The Billionaire's Vinegar

by Benjamin Wallace

  Back in Munich, Göksu also measured the natural radiation in the now-empty bottle, in order to have a clear idea of whether the bottle itself had affected the radiation level of the sediment. She took several small foil containers, each holding crystals, taped them to strings, and lowered them into the bottle with the strings flowing out for later retrieval. She taped additional packets to the outside of the bottle, both along its trunk and in the punt. She wrapped the head of the bottle in white tape, secured it with a red rubber band, fastened the bottle to a tray with black tape, and left it undisturbed for the next 226 days.

  In March of 1992, eight months after the opening of the bottle in Broadbent’s presence, Göksu was able to measure the radiation of the sediment and compare it with her Paris and bottle baselines. How old the wine itself was would be for her colleagues to assess, but she could confidently say that the sediment was 220 years old (confidently, that is, after allowing for a plus-or-minus ninety-two-year margin of error). In other words, it was definitely between 128 and 312 years old, meaning it came from some vintage between 1680 and 1864. It might, as advertised, come from 1787.

  At GSF’s Institute for Hydrology, meanwhile, Manfred Wolf was getting some surprising results. A chemist whose work normally involved assessing the nuclear contamination of, say, different depths of the Munich aquifer, Wolf’s expertise was radioactive isotopes whose clockwork decay could be exploited to date organic materials. He had tasted the wine on the day the bottle was opened and found it “not so bad.” After doing all the tedious prep work necessary to isolate a lab-worthy sample of the wine, he first tested it for tritium, an unstable element that had risen in atmospheric concentration starting in 1945, when the first atomic bomb was detonated, and peaked in 1963, when the Partial Test Ban Treaty brought open-air testing to an end. Tritium levels had been declining steadily ever since. If no tritium showed up in the test, it was a certainty that the wine predated 1945.

  What Wolf found, however, was that the wine possessed an extraordinary amount of tritium, a level consistent only with either 1962 or 1965. He repeated the test to be sure, using a less sensitive method since there was so much tritium present, and got the same result. It was just a bottle of wine to Wolf, but he was mildly shocked. He had assumed the bottle was what it purported to be, a two-hundred-year-old relic.

  Next, Wolf’s assistant tested the wine for carbon-14, which had a much longer half-life and could be used to date older things. But C-14, too, had peaked in the nuclear era, and the test showed a level of the isotope that indicated either 1962 or 1976–79 as the date of origin. The result was so unexpected that, to be absolutely certain of it, Wolf sent a sample to the University of Toronto. Toronto had an expensive piece of equipment, an Accelerator Mass Spectrometer, which could do more-precise carbon dating. That test yielded the same result. Combining the two findings, Wolf concluded that in all likelihood the wine dated to 1962.

  So the sediment was old, as Broadbent had correctly identified, but the wine was young, as he had not. Leaving aside whatever questions these results raised about the reliability of the auctioneer’s vaunted palate, the bottle had clearly been tampered with. The questions were when, and by whom.

  On June 23, a year after GSF first opened the bottle, it held a press conference to announce the results. In short order, Frericks issued a press release. He noted Monticello’s continuing skepticism and averred that “the person who is responsible for the falsification of the wine, which is now scientifically proved (and it has to be believed that other old bottles are also affected), apparently has ambitions to rank among the great counterfeiters of our times.” Frericks encouraged the owners of other Jefferson bottles to step forward and have their bottles tested. The next day, taking Frericks’ lead, a Munich tabloid announced: “The most expensive wine in the world is watered down…the Konrad Kujau of the grapevine has been exposed!”

  THE COMPARISON WITH Kujau, forger of the Hitler diaries, was richly apt. The diaries had come to light in 1983, two years before the Jefferson bottles. Whatever the origin of the bottles—whether real or fake—both cases involved sensational discoveries of supposedly long-lost objects at historically serendipitous moments: the Hitler diaries on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazis’ ascension to power, the Jefferson bottles on the bicentennial of Jefferson’s visit to Bordeaux. In both cases, tantalizing documentary references to misplaced objects existed (a missing trunk of Hitler’s possessions, a misrouted box of Jefferson’s wine), specific enough to make a discovery plausible, vague enough to make it irrefutable. Like the editors of Stern, the German newsweekly that was misled into publishing what it thought was the scoop of the century, Rodenstock claimed that skeptics were motivated by jealousy. Like Gerd Heidemann, the Stern reporter who obtained the spurious diaries, Rodenstock kept changing his story as to why he couldn’t reveal his supplier, sometimes claiming tax reasons, sometimes saying he’d “promised” his supplier he wouldn’t name him, and sometimes saying he wanted to write about it himself one day. Like both Kujau and Heidemann, Rodenstock made use of the Iron Curtain to obfuscate the origin of many of his bottles, especially his Yquems, claiming they’d been smuggled out of Russia illicitly. With regard to large-format bottles of Pétrus, Rodenstock cited an explanation identical to one used by Heidemann: the lack of prewar records. And in both cases, celebrated experts had authenticated the objects.

  Reaction to the GSF results in the wine world came quickly. James Laube, a columnist for Wine Spectator, publicly called on Rodenstock to come clean about the provenance of the Jefferson bottles. And the repercussions were felt beyond the tiny club of rich men who owned the bottles. Auctioneers and merchants from Germany to Switzerland to the UK reported severe disruptions in the old-wine market. “There is almost no interest in nineteenth- or eighteenth-century wines anymore,” Stephen Browett, whose Farr Vintners had sold more Jefferson bottles than anyone else, told Wine Spectator in early 1993. “Since the story broke in the press last June, collectors have treated pre-1900 bottles with skepticism.”

  Even Broadbent seemed fed up with it all. “I just wish Hardy Rodenstock would say how he came by these bottles,” he told a newspaper. “It’s doing a tremendous amount of damage to the old fine and rare market.”

  CHAPTER 14

  LETTERS FROM HUBSI

  DARKLY SUGGESTING THAT THE FIX WAS IN, RODENSTOCK claimed that the Frericks bottle had been doctored in order to hurt his wine business. He also issued a statement in which he asserted that “the renowned Jefferson Institute [i.e., Monticello] has found enough evidence…to prove that Jefferson indeed ordered the wines.” Alleging that it was the “assumption of many wine experts” that Frericks had replaced the original wine in the bottle with new wine and changed the seal, Rodenstock filed a complaint with the Munich state prosecutor charging Frericks with “making a false public oath.” Under German law, the prosecutor was required to take the complaint at face value, and he launched an investigation into Frericks.

  Rodenstock sought to cast suspicion on GSF as well. He pointed to the facts that GSF had not charged Frericks for the test and had failed to examine the cork and sealing wax scientifically. GSF responded that Broadbent had said that the cork and wax were no more than ten years old (to which Broadbent said he had only been referring to the wax seal). The lead in the wine was reported to be modern lead foil (thus evidence of tampering), though how that exculpated Rodenstock and implicated Frericks was unclear. The state prosecutor ordered a police raid on GSF, and the cork, bottle, and seal were confiscated.

  In the ensuing proceedings, Frericks presented several pieces of evidence, including a letter to his wife, Marianne, calling Frericks “a sick, bald-headed fool,” accusing him of an extramarital affair, and signed “Uschi Berthold.” A handwriting expert testified that the letter had almost certainly been penned by Rodenstock. Frericks wanted his money returned. “A reliable dealer would do that voluntarily,” he said.

  Frericks said that Rodenstock’s before-and
-after photographs must be “a photo montage” or “an optical trick” or, if real, that there was no way to certify when exactly they had been taken. Rodenstock responded to this by bringing forward a Bad Marienberg photo studio he said could confirm that the photos had been taken in 1985, before Rodenstock sold Frericks his Jefferson bottles. Frericks’s lawyer retorted that he had plenty of eyewitnesses who could attest that the seal on the bottle as presented to GSF was identical to the seal at the time when Frericks first purchased it. Rodenstock responded, “[Clearly] Mr. Frericks didn’t expect me to have the bottle photographed in its original condition in 1985…. I sold the bottle to Mr. Frericks in the same condition I bought it—in its original condition!”

  Rodenstock had, of course, resealed the bottle himself. As he wrote to the editor of the VWGA Journal in June of 1985, “I have sealed all the bottles,” and the photograph Rodenstock sent along with the letter showed one of the bottles with a seal very similar to the one Rodenstock was now accusing Frericks of adding. The fall 1985 issue of the Journal had included the letter and photo, and would have been powerful evidence in support of Frericks, but the obscurity of the publication ensured that neither Frericks nor his lawyers discovered it.

  Rodenstock had an edge when it came to media relations. Most of the important German-language wine journalists were longtime recipients of his generosity. “Hardy Rodenstock is a friend of mine,” Alles über Wein’s Heinz-Gert Woschek said later. “It was very delicate for me to write objectively.” The longer articles that appeared in wine magazines had a distinctly pro-Rodenstock bias. Urged by a mutual friend, Rodenstock reached out to Mario Scheuermann, to whom he had stopped speaking five years earlier, but who now wrote for the respected Hamburg broadsheet Welt am Sonntag. Scheuermann then wrote an article about the GSF results, from Rodenstock’s point of view.

  “For everybody in the inner circle, whatever they thought of Hardy, they thought Frericks was an unserious person,” Scheuermann recalled. “His attitude was always, ‘I’m the biggest.’ His tastings were more of a wine carnival.”

  Journalists and trade members in Switzerland, where Rodenstock had bought and sold a lot of bottles over the years, were less kind to him. Franz Wermuth, an auctioneer at Steinfels in Zurich, where Rodenstock was a regular, recalled that in the 1980s, four mid-shoulder bottles of 1924 Pétrus had come up for sale. This was a wine so rare that Wermuth had never before seen it on the market. Rodenstock bought all four bottles; later, at one of his tastings in Arlberg, he served a double magnum—four bottles’ worth—of 1924 Pétrus. Wermuth had also noticed that Rodenstock was more interested in bottles with low fills than in those in good condition. Wermuth aired the theory that Rodenstock was buying these heavily ullaged bottles at bargain prices, then topping them up with young wine and selling them for large profits.

  “Somebody is carrying out active protection of the environment with clever bottle recycling,” Wermuth suggested wryly. “At least ten books with tasting information about old wines must now be basically rewritten.”

  Rodenstock sent Wermuth a letter purporting to describe the complex evidence in support of the Jefferson bottles, but which devolved into pseudoscientific gibberish:

  It is extremely important for the determination that the Jefferson wines are absolutely authentic; there were clear signs of multi-element processes for the simultaneous determination of many elements, both processes of long wave and energy dispersing Roentgen fluorescence, the expensive atom emission spectroscopy with inductive coupled plasma stimulation and the strongly provable neutron activation processes for ultra-trace elements as radio-chemical activating analysis for group element examination and as instrumental activation analysis for individual element studies.

  Rodenstock had earlier suggested to Der Spiegel that it was possible he himself had been conned, but the editors of Vinum, a Swiss wine magazine, took a jaundiced view of this. They saw it as a case of Rodenstock hedging his bets “in case the scientists were to reveal the 1787 as adulterated.” Pointing out that there was no proof that the two bottles in the before-and-after photographs were identical—and noting discrepancies in the engravings—the magazine scoffed at Rodenstock’s protestations in the media that there was no reason for him or his supplier to add new wine to the bottle, “as if a 1787 is not worth a bit more than a 1962.”

  Both Wermuth and Vinum subsequently received a series of angry letters from Rodenstock. In one, Rodenstock spoke of “the steaming turds that you leave behind you everywhere.” Another stream of letters, attacking Wermuth and Vinum and defending Rodenstock, arrived from one Hubert Meier, who identified himself as a sommelier in Munich. While exhibiting a detailed knowledge of Rodenstock’s tastings, Meier didn’t hand-sign his letters or include his address, Vinum was unable to locate anyone by that name and description, and no one in Munich had heard of him. And Wermuth noticed that both the Hubert Meier letters and others written under different names seemed to have been typed on the same machine, one with a raised letter e. Among themselves, Vinum’s editors jokingly referred to the apparently pseudonymous letter writer as “Hubsi,” and in the magazine, they critiqued his spelling, called him “Little Darling,” and otherwise mocked him.

  “Naturally our buddy is upset,” editor Rudolf Knoll wrote. “Hubsi, let’s hear from you.” When the magazine subsequently received another mysterious, unsigned, no-return-address letter, this one from “Uschi Berthold, Munich” (the same person who had written to Frericks’s wife), the editors wondered, in the magazine: “Perhaps our friend has undergone a sex change….”

  PREVIOUSLY, WHEN HIS wines had been questioned on the basis of how they tasted, Rodenstock had been able to fall back on his unrivaled experience. How an old wine might taste was so uncertain that only the most knowledgeable could confidently assert whether a particular bottle was as it should be. In this uncertain environment, Rodenstock and Broadbent were elite possessors of occult knowledge, high priests no one dared challenge. When Rodenstock played the experience card, it was a conversation stopper. Those few who had the temerity to doubt him, Rodenstock would belittle as lacking the expertise to do so. Regarding the Jefferson bottles, he would always cite the 1985 lab test he had had performed on the 1787 Yquem.

  But rival scientific evidence was something he had never before faced. He couldn’t dismiss it with rhetoric. Late in the summer of 1992—with the GSF test results pointing to some kind of tampering, with Frericks telling everyone who would listen that the Jefferson bottles were “the Hitler diaries of wine,” and with open derision in Swiss wine circles—Rodenstock retained Raphael Mullis, a Zurich lawyer. Mullis had attended several of his tastings, first gaining entrée by agreeing to serve as a commis at one of the Arlberg events, and in later years attending as a guest and serving as notary for corks and bottles. On Rodenstock’s behalf, Mullis threatened legal action against both Vinum and the Steinfels auction house. Whenever a letter from Mullis arrived, Wermuth, the auctioneer, would instruct his secretary to address his response to “Mr. Moulis,” the name of a minor Bordeaux appellation.

  By now, Rodenstock had determined that he needed more persuasive evidence to make his case. Again using Mullis as his lawyer, Rodenstock gave a small bottle of “1787 Lafite” engraved with “Th.J.” to the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich. ETH was home to Georges Bonani, a chemical archaeologist who in 1989 had used carbon dating to debunk the Shroud of Turin. On August 27, Rodenstock, Mullis, Broadbent, and Bonani assembled at ETH to open the bottle. The men gathered in a spartan meeting room with a panoramic black-and-white photograph of the Manhattan skyline on the wall. For the sake of comparison, Rodenstock had brought along an old Burgundy, a half-bottle of 1893 Pommard. As expected for a younger wine, it had a higher fill level than the “1787 Lafite.” The Pommard’s cork came out cleanly.

  The Lafite was placed upright on a wood conference table, and Rodenstock hunched over the bottle and worked on the crumbly gray wax seal with a knife, while Broadbent sat writi
ng his observations in one of his red notebooks. The cork, black and shrunken, crumbled as it was drawn, and appeared to be considerably older than the cork from the Pommard. Rodenstock rolled up his sleeves and loosened his tie.

  Broadbent brought the bottle close to his face, then poured a small glass. He held it against the white backdrop of a notebook page, and Rodenstock and Bonani leaned in to examine it. The wine was pale. Broadbent poured a small amount into a test tube, which he then sealed, to give to Professor E. T. (“Teddy”) Hall, an Oxford scientist. Like Bonani, Hall had been involved in dating the Shroud of Turin, although he had first made his name, in the 1950s, by using X-ray fluorescence to debunk the Piltdown fossils as a hoax. Hall was also “a very keen wine man,” in Broadbent’s words, with a substantial cellar, part of which Christie’s would later sell. Rodenstock, Mullis, and Broadbent each tasted the wine. It had no fruit left, and was Madeira-like, though not so sweet. Broadbent and Mullis were both convinced the wine was old and authentic.

  Afterward, Rodenstock, Broadbent, and Mullis ate lunch at a posh hotel on Lake Zurich. Later, Rodenstock would take a blue ballpoint and inscribe the back of a photograph of the bottle-opening at ETH for Mullis: “For a 200-year-old wine, very interesting.” But even Rodenstock’s Swiss lawyer—to whom Rodenstock revealed no more about the Jefferson bottles’ provenance than he had to Broadbent—was puzzled by something: the bottle was tiny. It wasn’t even as large as a half-bottle. None of the articles describing Rodenstock’s find had ever mentioned tiny bottles being part of the cache.

  Broadbent returned to London carrying the sample for Professor Hall. At Oxford, Hall produced a 1955 Lafite from his own cellar, and Broadbent a 1962 Lafite from Christie’s cellar, for comparison. Both were opened, and a portion of each sent back to Zurich for Bonani to use as well. Hall was going to test the 1787 Lafite sample, as well as the younger Lafites. He cautioned Broadbent that while it was possible to prove that something dated from after the onset of the atomic era, there was a two-hundred-year gap before that when, because of the imprecision of carbon dating, it was nearly impossible to come up with a positive finding.