The Billionaire's Vinegar

by Benjamin Wallace

  As for the wine, Flatt’s tasting would make Marvin Overton’s pioneering 1979 “Lafite in Texas” shindig seem like small beer. Overton had assembled thirty-six vintages, at the time a huge number. But for this 1988 tasting, which had been in the planning for more than a decade, Flatt assembled no fewer than 115 vintages of the first-of-first growths.

  Working in Flatt’s favor, Lafite was perhaps the most collectible wine ever made, built to last and especially popular with those compulsive cellarers in England and Scotland. People kept it around for a long time, and more nineteenth-century vintages of Lafite had survived than of any other red Bordeaux. Even before ramping up for this tasting, Flatt already owned sixty vintages. All had perfect résumés, coming from Lafite itself, from other Bordeaux châteaux (they customarily traded samples with each other), or from the impeccably maintained cellars of great French restaurants.

  Now, to round out his tasting, Flatt homed in on the remaining vintages he wanted to include in the vertical. He was especially interested in serving the 1806, which he had acquired at auction in 1976 and which hadn’t appeared in earlier Lafite verticals. An 1803, having already been in the lineup at Overton’s 1979 tasting, interested Flatt less. He watched the market intently, constantly checking in with auctioneers and merchants; whenever a Lafite surfaced that he didn’t yet own, he pounced, checking another vintage off his list. The wines most difficult to acquire were not the pre-Phylloxeras, which were expensive but came up for auction on a fairly reliable basis. The really hard gets were the justifiably obscure vintages: nineteenth-century wines blighted by phylloxera or the powdery fungus called oidium; certain years from the unfortunate decade of the 1930s (Broadbent: “It opened with three atrocious vintages”); and even a few more recent “off” vintages, such as 1951 and 1965.

  Flatt faxed updates to friends, and they joined in the bottle hunt. Peter Meltzer, a journalist who had been writing about Flatt for years, was able to contribute a rare 1956. Broadbent considered the vintage so poor that drinking it was “a penance,” but Meltzer happened to own some because 1956 was the year of his wife’s birth. David Milligan, a New York importer of Lafite, got the château to contribute a 1905, a 1931, and a 1941. As the tasting approached, Flatt was still trying to add to the list. When an 1822 came up for auction at Christie’s in September, Flatt bid on it, but as the bidding soared, he dropped out. It would have made a nice inclusion, but even he had his limits. The bottle ended up selling for $20,900.

  The rarest Lafite of all was provided by Rodenstock, who bartered with Flatt for a 1784 from the Jefferson cache. Whatever its longer-term provenance, the bottle’s recent history was shaky. Rodenstock had personally delivered the bottle to Malibu, where Flatt kept another home, and Flatt had then carried the bottle by private plane to Washington, D.C., and then to New Orleans. The flight was turbulent. The bottle began to leak. Flatt dipped his finger in the wine and thought it tasted “good.”

  On a weekend in October, Flatt’s guests converged in New Orleans for an event billed as “200 Years of Lafite-Rothschild.” There were fourteen of them, the number of people who could comfortably fit at Flatt’s table and reasonably divide a single bottle for tasting purposes. They included Overton, thrower of the 1979 Lafite vertical that was about to be left in the dust, as well as Rodenstock and Michael Broadbent, who had wangled an invite for his son by volunteering Bartholomew’s services as a pourer. Before the weekend was over, Bartholomew, nicknamed Bollew, would repay the kindness by sneaking a glass of Coke into a lineup of brown, older wines his father was appraising. Michael Broadbent would say that for an old wine the color looked about right, yelling, after he smelled it, “Bollew, you little shit!”

  Day One of the vertical got under way with a flight of five wines: 1950–54. It was followed by a seven-wine flight (1902–08), which was followed by a five-wine flight (1868–72). The progression was typical for a tasting of this kind, moving backward in time from younger to older, simpler to more complex, more powerful and pleasurable to subtler and more intellectual. The final stop in the day’s time travel was 1784. Rodenstock’s leaky Jefferson bottle.

  The wine’s level was into the shoulder, ominously low. The room went quiet as Ralf Frenzel set to work. Save for his youth, Frenzel looked the sommelier’s part, with a black waiter’s vest and a silver tastevin dangling from his neck. Having learned his lesson when the Mouton cracked two years earlier, Frenzel now eschewed his antique bottle-breaching toolkit in favor of a plastic Screwpull.

  Sure enough, the cork crumbled, a piece breaking off and falling into the wine. Someone lit a candle stub in a silver stick, decanting the wine according to the traditional method. This involved carefully pouring a wine off its sediment, with a flame backlighting the stream, and stopping as soon as sediment began to flow with it. Frenzel inserted a metal funnel filter in the neck of a curvy, modern decanter to catch cork particles and poured the wine through it. Flatt brought the intact stump of cork to his nose and inhaled.

  Writer Terry Robards would later point out that, notionally, this Jefferson bottle was worth “at least as much” as the Forbes bottle, since it was three years older. It might even be worth more, since 1784 was considered a superior vintage. But then Flatt’s guests tasted the wine. This was the first of the Jefferson bottles to be opened and tasted in America, at an event neither run by Rodenstock nor populated exclusively with his loyalists, and the comments about the wine seemed to reflect these less controlled circumstances. Robards and Frank Prial, a writer from the New York Times, both deemed the wine “vinegar.” Bartholomew Broadbent would later call it “one of the best balsamic vinegars I ever tasted.”

  “The term ‘salad dressing’ was on everyone’s lips,” Robards wrote later, adding, “Only a handful of the other old Lafites proved to be undrinkable, and each of these was basically oxidized, showing the odor of Madeira that is typical of many tired old wines…. What bearing this discovery had on the authenticity of the 1784 Lafite was not immediately apparent, but it was clear that something very different had happened to this particular wine.”

  There was that word again: authenticity. The best wines were such a singular experience (the spice of Mouton, for instance, or what Michael Broadbent called the “slow strip tease” of Lafite) that seasoned tasters could readily notice a deviation from it. And Robards had observed, in his considerable experience of old wines, that they all followed the same course—paling in color, thinning in aroma and taste, weakening in structure. This wine was markedly different, being very dark and vinegarishly acidic. He speculated that younger wine might have been added, triggering a secondary fermentation in the bottle.

  Questions about the Jefferson attribution had been raised nearly three years earlier, and skepticism about the origin of the bottles had circulated as well, but Robards’s comments, which appeared in the December 15, 1988, issue of Wine Spectator, were the first to suggest publicly that something might be amiss—not merely spoiled, but strange and uncharacteristic—with the wine inside of those bottles. Previous rumors of a Nazi affiliation now seemed almost quaint next to suggestions that the wine itself might not be as old as the engraving indicated.

  Rodenstock and Broadbent were, of course, staunch defenders of the wine. “An ullaged bottle,” Broadbent recorded in his notebook. “Alas, but unsurprisingly ‘over the top,’ oxidised: colour dark brown; nose like pure balsamic vinegar; despite the rich components—undrinkable.” Few knew what a bottle so old should taste like, anyway. The number of people who had experienced pre-1800 wines was tiny, and of that handful, Broadbent and Rodenstock had tasted the most. This—a presumption of infallibility about old wines because they had tasted more than anyone else—was increasingly their fallback posture when questioned.

  “I cannot believe that it is anything but genuine,” Broadbent said. “I thought the bottle alone was worth 10,000 pounds.”

  IN THE THREE months following the Flatt tasting, Rodenstock privately sold four more Jefferson bottles. Th
e buyer of all four was William Ingraham Koch, the scion of a Kansas oil-and-gas fortune. For the past eight years, Koch (pronounced like the soft drink) had been at the center of an epic feud with his family, including his twin brother, David. It had ignited in 1980, when Bill Koch attempted a coup by proxy fight to oust his older brother, Charles, from Wichita-based Koch Industries, then the second-largest privately held company in the country; Charles outmaneuvered him, and Bill, who worked from the Boston area, ended up jobless at age forty. Bill sued his brothers. Their mother told Bill he wasn’t welcome in her house. Eventually, in 1983, Bill took a buyout of his piece of the company. He walked away with $470 million.

  Before the Koch brothers cut a deal, Bill’s wealth was illiquid, and he had been in a several-year funk. After receiving the windfall, Koch went on a hedonistic tear. He spent his newfound money on eating and drinking, and collecting houses, art, and wine. Koch had been interested in wine since the 1970s, when he noticed how much better Montrachet, the most famous white Burgundy, tasted than run-of-the-mill stuff. But it was the big payday that turned him into a collector. He started buying an average of 5,000 bottles a year, an acquisition rate he would maintain through the late 1980s.

  Systematically, Koch set out to assemble deep verticals of four iconic wines; eventually he would own 95 years of Pétrus, 100 years of Latour, 120 years of Mouton, and 150 years of Lafite (as well as 33 vintages of Hennessey Cognac, back to 1851). It was while assembling these verticals that, in November of 1988, Koch bought a 1787 Branne-Mouton, a Jefferson bottle, from a Midwestern firm called the Chicago Wine Company. Koch was then approached directly by Farr Vintners, the London brokers who had obtained the bottle from Rodenstock and sold it to Chicago Wine.

  Farr said they had three more, and partner Lindsay Hamilton flew to New York with the bottles—a 1784 Branne-Mouton, a 1784 Lafite, and a 1787 Lafite, all inscribed “Th.J.”—in a big leather lawyer’s briefcase and delivered them to Bill Koch at his Fifth Avenue apartment. For the group of three, Koch paid £116,000, or about $200,000. One month after buying the three Jefferson bottles from Farr, Koch bought another batch of (non-Jefferson) bottles from the brokers, including three eighteenth-century wines (1737 and 1771 “La Fitte,” and a 1791 “La Tour”) sourced from Rodenstock and priced, collectively, at £91,000 ($159,250).

  Where were all these bottles coming from? 1771? 1737? They were Koch’s oldest wines. The 1737 was way beyond anything even Broadbent had encountered. When Broadbent auctioned the Forbes bottle, a mere 1787, it was the oldest authenticated vintage claret Christie’s had ever handled. Even the earliest Christie’s catalogs, published during the 1760s and 1770s and 1780s, made no specific mention of red wine as old as the bottles Koch had just bought. In Broadbent’s Great Vintage Wine Book, 1771 and 1791 were among the very few eighteenth-century vintages mentioned, and not because he had tasted them, but because they had been acclaimed in their time. Their turning up now seemed a remarkable coincidence. But selling the bottles to Koch put them in the hands of an enthusiastic collector, not a scholar, and using the private market for the transaction meant that it went unobserved by most people in the wine world.

  The bottles were of a piece with a curious phenomenon in the old-wine scene in the latter half of the 1980s: the appearance of ever-rarer rarities. The 1970s and early 1980s had seen the progressive depletion of the buried stocks of Europe, thanks largely to Broadbent. “They don’t exist now,” Broadbent told an interviewer once. “They’ve been explored like the Pyramids or the tombs of the Nile. They’ve all been desecrated by me.” Yet in the years since his streak of discoveries, several more bottles from the eighteenth century had surfaced. A possible explanation was that Broadbent had done the strip-mining, and a new breed of bottle hunters was digging deeper. Then again, it seemed strange that the bottle hunter raising his shovel in triumph was invariably Hardy Rodenstock.

  Koch, in the mold of Forbes and Shiblaq/Al-Fayed, was a deep-pocketed outsider whose extravagant purchase of the bottles did nothing to validate them to wine-world insiders. For Chicago Wine Company and Farr Vintners to sell the bottles, however, was to provide yet two more seals of approval for Rodenstock and his bottles. The list of respected wine-world players willing to vouch for the bottles—Michael Broadbent, Christie’s, Marvin Shanken, Château Margaux, Château d’Yquem—had just gotten a little bit longer.

  Farr, in particular, was a major player, an upstart which, in a very short time, had emerged as the foremost London broker of Bordeaux futures as well as a leader in the rarities market. “We used to call them ‘the weasels,’” Broadbent recalled. Now Farr was the top seller of Jefferson bottles. Four—the number Farr had sold to Koch, three directly and one through Chicago Wine—was one more than even Broadbent had sold. And Farr had sold a fifth.

  CHAPTER 10

  A PLEASANT STAIN, BUT NOT A GREAT ONE

  BILL SOKOLIN WAS MAKING HIS WAY ACROSS THE ROOM to see Rusty Staub when he had the first inkling that something had gone terribly wrong. It was Sunday, April 24, 1989, and Sokolin was at a black-tie, $250-a-head, seven-course, seventeen-wine dinner at the Four Seasons. During the week the restaurant played host to Manhattan’s power elite; on Sundays it was often closed to accommodate the great and grand of the wine world at private events such as this. Sokolin, a wine-shop owner, was a controversial figure among his colleagues, known for his roster of well-heeled clients, his loopy newsletter soliloquies, and a Barnumesque promotional style (when a newspaper once termed him “an incorrigible hypemeister,” Sokolin wrote to thank the editor). At this moment, the proprietor of D. Sokolin & Co. was navigating the Pool Room, a high-ceilinged, midcentury-modern space bordered with stubby palm trees and surrounding an elevated, square, white marble pool rippling with azure water.

  Nearly two hundred people were here, among them every wine retailer of note in the New York area, including Michael Aaron from Sherry-Lehmann and Don Zacharia from Zachys. Former major-league baseball player Staub, now a restaurateur, had brought Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez. But what Sokolin was most excited about, what had goaded him to bring the bottle, were the guests of honor: Châteaux Margaux owners Laura and Corinne Mentzelopoulos and Paul Pontallier, the estate’s urbane director.

  Sokolin happened to be in possession of a Margaux the likes of which most of these people had never seen. A 1787 Margaux. A Jefferson bottle. The most expensive bottle of wine in the world, as far as Sokolin was concerned. Guinness might bestow that honor on Malcolm Forbes, but Sokolin’s bottle was insured for $212,000, $56,000 above the price of the Forbes Lafite. Tonight, Sokolin couldn’t resist showing the bottle around, and as a former minor-league baseball player, he was especially eager to show it to Staub.

  The realization that something was dripping on his leg was not immediate. Sokolin kept walking, but the sensation of moisture didn’t go away. He looked down at his tuxedo pants and saw a dark patch.

  Had someone spilled coffee on him? He hadn’t noticed it. Had he had an accident? He wasn’t that old. But then—

  No.

  No.

  Sokolin stopped walking.

  He turned around and retraced his steps, as if doing so would unwind what he dimly feared was happening.

  He got back to the table where he and his wife Gloria were sitting with the heads of Campari and Chateau & Estate and Southern Wines & Spirits and an executive from American Express.

  His leg was still wet. No use putting it off any longer: He opened the bag.

  Wine had spilled out. Worse, there were two large holes in the side of the bottle. A pair of irregularly shaped pieces of glass lay at the bottom of the bag.

  “I broke the bottle,” Sokolin announced, locking eyes with the Campari executive. “I’m going home.”

  There were gasps. He looked around the table, in shock. The people sitting there looked at him, speechless. And Sokolin walked back across the room, aware of nothing beyond himself and the bottle he clutched upright in its soggy bag. Red drops wer
e falling now, on the blue-and-gray carpet.

  Sokolin’s Margaux was already dodgy in the eyes of a number of colleagues in the room. It was one of the controversial Jefferson bottles. The level of wine seemed improbably high for something so old. The seal looked new. And in hindsight, his actions at the dinner would strike several guests as suspicious. Sokolin was, after all, a notorious self-promoter who had been touting the bottle aggressively. He had brought a fragile, extremely valuable bottle to a crowded event. He had handled it clumsily. The bottle was insured for a lot of money. And once Sokolin had fully grasped what was going on, he had fled the room.

  The bottle’s ill-starred journey had begun in late 1987, when Farr Vintners partner Stephen Browett flew from London to Munich. Hardy Rodenstock met him at the airport with the 1787 Margaux, and Browett flew straight to Manchester, where he handed the bottle, tucked inside a tennis bag, to Tim Littler, who had agreed to buy it for £37,000. Littler hailed from an old Cheshire wine-trade family. His grandfather had bought Whitwhams, a Manchester-area merchant, and by the 1980s it was a significant player in the rare-wine market. Browett had lunch with Littler, then boarded a train back to London.

  The standard Whitwhams markup was 100 percent, and the bottle was listed in its February 1988 catalog at £75,000. No sooner had the catalog appeared than Littler thought: What’s the point of selling the second-most expensive bottle of wine in the world? The Forbes bottle had gone for £105,000. In the next Whitwhams catalog, which came out that September, Littler upped the price of his bottle to £125,000.