The Billionaire's Vinegar

by Benjamin Wallace

  It was at this, the tenth of Rodenstock’s annual tastings, that his HR-1 line of Riedel glasses debuted. Woschek’s teasing description of Rodenstock as living an imperial lifestyle took on a literal quality that year. Most of the September tasting took place at the Kurhaus Stüberl, a restaurant in southeastern Bavaria, but on Saturday the twenty-third, the festivities moved to Schloss Herrenchiemsee, a palace on an island in a nearby lake, which had been built by King Ludwig II as a copy of Versailles. As with the Frericks event at the Egyptian Art Museum, the tasting caused protests. Newspaper editorials denounced the use of a government building for this decadent event for the schikeria, or “chic people.” That Saturday evening, eighty guests ferried across the Chiemsee for the re-creation of an event that had taken place a century earlier.

  In the summer of 1867—the midpoint of Bordeaux’s twenty-year golden age—luminaries from across Europe had descended on Paris for the Universal Exposition, and on June 7 a historic dinner had been held. Attended by Czar Alexander II of Russia, his son and heir Alexander III, and Wilhelm I of Prussia, future first emperor of Germany (as well as by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck), it was called the Three Emperors Dinner. The meal was prepared by Adolphe Dugléré of the Café Anglais in Paris, the most famous restaurant of the period.

  Rodenstock’s 1989 reenactment called for guests to wear period costumes, and people showed up in everything from a Cossack getup to an American admiral’s uniform to Styrian folk garb. Beyond the usual German-speaking suspects, the guests included some of the most prominent American collectors, such as Lloyd Flatt and Bipin Desai, who dressed as a maharajah; internationally famous winemakers such as Italy’s Angelo Gaja; the English wine-writing and-importing couple Serena Sutcliffe and David Peppercorn; and Mario Adorf, an Italian-German movie star. Rodenstock went as Napoleon, and brought as his date an actual member of the Rodenstock optics family, Inge, an internationally known collector of modern art. Hardy Rodenstock had found a way to merge, at least temporarily, with the famous family whose name he shared.

  The dinner, which began at 8:00 p.m., took place in the rectangular Second Antechamber, ornate with gilt, mirrors, chandeliers, haut-relief friezes, a frescoed ceiling, and paintings of Louis XIV and his family. Two long tables were set, parallel to each other and running the length of the room. The meal, which replicated the 1867 menu, was a barrage of excess: hot quail paté, ortolan canapés, lobster à la parisienne, and on and on. The centerpiece of the event, and the hardest to pull off, was the collection of wines. Rodenstock had brought together each and every one of the rarities served at the original dinner: Madeira 1810; Sherry 1821; Château d’Yquem 1847; Chambertin 1846; Château Margaux 1847; Château Latour 1847; Château Lafite 1848; and Champagne Roederer Frappé.

  Amid the spectacle, Walter Eigensatz nursed rising suspicions. Eigensatz, Mr. Cheval Blanc, had been a core member of Rodenstock’s inner wine circle since the early 1980s, but he had only begun to doubt his friend a few months before. For his fiftieth birthday, Eigensatz organized a tasting going back one hundred years to 1889, and featuring Mouton, Margaux, and Lafite in Jéroboam. The event included a comparative tasting of the 1959 Lafite in every bottle size from regular up to Impériale, a test of the conventional wisdom that inversely correlates bottle size and rate of aging. “The Impériale was still too young,” Eigensatz recalled later.

  The next flight was all Impériales from 1929, and aimed at anointing the best wine from that vintage. The contenders included a Cheval Blanc and a Pétrus, both bought at auction, a Mouton donated by Lloyd Flatt, and an Ausone that came from Rodenstock. To Eigensatz, it was obvious that the Ausone was something other than Ausone. “I was suspicious at the time but didn’t say anything,” Eigensatz said later.

  This was on top of his nagging questions about what happened to the corks and empty bottles after Rodenstock’s tastings. In the 1980s, whenever anyone would try to get a close look at a Rodenstock cork, Frenzel the sommelier would quickly put it in his pocket. After the annual event at Arlberg, Rodenstock would leave some bottles with Adi Werner, the co-host, but always took the best ones away with him. Eigensatz had never seen where they went, and when he once asked Rodenstock, the answer was vague and unsatisfying: Rodenstock said that “a crazy guy” had paid him 10,000 marks—less than $5,000—for all his empties.

  Other times, Rodenstock said he was collecting bottles for “a bottle museum.” In 1987, as a fortieth-birthday gift for a noted German circus director and clown named Bernhard Paul, Rodenstock had presented three rare wines—an 1847 Yquem, a 1947 Cheval Blanc, and an old port. They were drunk at the birthday party, which was organized by Hans-Peter Wodarz, at whose Die Ente restaurant in Wiesbaden Rodenstock had held his 1985 tasting. Afterward, Rodenstock said he had intended only the contents as a gift, and he wanted the bottles back. Over the next two years he wrote twenty-five letters to Wodarz demanding the bottles be returned to him. He addressed the chef alternately as “Woody” and “Woodybaby,” threatened to “make hamburger” of him, and dismissed Paul as a “circus twit.” Ultimately, Rodenstock claimed he’d gotten two of the bottles back and donated them to an “Oppenheim museum.”

  At the 1989 Rodenstock event, at a tasting at 1:30 a.m. the night after the Three Emperors Dinner, Rodenstock poured Pétrus, in Impériales, from 1921, 1924, 1926, and 1928. Walter Eigensatz was at a table with Serena Sutcliffe, David Peppercorn, and Cheval Blanc manager Jacques Hébrard. Sutcliffe looked at Eigensatz and said, “Walter, these are all the same.” All the vintages tasted alike to her. They seemed to be one wine in four different packages. Sutcliffe was less skeptical of other wines served at the tasting. “Then there are grand occasion wines,” she wrote later, in a roundup of the most remarkable wines she had tasted in 1989, “which impose themselves even amid an array of historic superstars. Such was Hardy Rodenstock’s Château d’Yquem 1847 in magnum, brought from Leningrad for his re-creation of the 1867 Three Emperors Dinner. Liquid cocoa and coconut milk on the nose, fireworks on the palate—not just length, but breadth, remaining constant in the glass for half an hour. Incroyable.”

  On the subject of the Pétrus, though, tablemates Hébrard and Peppercorn agreed with her: This was one wine in four different bottles. The presence of Pétrus in large formats from the 1920s was surprising on its face because the vineyard’s rise to fame had begun only after World War II. Before that, it had been little more than a farmhouse, and its wine had been shipped mainly to Belgium. Christian Moueix, whose family had become one of the estate’s distributors in 1945 and half-owner in 1964, had attended the Pétrus vertical hosted by Hans-Peter Frericks in Munich, and had been skeptical then of the big bottles of 1921 Pétrus supplied by Rodenstock. When Moueix had asked Ralf Frenzel to see a cork, Rodenstock’s young sommelier had replied “Nein,” putting the cork in his pocket. After the suspicious Pétrus flight at Rodenstock’s 1989 tasting, Moueix told Eigensatz he doubted that any Impériales had been bottled in the 1920s. “Moueix served me a ’28 Pétrus,” Eigensatz recalled. “It was bad. The twenties Pétruses were bad.”

  Eigensatz found himself reevaluating all the Rodenstock wines he had drunk in the last several years. “I served them. I bought them,” Eigensatz said of the wines supposedly purchased in Caracas. Among these wines, which Eigensatz bought in 1987 and served shortly thereafter, were a double magnum of 1893 Cheval Blanc, an Impériale of 1893 Lafite, and a double magnum of 1893 Pétrus. “Pure raspberries,” Eigensatz recalled of the Cheval Blanc. “Incredible. The Lafite was excellent. The double magnum of Pétrus was very good. I know they were fakes. I’m convinced. I never had a Cheval Blanc again in this way—it’s always forest berries, never raspberries.”

  CHAPTER 12

  A BUILT-IN PREFERENCE FOR THE OBVIOUS

  FOR A LONE PRIVATE COLLECTOR WITHIN THE GERMAN-SPEAKING segment of the wine scene to have doubts was one thing. But more far-flung and influential people, not just those at the Three Emperors Dinner, were growing skeptical of Rodenstock, too. T
he German’s most important ally in Bordeaux had been Comte Alexandre de Lur Saluces, the proprietor of Château d’Yquem. Lur Saluces knew many serious collectors of his wine, but none so avid as Rodenstock, whom even he called “Monsieur Yquem.” Rodenstock had opened the 1787 Jefferson Yquem at the château in 1985, and when Rodenstock asked whether he might hold his 1986 tasting at the château, Lur Saluces assented. Rodenstock promised a wine of equal rarity for this tasting, the flower-painted bottle, presumed to be from the mid–eighteenth century and supposedly discovered in Leningrad, inscribed with the name of the Sauvage family.

  Lur Saluces wasn’t entirely prepared for what he was getting himself into. Rodenstock devoted an entire day to the question of which water to serve at the event; after sampling dozens, he concluded definitively that the simplest, most tasteless H2O was a particular Belgian spa water. The event, attended by forty-two guests, began at 1:00 p.m. and ended at 1:00 a.m. the next day. After one flight, a well-marinated Michael Broadbent had to remove his vest to walk in the vineyard. Jancis Robinson, who found herself drinking 1964 Lanson Champagne to wash down aspirin, left her tasting booklet at the château, to the annoyance of Lur Saluces, who felt it would be indelicate to address the matter, as it would draw attention to the fact that she might have overindulged. Later, Lur Saluces agreed to trade Rodenstock a number of older vintages of Yquem from the château cellar, including several 1921s, in exchange for another, full Jefferson bottle, a 1784.

  In Bordeaux, Lur Saluces was the bluest of bluebloods, Yquem the bluest of blue chips. The count’s validation was key to legitimizing Rodenstock. Some châteaux, including Pétrus and Margaux, kept their distance. Once Rodenstock asked Margaux general manager Paul Pontallier for certificates validating some of his old bottles. Pontallier refused. “He’s not an unpleasant person at all,” Pontallier says. “But we’ve never reconditioned bottles for him or participated in his tastings. Not that we had proof of anything, but we just weren’t comfortable.” Over the next few years, however, several other leading châteaux, including Yquem, Lafite, and Cheval Blanc, vouched for Rodenstock’s bottles by recorking them, which was tantamount to guaranteeing their authenticity. The day after the tasting at Yquem, the city of Bordeaux honored Rodenstock with a commemorative plaque.

  But Lur Saluces gradually became disillusioned. When they’d first met, in the early 1980s, Rodenstock had been humble, respectful, knowledgeable, and laconic to the point of awkwardness. Over time he became increasingly arrogant, pronouncing himself the authority on Yquem. A collision with Yquem’s leader seemed inevitable, and in the late eighties it happened.

  Near the end of the growing season in 1987, in Sauternes, it rained. A late rainfall was one of those things that could kill a vintage. If grapes were wet when picked, the entire crop could be diluted. A new technique called cryoextraction offered a solution: freeze the grapes, then mechanically separate them from the ice. The unripe grapes would freeze first (the riper grapes’ higher sugar content making them more resistant to freezing), so pressing would render juice only from the ripest grapes. Though the word suggested a futuristic, high-tech procedure, Lur Saluces viewed cryoextraction as basically “a cold room next to a press.”

  When he explained the process to Rodenstock, however, the German wrote a letter to Lur Saluces, denouncing the innovation and insisting that he stop using it forthwith. In the traditionalist view of Rodenstock, Lur Saluces was forsaking the venerable method of individually picked berries, bringing mechanization to a bastion of handwork. Instead of limiting his criticism to a private letter, however, Rodenstock sent copies to several journalists, and a big article appeared in Der Spiegel, sounding the alarm about Yquem’s new “horror machine.” Lur Saluces took umbrage. “This was a German giving orders to a Frenchman,” as journalist Heinz-Gert Woschek later put it.

  Lur Saluces was shocked by the attack and seriously considered suing Rodenstock. A few years later, Rodenstock further antagonized Lur Saluces when he tried to market a vase with Yquem’s insignia. Lur Saluces was at the time embroiled in a seventeen-year fight with Davidoff over its unauthorized use of Yquem’s name for one of its cigars, and Rodenstock’s venture seemed a clear provocation. Lur Saluces didn’t sue, but Rodenstock could forget about being asked to join the Académie du Vin, a fraternal organization led by Lur Saluces. When California collector Bipin Desai hosted a big Yquem vertical in the early 1990s, he had to disinvite Rodenstock after Lur Saluces said he wouldn’t attend if Rodenstock was there.

  “When Hardy attacked Yquem,” collector Wolfgang Grünewald said later, “the whole Bordelais community was behind Alex. That was a huge blunder by Hardy. He lost an invaluable relationship. Hardy would not be good at politics.”

  MORE THREATENING TO Rodenstock’s thriving business dealing wine were the proliferating questions about the contents of his bottles. At the high end of the market, doubts about the authenticity of certain old wines, while sometimes privately held, were seldom publicly aired. Châteaux, auction houses, and established merchants were fearful of spooking buyers, collectors of devaluing their cellars, and wine writers of being disinvited from exclusive tastings. Ambitious middlemen balked at interrogating their gray-market suppliers. In the late eighties, however, a handful of American collectors on the West Coast became more vocal.

  They were generally more private and intellectual than the big-money collectors who formed the Group. At the center of this mostly Los Angeles–based contingent was Bipin Desai, a theoretical physicist at the University of California’s Riverside branch, who on the side organized commercial tastings featuring grand assemblages of old and rare wine.

  Born into a wealthy Indian merchant family in Rangoon, then raised in Bombay, Desai had been a math prodigy, graduating from high school at the age of fourteen. After his family moved to the United States, he ended up getting his doctorate in physics at UC Berkeley and specialized in making predictions about the mass and behavior of subatomic specks like quarks, bosons, and leptons.

  A teetotaling Hindu in his youth, he had come to enjoy an occasional glass of wine after traveling in Europe. But after he attended a horizontal of 1961 Bordeaux, Desai became an obsessed tasting organizer. (He also became a gourmand; during a three-month sabbatical at CERN, the nuclear research lab in Switzerland, he dined two dozen times at the three-star restaurant of Fredy Girardet.) His events tended to be brainier and more focused than Rodenstock’s: Each would explore a single theme; dress would be merely coat-and-tie; there were fewer celebrities; they would typically only last two days; and, of course, Desai didn’t foot the bill for his tastings.

  Other key members of this group included Geoffrey Troy, an oenophile who ran a company that trucked automobiles around the United States; collector Edward M. Lazarus, a lawyer of right-leaning political convictions (at a vertical tasting of the Spanish cult wine Vega Sicilia, he proposed a toast to “El Caudillo”—the dictator Francisco Franco); Dennis Foley, an auctioneer at Butterfield & Butterfield in San Francisco who advised Gordon Getty on his wine purchases; collector John Tilson, an investment banker who, with Foley, published the newsletter Rarities; and Albert Givton, an Israel-raised Canadian who also published a wine newsletter. They were many of the same people who for several years had held an annual tasting jointly with their German counterparts. Desai’s events often included bottles sourced from Rodenstock.

  These were experienced tasters, and many of them weren’t that awed by Europeans like “Rodey,” as Lazarus sardonically referred to the German, or even Broadbent. After a tasting run by the British auctioneer in October 1983, Givton snarled to his diary that the event had been “very poorly organized” by “His Majesty,” signing off, “Bon Voyage!” The two men would soon square off on the letters page of Decanter, where Broadbent, disregarding the fact that Givton had grown up in Jerusalem, wrote that “the North American palate…has a built-in preference for the obvious.” As for Rodenstock, Givton was suspicious from their first encounter, at the September 1985 Ger
man-American Rarities Group tasting in San Francisco, where Ralf Frenzel decanted many of the wines and frequently whispered into his master’s ear. At a Mouton vertical during the four-day event, Rodenstock was able to guess the 1945 correctly, even though Givton found it odd-tasting and impossible to identify.

  “How could he have known that this poor bottle was the 1945?” Givton wrote in his diary. “Anyway, this German wine collector makes me nervous. I can’t quite figure him out. He seems too sleek.”

  In 1987, Troy and Lazarus organized a vertical of Mouton, back to 1853, in Los Angeles. Among the bottles was an 1865 bought from Rodenstock, via Desai, for a substantial sum. Several tasters found the wine bizarrely young; one noted that it had a pronounced cabernet franc character, odd for a wine that made scant use of that grape. Troy was certain, after examining the cork, that the wine was a fake. The style of the branding, and the quality of the vintage lettering, made it clear that someone had drawn the cork from a young Mouton, sanded off the vintage, and inked “1865” in its place. Troy stopped short of fingering Rodenstock as the faker, allowing for the possibility that Rodenstock had himself been duped by whoever sold him the bottle. Troy asked Desai for his money back, but nothing came of it.

  In Los Angeles a week later, Desai hosted a vertical of Pichon Lalande, one of the so-called Super Seconds, second-growth Bordeaux often of a quality equal to the first growths. Among the bottles in the lineup were two from Rodenstock: an 1893 double magnum and a 1900 magnum, both purportedly from his big Venezuelan find. David Molyneux-Berry, the Englishman who headed Sotheby’s wine department, was a guest of honor at the Pichon tasting, and he stood up to talk about the château’s wines. As he spoke, someone came up behind him, tapped him on the shoulder, and put a cork in his hand. It said “1893” and bore the château brand. But it was oddly short. After he finished speaking, Molyneux-Berry showed the cork to May-Eliane de Lencquesaing, the château’s proprietress. She told him, “We just don’t use corks like that.”