The Billionaire's Vinegar (10 page)

On December 12, 1985, a week after the record-setting auction, Goodwin issued her report. She couldn’t just come out and say she thought Broadbent and Rodenstock didn’t know what they were talking about, so she began by flattering them: “When we learned that [Hardy Rodenstock and Michael Broadbent] were men of unquestioned knowledge and integrity, we began to reassess the possibilities of authenticity.” Then she methodically proceeded to establish that they didn’t know what they were talking about.

While Goodwin’s report focused on the record-setting 1787 Lafite, she made the point that the bottles must fall or stand as a group. They had been found together and engraved similarly, which must have happened after they left their respective châteaux. Given that Jefferson, from 1787 on, ordered his wine directly from châteaux, deliberately bypassing merchants, this meant either that one of his intermediaries in Bordeaux had done the engraving, or that they had been engraved after reaching Jefferson in Paris.

“He seems to have made the connection between the bottles and Jefferson by a study of the records,” Goodwin wrote of Rodenstock, “but it is precisely those records which make such a connection less and less likely.”

Broadbent, in his Christie’s-catalog provenance for the 1787 Lafite, had pointed to Jefferson’s 1790 order, which included a request that the bottles be
etiquettés,
or labeled, as support for the engraving. Goodwin pointed out that to engrave the entire shipment (1,020 bottles) would have been costly and would certainly have merited mention in Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, yet no such expense appeared there. Goodwin also homed in on the particular style of initials used. Jefferson had requested that the wine be marked “T.I.” In other circumstances he had used a cursive “TJ” to identify certain possessions, and “Th:J,” with a colon, to sign some correspondence. The form of the initials on the Rodenstock bottles was “Th.J.,” which Jefferson had never used or specified.

Goodwin further noted that Jefferson had requested that the marking take place at the vineyard, which didn’t explain how wines from four different vineyards seemed to have been engraved by the same hand. And she cited some letters that seemed to indicate that, by
etiquetté,
Jefferson had meant that the cases, not the bottles, be labeled. Most damningly, it seemed, the 1790 order had consisted only of Yquem and a lesser-known Bordeaux named Rausan. Not only had the shipment for Jefferson arrived successfully in America; even if the unspecified Yquem was 1787, the shipment had not included Lafite, Margaux, or Branne-Mouton.

Trying to anticipate some of the objections that might be raised, Goodwin dealt with the possibility that Jefferson had received some bottles as a gift or as part of a trade. In order for a verbal, undocumented transaction of this sort to have taken place, it would need to have been before his departure from Paris in September 1789, which was, in those days of three or four years between harvest and shipping, early for the 1787 vintage.

Goodwin also allowed that there was a slim possibility that evidence of further orders would turn up (in 1985, Jefferson’s letters had only been published through 1791, and access to the unpublished letters was limited), but given the redundancy of Jefferson’s recordkeeping, and her access to both his letter log and his Memorandum Books, she thought it highly unlikely. She also acknowledged that a lack of documentary evidence did not definitively prove that the bottles weren’t Jefferson’s. Monticello had numerous relics it had deemed authentic without having a paper trail to back them up; in those cases, however, provenance had been supported by the objects’ uninterrupted passage through several generations of Jefferson’s descendants.

How the particular combination of châteaux and vintages announced by Rodenstock—some of which Jefferson had ordered and received in Paris, some of which he had ordered and expressly not received in Paris, some of which he had ordered and received in America, and some of which he seemed never to have ordered, but which, if he had ordered, would in any case have been after his return to America—had all ended up in Paris, and been engraved by the same hand, was beyond Goodwin, but in her report she hazarded a guess.

“Were there not Thomases, Theodores, or Theophiles, and Jacksons, Joneses, and Juliens who also had a taste for fine Bordeaux wine, and who would have been resident in Paris in 1790 or after, when the 1787 vintage would have been in bottles? I think it is a question of someone other than Jefferson, and perhaps there is an equally fascinating story there.” After making another perfunctory reference to the “honorable characters of Mr. Rodenstock and Mr. Broadbent,” she concluded that she could not “make the same leap of faith they have.”

W
HEN
G
OODWIN’S REPORT
came out, Broadbent and Rodenstock reacted not with gratitude that this servant of accuracy and historical truth had demolished their case for a Jefferson link, but with rage. Even the most detail-oriented person couldn’t be expected to “note every vintage and source of every bottle he ever purchased or received,” as one Broadbent/Rodenstock partisan wrote, especially someone as busy as Jefferson after his return to the United States.

Goodwin had made a convincing case, but Broadbent seized on three weaknesses in it. First, there was, as it turned out, a record of Jefferson having requested engraving of bottles. Shortly before leaving Paris in September of 1789, he had written to John Jay, America’s foreign secretary in New York, describing a shipment of wine to him and George Washington with diamond-engraved initials on each bottle. Second, Goodwin’s insistence about the form of the initials was a flimsy argument; there was no reason to assume that someone engraving the bottles for Jefferson would follow his exact and idiosyncratic mode of punctuation. Third, Goodwin had said that the only wine in the cache that Jefferson had recorded ordering was 1784 Yquem; she failed to connect Jefferson’s order of 1784 Margaux with the Rodenstock find. (She hadn’t caught this only because the early U.S. media reports about the cache hadn’t indicated that it included 1784 Margaux.)

These points made only glancing dents in Cinder Goodwin’s case, but they sufficed to give Rodenstock and Broadbent a basis to attack the entire report. “Cindy Goodwin,” as Broadbent called her, had been “led astray and raised doubts almost solely because of the initials on the bottle,” as had the
New York Times
’s Howard Goldberg, whose probing questions Broadbent found distasteful. Goldberg was guilty, Broadbent wrote, of “the sort of investigative journalism we are all only too used to: like a terrier shaking a rabbit.” Rodenstock also supplied the
VWGA Journal
with a copy of what appeared to be a facsimile of an eighteenth-century page of Château d’Yquem’s ledger showing an explicit order by Jefferson for the 1787 vintage.

In a December 28 letter to Dan Jordan, Monticello’s new director, Rodenstock complained angrily that his integrity had been impugned by Goodwin. “[O]ne should courteously keep back one’s dubious and unfounded remarks,” Rodenstock wrote, “and one shouldn’t make oneself important in front of the press.” The controversy played out on the letters pages of
Decanter
. An elderly, impish Sussex winemaker named Arthur Woods, who frequently wrote letters to the editor dogging Broadbent, posed the rhetorical question, “Is it possible that Mr. Christopher Forbes, who bought the bottle, has not so much purchased a wine almost certainly undrinkable, or a genuine bottle of the period, worth perhaps £100, as a set of initials whose authenticity is likely to be vigorously challenged by those of a heretical bent?” He concluded by asking, “Did I hear somebody murmur ‘Piltdown Man’? Perish the thought.”

In Bordeaux, owners of the first-growth châteaux rallied behind Broadbent. Baron Eric de Rothschild, from Lafite, told
Wine Spectator,
“I don’t question its authenticity.” Comte Alexandre de Lur Saluces came next, attesting in
Decanter
to the authenticity of the Yquems that Rodenstock had found. Lur Saluces mentioned the letter in which Jefferson asked for bottles to be “labelled,” the original of which was in Yquem’s voluminous archives, and mentioned the 1784 order and “an order corresponding to 1787 as well” (Jefferson’s 1790 order in which he didn’t specify a vintage). It was the same evidence already weighed by Goodwin, but Lur Saluces put a different spin on it.

“I see no reason to doubt the authenticity of these bottles,” Lur Saluces continued. “Indeed, as far as the 1787 is concerned, we have been astonished at Yquem to discover an aroma that is familiar. After the tasting, the cellar master himself confirmed to me, that simply on the nose he had been able to recognize Yquem.” Lur Saluces called Rodenstock “my friend.” Broadbent himself wrote a letter to the editor that appeared in the July 1986 issue, in which he made the point: “I cannot imagine anyone in the late eighteenth century going to the trouble of engraving ‘Th.J,’ the name of the wine and the vintage, in the extraordinarily faint hope that in two hundred years’ time some susceptible collector would acquire it and some muggins of an American would pay an exorbitant price for it…. All I can repeatis that the bottle and its contents are amazingly right.”

Since neither side could prove anything, the dispute boiled down to where the burden of persuasion lay. Goodwin, a historian, made the case that it was very unlikely that the bottles were Jefferson’s. Surely it was statistically implausible that the only Jefferson bottles ever found intact would be the exact ones excluded from his extraordinarily thorough records (even if those records weren’t perfect, as evidenced by the unaccounted-for glass Lafite seal found in the dirt at Monticello). She contended that it was up to Broadbent and Rodenstock to convince the world otherwise. Meanwhile, Broadbent insisted that too many coincidences were involved for the bottles
not
to be Jefferson’s. His argument rested on several assumptions, not least of which was that no one had deliberately set out to fake the bottles.

F
ORTUNATELY FOR
B
ROADBENT—
and for Christie’s—Monticello didn’t come out with its report until a week after the auction had taken place. By then, the record price had vaulted the bottle high into the mediasphere, chronicled from Stockholm to Omaha to Melbourne. CBS News called it “the most famous bottle of wine in the world.” Most reports—whether in
Newsweek
, the AP, or the
Times
of London—stated unequivocally that it was Jefferson’s wine.

Journalists loved tallying the prorated cost of the wine: $19,500 a glass, $4,000 a sip, $795 “for each year of the life” of the wine. Citroën ran an ad making fun of the bottle’s price compared with the mere £4,165 cost of its “Van Rouge.” In a cartoon that ran in a British newspaper, a paunchy, red-nosed airplane passenger passed a bottle around to his friends while turning to a seat neighbor who appeared to be having a heart attack: “I’ve just opened your duty-free, mate—I’ll get you another bottle when she comes round!” Some muggins of an American, reveling in all the publicity, had the best of these framed and added to the gallery of press clippings that winds around the hallways of the
Forbes
magazine executive offices on lower Fifth Avenue.

There was a fair amount of moralizing about the purchase. Hand-wringing pundits spoke of Jefferson “[turning] over in his grave” because of the extravagance, or because of the Forbeses’ stated intention of putting the bottle in a museum. Wine experts proffered sniffy opinions on whether the Lafite would be drinkable. Bordeaux château owners eagerly hoped the price would have a trickle-down effect on the market for their own wines. Broadbent was soon calling it “[u]ndoubtedly the major event of the wine season, of any season, anywhere.”

Coming at the height of a decade increasingly viewed as one of materialistic excess, the bid would eventually take on symbolic heft. As “the most expensive wine” (by a factor of more than four), the bottle entered
The Guinness Book of World Records
. By the end of the decade,
Life
magazine, in its rundown of the 1980s, would include the purchase in a handful of year-defining events of 1985, alongside the resurrection of Coke Classic and the fad for Transformers, the Japanese toy.

In all the hubbub, any serious scholarly doubts about the bottle were forgotten, and two questions went unanswered. Years later, in interviews, Rodenstock would claim that Christie’s had known about the cache and he had simply beaten them to it. But Steven Spurrier, the well-connected Englishman who owned a wine shop in Paris and served as Christie’s agent in that city, had not heard so much as a whisper about the bottles’ discovery. It seemed odd that whoever first found the bottles wouldn’t have shopped them to the highest bidder, rather than automatically selling them to Rodenstock. Stranger still was the question of where, exactly, the bottles could have been found. In his last four years in France, Jefferson had lived at an address not in the Marais but on the Champs-Élysées, and the house had long ago been razed, replaced by a high-rise. Perhaps the bottles were a gift intended for Jefferson—a mixed case from an aristocratic Parisian friend that was never delivered because of the French Revolution. But even a week after Forbes had made news around the world, no one had stepped forward to claim he’d been the Parisian driver of the backhoe that had broken through to the hidden cache that turned out to hold the most expensive bottle of wine in history.

C
HAPTER
8

T
HE
S
WEETNESS OF
D
EATH

T
OWARD THE END OF
A
PRIL
1986,
THE
J
EFFERSON
table had to be returned to the Maryland Historical Society, and the Forbes Galleries staff rearranged the exhibit. They moved the 1787 Lafite to a case in the adjacent gallery. Soon after, wine merchant Bill Sokolin, who owned a shop at the corner of Madison Avenue and 34th Street, came to see the bottle. He was struck immediately by how it was stored.

The bottle basked under a spotlight.

Its environment was approximately the opposite of ideal cellar conditions.

Sokolin went over to a security guard and asked him to inform the Forbeses that they really needed to store the wine differently.

Not long after that, a member of the curatorial staff was removing the bottle from its case for a photo shoot when she noticed that something wasn’t quite right. The bottle was a dark green, but despite its murkiness, she could see something floating in the wine. She looked more closely.

It was the cork.

The light had baked it, causing it to shrivel and slip.

Horrified, curator Margaret Kelly called Michael Broadbent for advice; he was, she recalled later, “surprisingly unhelpful.” Since the bottle wasn’t for drinking, he advised her simply to put a new stopper in it.

The Forbes family was concerned, but once they determined that there was nothing more to be done, that was that. From the beginning they had felt that what they had in their hands was not a bottle of wine but a piece of Jeffersoniana, a historical curiosity. There was never any intention of drinking it, notwithstanding the suggestion by their friend Ernest Gallo that they sample the wine by sliding a hypodermic needle through the cork. Even if there was a slim chance that the wine was potable, they had no illusions that its taste could stand up to the price tag. Better to leave it undisturbed in its glass tomb, cork bobbing in the liquid. The wax seal remained intact. And so, even after the cork fell in, the place for the bottle remained not their wine cellar but the presidential memorabilia display in the galleries.

The incident became a source of much merriment and derision among those observers to whom the purchase had been an extravagant folly, as well as among those rarefied wine devotees who had felt the wine was wasted on a vulgar, nouveau-riche American. It played right into Anglo-condescension, and the well-publicized event was unlikely to help the bottle’s resale value. Still, the likelihood that there was a meaningful distinction to be made between the taste of the wine pre- and post-spotlight was slim.

In truth, very little was known about exactly what might take place in a bottle of wine sealed for two hundred years. The kinds of authenticated samples needed for studying older wine were costly, and few commercial interests—potential sources of research funding—were at stake in the question of bottle age. Scientists’ knowledge of what happened in a bottle stopped at about fifty years. Wines older than that were uncharted territory, leaving unsolved the puzzle of how something could become more valuable by rotting.

Crudely, the molecular changes known to unfold in a sealed wine bottle that has been laid down for years involve the gradual interaction of oxygen and wine. Simple chemical compounds break down and recombine into more and more complex forms called polymeric phenols. Acidity and alcohol soften. The largest compounds—the harsh, astringent tannins—drift down into a carpet of sediment, taking with them the saturated, inky pigments. They leave behind a mellowed, unfathomably subtle flavor and a brick-red hue. Everything knits together, resolving into an ever finer complexity expressed fragrantly in the wine’s bouquet.

At least that’s how it is supposed to work. Just as oxygen yellows newspapers and browns sliced apples, it spoils wine, but the process is more complex. There is also a beneficial oxidation that helps a wine mature. Paradoxically, wine is improving even as it is being destroyed; time will kill a wine, but is also necessary to make it great. This dual process is visible after a bottle has been opened. Aeration of wine—whether by decanting a bottle, swirling one’s glass, or sloshing a mouthful around—is a form of controlled oxidation. The aim is to improve the wine by helping it open up after its long confinement in bottle. Leave an uncorked bottle or glass out too long, though, and it will be ruined.

The trick that the greatest old bottles of wine pull off is keeping long enough to blossom. The tiny amount of air in a bottle of wine, the porous cork that allows a slow exchange of oxygen over decades, the coolness of a cellar that decelerates chemical reactions in the wine, the humidity of a cellar and horizontal storage that ensure a cork stays moist and maintains a seal—all these practices are aimed at fostering beneficial changes while deterring destructive ones. A wine is considered mature when it has maximized its flavor possibilities but has not yet begun to deteriorate.

There are certain truisms about how wine ages. Big bottles are believed to age more slowly than small ones, because the ratio of oxygen to liquid is lower. Wine in cooler cellars ages more slowly than wine in warmer ones. More-tannic wines take longer to come around than more-supple ones. High-alcohol, high-sugar, and high-acid wines—fortified wines such as Port and Sherry, sweet wines like Sauternes and Tokay, the deliberately heated Madeira, acidic wines including certain Rieslings—all live longer than table wines because their strength inhibits the development of bacteria.

The genius of Madeira, a sea turtle of a wine with an almost infinite lifespan, is that oxidation is the goal. “You take a wine and oxidize the crap out of it,” in the words of Andrew Waterhouse, a chemist at the University of California, Davis. Madeira, like many kinds of wine, was discovered by accident, when ships’ captains noticed that barrels of wine from the eponymous Portuguese island that had gone around the world in their holds, with lots of heat and sloshing around, tasted pretty good. Soon this was done deliberately, and it became common for advertisements for barrels of Madeira to boast of the miles they’d traveled, the distant ports seen. Later, and more cost-effectively, white wine would be deliberately cooked for between three months and a year, either naturally in tin sheds under the tropical sun, by pumping hot water through steel pipes in tanks containing Madeira, or by putting Madeira-filled casks in heated rooms. It was impossible to ruin something that had, essentially, perfected the taste of ruin. Further oxidation is simply making a Madeira more like itself. (Apparently inspired by Madeira’s example, in the nineteenth century the manager of Château Lafite, a Monsieur Goudal, sent fifty bottles of the 1846 Lafite on a sea voyage around the world in an effort to accelerate their aging.)

With still wines, you cannot stop the undesirable process of oxidation, you can only delay it. Therefore the young bottles of wine with the greatest chance of achieving an exalted state are those with both preservatives (tannins) and potential (phenols). The red wines of Bordeaux’s left bank are among the most ageable because their predominant grape, cabernet sauvignon, contains extremely high levels of phenols and tannins. The bottles that have proven, over long history, to be considered the greats—1870 Latour, say—were undrinkable in their youth.

Because the tannins serve as an antioxidant, once they start clumping together and falling out of the wine, this line of defense against further oxidation begins to give way. At this point a wine’s fruity character begins to disappear, and the wine is said to “lose its fruit.” Eventually, a wine becomes so leached of its original vitality that it is called faded at best, but more likely “maderized” or something worse. The Forbes bottle, two hundred years old and recently exposed to light, heat, and possibly oxygen, was almost certainly something worse.

T
HE
F
ORBESES HAD
not planned to taste the wine. Now, clearly, no one would. The question of how a red wine from the Jefferson-bottle cache might taste would have to wait for another of the bottles to provide an answer. But for Rodenstock and Broadbent, the stakes had heightened, and Broadbent was worried. In the six months since the Forbes sale, questions about the bottle had multiplied. Answers to at least some of them were promised by a tasting on June 3, 1986, when a 1787 Branne-Mouton from the cache was opened at Château Mouton-Rothschild.

In 1985, few wines were as highly priced in the market as Mouton-Rothschild, but in 1787, when it was known as Branne-Mouton, the vineyard had been mentioned only in passing in Jefferson’s diaries, and then as a
third
-tier property. In the 1855 Classification, it was named a second growth. The French branch of the Rothschild family bought the vineyard in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it was the magnetic and multitalented Philippe de Rothschild (champion race-car driver, film producer, translator of Elizabethan drama into French), who took it to new heights of excellence and fame. He led Bordeaux in being the first to château-bottle his entire production (in 1923), brought a marketing touch unique in the fusty Médoc when he began using a famous artist—Braque, Picasso, Warhol—to design each year’s label, and won the only significant change ever made to the 1855 Classification when he persuaded the French government to elevate Mouton to first growth in 1973. He also kept up the long-standing rivalry between Mouton and his cousins’ Lafite, famously serving curry with the rival wine at a luncheon, a tactic certain to obliterate any subtleties of Lafite’s taste. Rothschild’s insistence on setting the opening price for Mouton’s new vintages higher than Lafite’s had been a primary cause of the early-1970s price spiral in Bordeaux.

Mouton had been one of the so-called “wines of the vintage” in 1982, a bumper year that brought unprecedented speculation into the Bordeaux market. Rodenstock had visited the château in 1984 and written a long article about Mouton for
Alles über Wein
. The presence of Mouton among the Jefferson bottles was an extraordinary stroke of fortune.

The idea for the event at Château Mouton-Rothschild was Rodenstock’s. As with the Yquem opened at Yquem the year before, he liked the notion of bringing this Mouton home to taste in its birthplace with the great baron himself. The bottle had been brought to the château by hand, six weeks earlier, and left standing upright, to allow enough time for the sediment to settle to the bottom. It had been locked away in the baron’s personal cellar, to avoid a cellar staff person’s reflexive laying of the bottle on its side. Just to make sure, a sign was placed next to it enjoining anyone from moving it. The château had the best collection in the region of nineteenth-century Bordeaux, but the oldest bottle of its own wine was an 1853 (the year the Rothschilds bought the property), and it had been acquired just a few years earlier, at Christie’s.

Among the nineteen tasters who attended were several of Hardy Rodenstock’s German cronies, including Mr. Cheval Blanc, Herr Pétrus, and Magnum Uwe. Michael Broadbent arrived just as the tasting was beginning, wearing gray flannel slacks, a blue blazer, and, shrewdly, a Mouton necktie. He promptly began retelling the story of the Forbes cork fiasco.

The group crossed the gravel walkway to the cellar slowly and solemnly, as at a funeral. Leading the way in blue overalls and Adidas sneakers, a candle in his hand, was the aged cellarmaster Raoul Blondin, lower lip petrified in a shrugging Gallic
pffftttt
. Blondin said that the wine would be “passé. Zéro.”

The bottle was in the shape of a flask, with shoulders in a Burgundy-style slope. Etched in the glass were “Branne Mouton 1787” and “Th.J.” A wax bulb sealed the top. There was significant ullage, the wine’s surface nearly three inches below the bottom of the cork. Everyone looked intently at the bottle. Broadbent opened his notebook and began recording his impressions. “Level?” he said aloud. “Ah, mid-shoulder. Very interesting.”

Rodenstock had brought with him Ralf Frenzel, the young sommelier of Die Ente in Wiesbaden, who was a kind of personal wine steward and surrogate son to him. Frenzel carried the bottle upstairs and out onto a gravel path near the original patch of vineyard called La Motte. He placed it in a bowl on the ground, crouched in front of it, and gently began tapping at the wax seal with an antique sommelier’s hammer given him by Rodenstock. Though only in his twenties, Frenzel knew what he was doing. The soft percussion of his tool dislodged the cork, which plopped into the wine.

Then came the sound of glass cracking. A lateral hairline fissure opened, a few inches from the bottle’s base. Wine seeped out into the bowl.

“Schnell! Schnell!”
the Germans cried.

En masse, the group hurried back down into the cellar to get a decanter Rodenstock had brought, a hollow glass bust of George Washington with a cork in the crown of his head. It was vital that the wine be removed from contact with the cork and the wax that had collapsed inward with it, before either could corrupt the wine. And the crack threatened to expand. Frenzel carefully but quickly decanted the rest of the wine, then the group relocated again to the tasting room.