The Billionaire's Vinegar

by Benjamin Wallace

  In the Whitwhams cellar one day, an employee noticed that the bottle was leaking through a bubble in the heavy wax that capped it. One of the firm’s directors flew the bottle to Bordeaux to have it recorked at Château Margaux. With Paul Pontallier and Corinne Mentzelopoulos looking on, the cellarmaster added a bit more than an inch of 1959 wine and inserted an unusual, wedge-shaped cork. It fit loosely. Back in Manchester, Littler saw that the bottle continued to ooze.

  This time he decided to recork it himself. Recorking was a specialty of Whitwhams, which performed the service on 2,000 bottles of wine a year. Some connoisseurs objected to the practice, and had found wines recorked by Whitwhams, in particular, to be subpar. But Littler defended recorking, which provided a merchant with an opportunity to assess a bottle’s contents before reselling it, as a quality-control mechanism that benefited customers.

  Normally, recorking a wine was straightforward: take out the old cork, put in a new one. But you had to be careful putting a new cork into the oldest bottles, as the increased air pressure could blow out the base. A 1787 Margaux called for extra caution. Like the Forbes Lafite, this Margaux was in a hand-blown bottle, heavy at the bottom and much thinner near the top. Worried that the glass would shatter, Littler taped the neck and eased the cork out with his hands.

  He couldn’t let this opportunity pass. He tipped out a few drops of the wine into a glass. It was the color of iodine. Littler tasted it. Later he wouldn’t recall the flavor, other than “prunes” and that it was “certainly much more than” merely “interesting” or “alive.” He resealed the bottle.

  The old-wine market ebbed and flowed. Littler might go half a year without selling a bottle, then move six in a week. All it took was one interested buyer. But after several months he still hadn’t found a customer for the Jefferson bottle. Meanwhile, a New York retailer he knew named Bill Sokolin said he had a client who was interested but wanted to see the bottle before committing.

  Sokolin had pretty much fallen into the business started by his father. After attending Tufts, where he excelled at baseball, he had played for a string of teams in the Brooklyn Dodgers farm system, then was drafted into the army. Stationed in Virginia, he was spared from combat by his assignment to the service baseball, basketball, and football teams. Sokolin completed his service and, as a stopgap, went to work for his father. At the time, his father sold mainly hard liquor; what little wine he carried was plonk.

  This was in the late 1950s, just when well-off Americans were becoming more interested in wine. Bill Sokolin saw an opportunity, and he rebuilt his father’s business around Bordeaux. When wine prices started to soar in the 1960s, Sokolin became an evangelist of wine as investment, ultimately writing two books on the topic. William Buckley Jr. was a longtime client; in his memoir, Buckley wrote of Sokolin’s enthusiasm for wine, “It would positively have killed Bill Sokolin if he had been born, say, in Saudi Arabia. I suspect both his hands and both his feet would have been amputated by the time he was sixteen, because Bill Sokolin cannot be kept from wine tasting.”

  When the ballyhooed 1982 Bordeaux vintage came out, Sokolin sided with a few old-guard critics in arguing that it was overrated, taking out full-page ads in the New York Times in which he dismissed the gushing praise for the ’82s by up-and-coming wine critic Robert Parker. Sokolin was colossally wrong about the vintage, which proved to be the best investment in wine history and made Parker’s name as a critic.

  Over the years, through his business, Sokolin met several U.S. presidents. Just after Ronald Reagan was first elected, he called Sokolin and said, “Where’s my wine?” Reagan had ordered some from Sokolin on the advice of Bill Buckley. “In front of me,” Sokolin replied. He had been unable to deliver the wine to the White House without the approval of the Secret Service. With the approval, Sokolin could get the wine to him in three or four hours. Reagan took care of it right away.

  But it was a dead president who tugged at Sokolin’s imagination. Having heard of Thomas Jefferson’s interest in wine, “I started to read a little, and then I started to read a lot.” Sokolin bought more than a hundred books about Jefferson. When Sokolin met Jimmy Carter, he took the opportunity to discuss Jefferson with a sitting president. Sokolin also used the newsletters he sent regularly to his clients as a platform to talk about Jefferson. In one essay, Sokolin argued that it was Jefferson who first introduced wine futures to America. Sokolin had a mystical streak and, in a commentary of which he was especially proud, imagined a three-way conversation among Ernest Hemingway, Jefferson, and Winston Churchill. Another time, he wrote a letter to Ambassador Jefferson as if he were still alive.

  Sokolin first heard of the Jefferson bottles when he read an account of the Forbes purchase in Wine Spectator. Later, when he visited the Forbes Galleries to view the 1787 Lafite, he was shocked that it was displayed under a spotlight and warned the security guard. Then, when the cork slipped, Sokolin says, Kip Forbes called him and asked what to do. Sokolin told him there were two options: either throw out the wine, or let Sokolin jump on a plane and take it to Lafite for recorking. The Forbeses decided to keep the bottle as it was.

  Sokolin learned that he might be able to get his own Jefferson bottle when Littler, with whom he’d done business in the past and who knew of his Jeffersonian proclivities, called and said, “Bill, I think I’ve got your bottle.” Littler said he could arrange for Sokolin to take the bottle on consignment. The two men began to explore their options for complimentary transport. Air France offered to fly Littler and the bottle to America by Concorde, but that would require Littler to get to London. British Airways flew straight from Manchester, and volunteered two first-class tickets—one for Littler, one for the bottle. After making sure Sokolin had obtained insurance, on Friday, October 22, 1988, Littler set out for the Manchester airport.

  British Airways issued a press release about the flight and photographed Littler and the bottle checking in and taking their seats on the plane, where a clutch of publicists and flight attendants dressed up the Margaux, peeking out of the same tennis bag in which Littler had received it, with blanket, headphones, and seat belt. Landing at JFK in New York at 6:00 p.m., Littler went through customs, gave the bottle to Sokolin, turned on his heel, and boarded a return flight to England. There, a hand-scrawled fax from his friends at Farr Vintners awaited him. It accompanied one of the pictures of Littler and the bottle that had appeared in a newspaper, and said, “Don’t Die of Ignorance: Always wear gloves when you’ve got your fingers in a punt.” In the photo, Littler’s thumb was in the “punt,” the concavity in the base of a wine bottle.

  The following day, Sokolin’s interested party had a heart attack while playing golf and died, Sokolin told Littler. Therefore he no longer had a customer. Littler said he was going to be in New York a month later and would collect the bottle at that time. But then Sokolin said he had another client who was interested, and Littler’s trip was pushed back a few months. The bottle stayed with Sokolin.

  Sokolin displayed it in his shop and encouraged wine journalists to write about it. He also sent a fax to Malcolm Forbes with the latest D. Sokolin price list, touting the arrival of the 1787 Jefferson Margaux:

  Dear Malcolm,

  This is an event of some magnitude. And it ain’t the price—250,000 for this bottle.

  Th. Jefferson’s spirit is in this bottle.

  He and G Washington had a COMPANY—called the WINE COMPANY—chartered in 1774.

  THE PURPOSE—to get the DEMON RUM out of the Colonies—The equivalent of drugs today.

  And replace it with WINE…WINE

  It’s a good story and better than the ones the candidates have chosen.

  This little bottle will start drugs out as requested by the SPIRIT OF JEFFERSON…

  Sounds nuts—?

  I think the bottle would make nice duo at FORBES—and the story is the point…

  All the best,

  Bill Sokolin

  The story was the point, but Forbes wasn’t
interested. Heeding the salesman’s adage that if at first something doesn’t sell, you should ask for more, Sokolin kept hiking the price, first to $394,000. Then, after seeing a rickety footstool sell at auction for $290,000, which Sokolin thought absurd, he repriced the bottle at an entirely arbitrary $519,750.

  IT WAS DURING this lull that Sokolin attended the Four Seasons event. The sponsors were Chateau & Estate and Château Margaux. By the late 1980s, an annual U.S. roadshow was de rigueur for the top growths of Bordeaux. While, on a mass scale, America had come late to wine, its high-end collectors had exercised a disproportionate influence on the market since the late 1960s. As of 1990, a quarter of all Pétrus and half of the production of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, the most esteemed producer in Burgundy, would be going to the U.S. In the spring of 1989, the Margaux team were in New York to promote the 1986 vintage, considered one of their strongest showings since the Mentzelopoulos family had bought the estate more than a decade earlier.

  Corinne Mentzelopoulos began the evening by getting up and talking about the special vintages, 1953 and 1961, that Margaux was providing that night, and about the 1986 wine that would be tasted. Then the meal got under way. A few courses had already been served when Sokolin realized he should have brought the bottle with him. What better occasion to show off this extraordinarily rare bottle of Margaux than at a dinner to honor its makers? He said so to his wife Gloria.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

  “Nope,” he said. “I’m going to get it.”

  Sokolin took a taxi to the prewar building where he lived on the Upper West Side, across a darkened lawn from the Museum of Natural History. Entering his ninth-floor apartment, Sokolin passed an oversized retro poster ad for Mumm’s Champagne and foyer bookcases packed with works about wine and Jefferson. He crossed the blond parquet floor and turned into the dining room, where, instead of wallpaper, the ends of wooden cases that had once contained great wines were arranged in a vinous mosaic. A shelf displayed two reproductions of Jefferson’s wineglasses, a gigantic Lafite bottle opened after Gloria’s mother’s funeral, and an eighteenth-century Madeira decanter Sokolin had opened for the party to launch his book Liquid Assets. He retrieved the Jefferson bottle from a freestanding refrigerated wine closet in the corner of the room.

  When he arrived back at the Four Seasons, half an hour after he had left, he brought the bottle directly to the Margaux table and said to Madame Mentzelopoulos, “I bet you never saw a bottle this old.” She had, of course, seen this very bottle, during its recorking for Whitwhams. Sokolin left it with the table for thirty minutes. “He was showing it to everyone,” Julian Niccolini, then the maître d’, recalled later. “Everyone was suspicious of this bottle.” Before dessert, Sokolin retrieved it from the Margaux table and took it to show to Rusty Staub.

  Sokolin was cradling the bottle in a bag, with his left arm, when it happened. Niccolini saw the whole thing. Just inside the Pool Room, to the left of the door, stood a gueridon, a low, metal-topped trolley used as a service station by waiters. When Sokolin was a few steps into the room, headed toward Staub, he brushed past the gueridon. Wine immediately began to spill onto the carpet.

  Minutes later, Sokolin was running from the room, trailing splotches of what looked like blood on the pale stone underfoot. He strode down a long, white marble corridor that led to the Grill Room, past the hostess station, and down the stairs to the lobby, which was scattered with black Barcelona chairs. When Sokolin put the bag and bottle down on a counter as he retrieved his coat, more of the wine leaked out, and three people dipped their fingers in it. One, licking his finger, said the wine was “cooked.” Niccolini thought it tasted like mud.

  NOW IN HIS overcoat, Sokolin pushed out through the double doors onto an especially charmless block of midtown Manhattan and flagged down a taxi. Back in the Pool Room, in the spot where he had last been standing, a crowd gathered. In the chaos of his departure, Sokolin had left the two loose bottle shards at the restaurant. Howard Goldberg, from the New York Times, took one piece as a souvenir, and Paul Kovi, the co-owner of the restaurant, took the second. Meanwhile, Gloria Sokolin, unaware of what had happened, was wondering where her husband was. Then she saw Goldberg.

  “So, the bottle’s broken,” the Times reporter said.

  Gloria did a double take. “Excuse me?” she said.

  “Bill broke the bottle,” Goldberg repeated.

  At first Gloria had a hard time believing that her husband could have left without her, but as she continued to look for him without success, it began to sink in. This was a problem. She had no money. She didn’t even have the ticket to retrieve her fur coat. Somewhat embarrassed, she had to borrow five dollars from a tablemate for a taxi. Fortunately, her husband had at least had the presence of mind, in his rushed departure, to leave her coat-check ticket with the attendant.

  Gloria took a cab home, and on the way, a news report came on the radio about what had happened. She arrived home and, understandably annoyed, allowed herself an I-told-you-so. But she knew how bad it felt to break something. A few years earlier she had been removing her silver chest from its hiding place inside the wine closet when she accidentally broke an 1874 Lafite. She and Bill had literally lapped it up off the floor. He had been understanding then, saying, “Accidents happen.”

  Now she found her husband “bereft,” as she later put it. “Bill was inconsolable.” Arriving home, Sokolin had gingerly removed the bottle from its carrier. Only about five ounces of wine, or 20 percent, remained. He went into the kitchen, where the walls were covered in paper, designed by Gloria, featuring a repeating pattern of signatures of great modern French chefs. Paul Bocuse. Jean Troisgros. Alain Chapel. Sokolin poured a small glass for himself, then put the rest of the wine in a small plastic container, which he put in the freezer. He tasted what was in his glass. It was recognizable as wine, but by no means tasted good. He put the empty bottle on a table in the living room.

  At midnight, with the arrival of April 25, he turned fifty-eight. Forty minutes into Sokolin’s birthday, Howard Goldberg, the Times reporter who had made off with a piece of the bottle, telephoned, eager to secure his scoop. He asked if Sokolin had been drunk. Sokolin said he’d only had a single glass of Champagne and hadn’t finished any of his glasses of Bordeaux.

  “I did something terrible,” Sokolin told Goldberg. “I’m very unhappy. I was in shock. I committed murder.”

  The next morning, Tim Littler was staying with friends in Geneva when his host knocked on his bedroom door and said a reporter was calling from the New York Times. Littler didn’t think anyone knew where he was, so he wasn’t sure how the reporter had tracked him down, but he took the call. Goldberg delivered the bad news. At first, Littler thought it must be an April Fool’s joke, but it was already the fourth week of the month, so he quickly gave up on that idea. Several more newspapers called that day.

  Littler wasn’t worried about the money. His attitude was a shopkeeper’s: you break it, you buy it. At first he thought, knowing Sokolin, that it might be a publicity stunt. But once he learned of the precise pattern of breakage, Littler ruled out that theory. If the bottle had fallen on the ground and shattered, that would be one thing, but no one could intentionally and cleanly puncture such an old bottle.

  The next several days were a blur of media attention. Sokolin walked to a TV studio, bottle in hand, to appear on Regis Philbin’s show. “Murder at Four Seasons” was the headline in U.S. News & World Report. People went with “Oops!” and dubbed Sokolin’s misfortune “the world’s most expensive puddle.” The New York Post blared: “Grapes of Wrath: Clumsy Vintner Breaks a 519G Bottle of Wine.” For Fleet Street tabloids, the episode served as a platonic illustration of Yank barbarism. “What a Plonker!” screamed one, while another tossed off a “Thought for Today: There’s only one thing worse than an American with no taste: One who buys it, then drops it.”

  Cartoonists had a field day. “Okay, stand back,” a man said to a crowd
gathered around a puddle in one cartoon, “and let it breathe.” In another, a man opined, of a splotch on the floor, “It’s a pleasant stain, I think, but not a great one.” Paul Kovi, at the Four Seasons, sent Sokolin a bill for the $360 it had cost the restaurant to have the rug cleaned. Sokolin ignored it. His feeling was that Kovi had gotten about “ten or twenty million dollars’” worth of free advertising out of his gaffe. (It would be dwarfed, seventeen years later, when casino developer Steve Wynn put his elbow through a $139-million Picasso.)

  When the reporter from People came to his home, Sokolin reached for the bottle, which still stood on the table where he had set it down, and almost knocked it over. Sokolin put his hand to his chest as the bottle swayed, but it remained standing. Sokolin retrieved the plastic container from the freezer and let the reporter smell it. It “looked like chocolate-brown goo and emitted an intense aroma not unlike that of stewed prunes,” the reporter wrote.

  “You think I did it on purpose, don’t you?” Sokolin said to the reporter, who concluded that it had been a true accident. Two of the key questions muttered by suspicious colleagues after Sokolin broke the bottle had ready answers: the level of wine was so high, and the seal new, because of the recent recorkings by Margaux and Whitwhams.

  Sokolin by now was embracing his fifteen minutes—mugging for the camera, bugging his eyes out, and holding the bottle forth defiantly. He said the bottle had been “worth maybe $10 million or maybe more.” He and Gloria, a real-estate broker, found themselves invited to social gatherings that previously would have eluded them. It wasn’t clear whether they were guests or entertainment. At one high-powered dinner party, the host introduced Sokolin as “Butterfingers.”

  The New York Times saw a morality tale in what had happened, publishing an editorial that read, in part, “Everyone who has saved a perfume for a worthy occasion and found its lilies have festered by the time she gets around to opening the bottle knows what it is to be a William Sokolin.” A William Sokolin! He had become a cautionary archetype. The lesson, the Times concluded, was that wine is for drinking rather than saving.