was by far his most ambitious. Of all the Bordeaux in his collection, Lafite reigned supreme. Flatt had more examples of it than of any other wine, and it was his favorite, “an entity within itself,” as he put it, “truly the first of the great growths. It has great finesse, subtlety, elegance and staying power.”
The tasting would take place over three days. Flatt already owned 3,000 Tiffany wineglasses, and he ordered an additional two thousand. And Flatt made sure the entertainment would live up to the rest of the event. The Storyville Stompers, a Dixieland jazz band, would parade the tasters to lunch at a restaurant. Another meal would have the theme of a plantation feast. Peter Duchin, the New York society bandleader, would perform at the 120-guest, black-tie dinner-dance at the Meridien Hotel, which would bring the weekend to a close.
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