The World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine

The Billionaire's Vinegar:
The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine

By Benjamin Wallace

A mystery uncorked

DECEMBER 5th 1985 will for ever have a place in wine lore. On that day Christie's auctioned a bottle of 1787 Château Lafite Bordeaux, thought to have once been part of Thomas Jefferson's cellar, and part of a cache of bottles said to have been recently unearthed from a Paris house. The sale price for lot 337, $156,000, was five times the previous record for a normal-sized bottle of wine.

The buyer, Malcolm Forbes, was at first incensed that his son, Kip, bidding on his behalf, had paid so much. But the sale caused such a stir that the publicity-seeking billionaire concluded that it was a price worth paying for a piece of history, and proudly put the dirt-encrusted vessel on display.

Doubts over the wine's provenance soon emerged, though. Jefferson, who meticulously recorded his transactions, had never mentioned buying any such wine. The discoverer of the Jefferson bottles, a German pop-band manager turned wine dealer called Hardy Rodenstock, would not say who had sold them to him, or even how many were in the cache. The record-breaking bottle had, some muttered, suffered suspiciously little ullage (evaporation). To others, something about the initials engraved on it, “Th.J”, did not seem quite right.

For a while, Mr Rodenstock was able to keep the doubters at bay. It helped that he was championed by the auctioneers' respected wine supremo, Michael Broadbent, owner of the world's most experienced palate, which had tasted 40,000 different wines. Others, too, drooled as Mr Rodenstock displayed an extraordinary talent for digging up rare Yquems, Margaux, Lafites and Moutons (he was known as “Monsieur Yquem” on account of his passion for sweet white Bordeaux). Oenophiles flocked to his increasingly lavish “verticals”—tastings of many vintages from a particular chateau—hoping to be one of those whom he called from time to time, offering an antique bottle at a “friendship” price.

But, as prices for rare wines shot up in the late 1980s, fuelled by rising American demand, so did fears over wine piracy. Dodgy bottles started appearing almost weekly. Of those exposed as fakes, a remarkable number could be traced back to the enigmatic Mr Rodenstock.

He might have got away with it, were it not for an uppity Florida tycoon, Bill Koch, who had bought four of the Jefferson bottles. Unable to live with the feeling that he might have been defrauded, Mr Koch threw money at a team of investigators to root out the truth. Forensic experts concluded that the engraving on the labels had been made with a modern power tool, not an 18th-century implement.

A tip-off led to the basement of a house recently vacated by Mr Rodenstock and the discovery of piles of blank labels, corks and other counterfeiter's paraphernalia. In 2006 Mr Koch sued the German (whose real name, it turned out, was Meinhard Goerke) for fraud.

The rare wine world is still recovering from the tawdry affair. Mr Rodenstock, for many years considered its boldest bottle hunter, turned out to be “the Konrad Kujau of the grapevine”, as one newspaper put it, referring to the faker of the Hitler diaries.

This is a gripping story, expertly handled by Benjamin Wallace who writes with wit and verve, drawing the reader into a subculture strewn with eccentrics and monomaniacs. “The Billionaire's Vinegar” is full of detail that will delight wine lovers. It will also appeal to anyone who merely savours a great tale, well told. Unlike Monsieur Yquem's dodgy plonk, this book is the genuine article.

Source: Economist

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