The Billionaire's Vinegar (11 page)

Now that the wine was safely transferred, the Médocain sun filtered dimly through its murk, and it was possible to assess the color. It was in no sense red. The body of the wine was molasses brown, the rim amber. All to be expected in a wine so old. But the concentration of color was improbably youthful.

“Extraordinaire!”
several of the French murmured.

The hue reminded Broadbent of a 1900-vintage Bordeaux. It had a sheen that an oxidized wine would not.

Frenzel wasted no time, pouring it out into glasses. Baron Philippe was sick and bedridden, the guests were told, and his grandson Philippe now lifted his glass and asked if it would be all right to take it to his grandfather upstairs. He then departed to share the precious gift with the baron, who in truth was not there because he refused to meet with the Germans; his first wife had died in the concentration camp at Ravensbrück.

The smell of the wine was restrained at first—even the hypersensitive Broadbent found it scentless. There was none of the acrid tang of vinegar or the deep mustiness of oxidation. There was nothing. Broadbent was surprised. In spite of his touting of the Forbes bottle, and his earlier suggestions that it might have survived the centuries in drinkable form, he knew it was nearly impossible for a red claret to do so.

This one had a relatively low fill level, had been untouched for two hundred years, and had been stored who knew where. “But at this age,” as Broadbent put it later, “no news is good news.” And, after four minutes, the wine had a discernible fragrance. It blossomed, filling the room with a kind of sweetness. Was it the proverbial sweetness of death? As the tasters plunged their noses into the depths of their glasses, they found that the bouquet kept changing. After ten minutes it had what Broadbent described as “a rich, warm, wholemeal, gingery smell.”

“Dunked gingernuts,” he remarked.

“Lovely coffee,” Rodenstock intoned.

Jancis Robinson, an English journalist who was the only woman present, was taken aback. Over forty-five minutes, the wine kept getting more delicious, a feat “even for a young wine,” as she later put it. “This relic of pre-revolutionary days” was “richly juicy and fighting fit” and “the most exciting liquid I ever expect to drink.” An hour after the pour, Broadbent found cabernet flavors in the nose. On the palate, he experienced “a beautifully sweet rich wine, with good body, extract and absolutely perfect acidity and balance. The flavour had hints of coffee and caramel, the effects of a long but sublime form of oxidation in the bottle, and it was delicious to drink.”

“I’ve never tasted anything like it,” Raoul Blondin said, over and over. The last drops of wine in the decanter were trapped at the tip of George Washington’s nose, so Blondin tipped the cracked bottle upside down, emptying its viscous dregs into a giant glass and tasting it. “It’s delicious,” Blondin said. “No bitterness. They wouldn’t have done any egg-white fining in those days, you see.” Such fining, more common in modern times, was a technique in which egg whites were stirred into wine, before bottling, to help precipitate out coarse solids. The result was clearer, more stable wine, and a sediment that could have an unpleasant astringency.

Blondin was in his mid-seventies, and had tasted many of the oldest vintages of the wine to which he had devoted his life, but none was as old, or noteworthy, as this one. He reveled in the symmetry of the bottle’s being opened right next to the vineyard whence it had sprung, the plain known as the Carruades, which had originally constituted the whole of the property. He passed the glass around. When it got to Robinson, the dominant smell note was a blend of sundry colognes and tonics transferred from the hands and faces of all the Germans who’d already handled it. It made it hard for her to absorb the wine’s essence, but she was still impressed by its high quality.

Young Philippe Sereys de Rothschild returned and reported that his grandfather, who had shared his
maître de chai
’s skepticism that this wine could possibly be drinkable, was amazed and delighted. (The baron would die a week later.) Rodenstock was clearly pleased with himself, nodding his head and smiling inscrutably as he said, “The Paris cellar was so effectively blocked up, it was almost hermetically sealed, you see.” Broadbent, whose jaded palate made him cool and detached about most wines, was almost manic, probably as much because the wine vindicated his and Christie’s imprimatur for the Forbes bottle as because the wine was inherently exciting. “I thought it would be a bit acidic, a bit decayed, but there wasn’t a trace. If there was any doubt, forget it. This wine is genuine. No doubt about that.”

After tasting such an antique, it was time for something younger: an 1858 Mouton. “It tasted so light, so
modern
after its predecessor,” Robinson later recalled. Then Rodenstock showed off a bottle he had in the trunk of his car: a Jéroboam of 1945 Pétrus.

It was time for lunch, which was served next door at Philippine de Rothschild’s
petit château,
decorated in the Louis XVI style. An 1865 Margaux would be among the wines to be drunk. Rodenstock mentioned that he had a complete vertical of Mouton from 1945 to 1982. He suggested opening the ’45 Pétrus Jéroboam, but this idea was scuttled by grandson Philippe, who suggested it would be a waste to drink it without having decanted it sufficiently ahead of time. An equally likely reason was that powerful right-bank Pétrus might well show up the elegant left-bank wines.

Broadbent, who had a dinner to attend in London that evening, flew out on a 2:25 p.m. flight. He felt reassured by the day’s events. The cork’s collapse, as suggested by the Forbes bottle’s fate, was a reliable feature of old wines. The Mouton bottle’s cracking suggested there was no way that an engraving could have occurred recently. Even Blondin’s comment about the lack of fining in the eighteenth century was a reminder that wine, in Jefferson’s day, was for early drinking; the 1787 vintage would have been bottled in 1788 and ready for consumption in 1791. “[M]ost of the party anticipated a funeral. It turned out to be a resurrection,” Broadbent crowed in a
Decanter
article headlined “No More Doubts.”

C
HAPTER
9

S
ALAD
D
RESSING

B
EFORE THE
F
ORBES AUCTION
, B
ROADBENT HAD SAID
the 1787 Lafite was probably the only bottle “of its kind” that would ever come up for sale. Arthur Woods, Broadbent’s
Decanter
letters-page tormentor, was having none of it. “One now supposes that after a discreet interval another bottle will appear for auction,” he wrote in June 1986; “next December or early in 1987 perhaps?”

As it happened, in December, one year to the day after the Forbes sale, Michael Broadbent auctioned off another of Rodenstock’s Jefferson bottles. This time he was selling a 1784 Yquem, the same wine that had piqued his interest when Rodenstock opened one at the October 1985 tasting in Wiesbaden. In the catalog, Broadbent called it “the last but one bottle of 1784, and the only occasion this vintage is ever likely to come on the market.”

In spite of Monticello’s doubts, and the unfortunate incident with the Forbes cork, the Mouton tasting six months earlier had benefited Broadbent and Rodenstock in two ways: it had authenticated the wine while adding to its value by finding it drinkable; and this new bottle was an Yquem—a Sauternes with a greater chance of surviving than a red wine—and of a vintage that had already been opened successfully. It had a track record, which Broadbent distilled as “perfect in every sense: colour, bouquet, and taste.”

Broadbent also happily reported that a German laboratory had analyzed the bottle opened earlier. “[T]he wax, the cork, and the wine have been rigorously examined by Professor Eschenauer whose methods are said to be the most acceptable, reliable and accurate,” Broadbent wrote in the catalog for the December 1986 sale. With the bicentennial of Jefferson’s visit to Bordeaux just months away, the moment seemed too perfect not to put another Jefferson bottle on the market.

As with the Forbes/Shanken match-up one year earlier, the contest on Thursday, December 4, 1986, rapidly narrowed to two serious bidders. After bidding £35,000, the owner of a wine shop in Syracuse, New York, was sure the bottle was hers, but then a buyer in the front row, an olive-skinned man with glossy ringlets of black hair and a small mustache, topped her and won the bottle for £39,600, or $56,628.

The buyer gave his name as Iyad Shiblaq, and identified himself to reporters as a Jordanian Muslim. He took pains to say that the bottle was not for himself, as his religion required him to be a teetotaler. He said he was buying the wine for “a friend of mine in New York” who had given him £50,000 to bid. Shiblaq wouldn’t name the friend, saying he had “no idea what he is going to do with” the bottle and that the friend simply wanted it “because of the label.” Shiblaq then rushed away without answering further questions.

This Jefferson bottle, too, set a record: it was the most expensive
white
wine ever sold. Like the Forbes purchase, it made news around the world. A transatlantic guessing game commenced as to the identity of the mystery buyer. On December 5, the
New York Post
’s Page Six floated several names, including Malcolm Forbes, William Zeckendorf Jr., and Daniel Rose (both of the latter were Manhattan real-estate developers), investment banker Ed Marks, and Dodi Al-Fayed, son of Harrods owner Mohammed Al-Fayed, who years later would die in a car crash with Princess Diana. All denied it, and the
Post
concluded that none was the buyer.

“WHOOPS!” Page Six corrected itself the following day. The buyer was Al-Fayed, after all. “Wine is meant for drinking,” a Christie’s specialist named John Boodle had opined after the auction. “It is not a thing of beauty. You can’t hang it on the wall.” Now, Al-Fayed’s spokesman told Page Six, “He’s just going to keep it as if it were a piece of art.” Christie’s said it might auction another Jefferson bottle soon.

T
HE
S
HIBLAQ
/A
L
-F
AYED
purchase came at a moment of broadening American awareness of Thomas Jefferson’s interest in wine. The first serious attention paid to his precocious connoisseurship had occurred in 1976, during the national Bicentennial, when the Wine Museum of San Francisco put on an exhibit called “Thomas Jefferson and Wine in Early America.”

Jefferson had planted scores of grape varieties at Monticello, and in many ways had foreshadowed the kind of systematic experimentation that eventually led Robert Mondavi to revolutionize American winemaking in the 1960s and 1970s. Now it was primarily citizens of his home state who led the way in dusting off this forgotten aspect of Jefferson’s life. In 1976 the Virginia Wine Growers Association, which would later break the news in the United States about the Rodenstock discovery, published its
Jefferson and Wine
anthology. The same year a winery called Barboursville opened in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, around the ruins of one of the five homes Jefferson had designed in his lifetime; it named a wine Octagon after the shape of some of the rooms. (Virginia’s wine industry would soon take off, expanding from six wineries in 1979 to forty-one in 1991 to 122 in 2006.) In 1982 a former National Security Agency linguist of Virginian extraction opened a winery called Monticello in the Napa Valley, and included a Jefferson Cuvée cabernet among its bottlings.

This rediscovery of Jefferson and wine came to a head in the mid-eighties, around the time of the record Forbes purchase. Monticello itself, in 1985, copied Jefferson’s planting of 1807, sowing twenty-one of the twenty-three varieties of white and red grapes (French, Italian, domestic) Jefferson had planted in the quarter-acre northeast vineyard. In 1986 a winery named Jefferson Vineyards came out with its first vintage; it was made from grapes grown on the neighboring land once worked by Filippo Mazzei, the Italian wine grower Thomas Jefferson had sponsored.

With the bicentennial of Jefferson’s 1787 visit to Bordeaux approaching, the scattered group of people with a particular combined interest in both wine and Jefferson arranged a series of celebrations. Travel agencies promoted tours of French wine regions visited by Jefferson. Treville Lawrence, editor of the
VWGA Journal,
approached Monticello about the possibility of either Hardy Rodenstock’s opening a bottle there or of the VWGA and Monticello jointly auctioning the bottle to benefit the VWGA. Monticello’s board of directors turned down the request. “The major problem relates to a doubt in our mind about the Jefferson connection,” director Dan Jordan wrote in a letter to Lawrence, “but the tradition here has also been to generate revenues in ways other than auctions.”

Edward Lollis, the American consul to Bordeaux, spent more than a year researching and organizing a slate of events that roughly tracked the dates of Jefferson’s visit. In a small triumph of amateur scholarship, Lollis deduced an explanation for Jefferson’s epistolary mention of seeing Latour’s vines, given the lack of evidence that Jefferson actually visited the estate. Latour’s vines grow near the Gironde, and Jefferson, an able flatterer, could plausibly imply he had glimpsed them as he sailed north along the river away from Bordeaux.

Things kicked off on March 28, 1987, with a black-tie dinner at the Château de Clos de Vougeot, in Burgundy, keynoted by the president of the Jeffersonian Wine Grape Growers Society in Charlottesville, Virginia. On June 1, the American ambassador to France traveled from Paris to Bordeaux, where a changing-of-the-cork ceremony was scheduled to take place at Château Lafite for a 1787 Jefferson bottle still in the possession of Rodenstock. The same day, Château Haut-Brion unveiled a plaque honoring Jefferson’s visit two hundred years earlier. In the afternoon, at the downtown building that had once been the Palais Royal and now housed the Chamber of Commerce, a Jefferson impersonator spoke, and the “world premiere” of an American Express tourism video, “Bordeaux at the Time of Jefferson,” was screened. In the final scene, filmed using a helicopter, a group of wine bottles rose into the sky.

Three weeks later, during Vinexpo, the massive trade show which brought the wine world to Bordeaux every other summer, Lollis welcomed visitors to the American consulate for a tasting of 140 wines from seventy-one American wineries. Jefferson had dreamed of this: the wines—whites downstairs, reds upstairs—came not only from Napa, but also from Missouri and some ten Virginia wineries. Christie’s, meanwhile, had announced that it would sell a third Jefferson bottle at Vinexpo.

O
N THE FIFTH
and final day of the trade show, two and a half hours into a four-and-a-half-hour, four-hundred-lot auction, Christie’s put the Jefferson bottle on the block. This one was a 1784 Margaux (the engraving said “Margau”) and was a 375-milliliter half-bottle shaped like a mallet. The fill came almost to the top of the shoulder. Michael Broadbent quoted from two Jefferson letters that referred to his buying 1784 Margaux, and opened the bidding at $21,600.

The bids quickly added $5,000 to the asking price. One of the leading contenders, an absentee buyer who had left a commission bid authorizing Broadbent to raise the paddle on his behalf, was Marvin Shanken. Though thankful not to have spent $156,000 on the 1787 Lafite, the publisher of
Wine Spectator
was still annoyed that he had gone home empty-handed. When Broadbent called to say that another Jefferson bottle was coming up for auction, Shanken prudently decided to stay away from the saleroom but told Broadbent to bid up to $30,000 in his name.

When the price hit $26,600, a phone buyer, whom Broadbent identified to the room only as an Arab “bidding for a friend,” countered with $28,300 before dropping out in response to Shanken’s automatic bid of $30,000. Shanken had his bottle, and yet another record had been set. This one was for the most expensive
half
-bottle of wine ever bought.

A writer for Shanken’s magazine, in an article about the auction, seemed suspicious of the mystery bidder who had dropped out only when Shanken’s limit had been reached. So was Shanken. “You know what?” he said later. “In the auction business, you never know. Who knows even if there was another bidder?”

Before Shanken would take delivery of the bottle, he insisted that Broadbent have it recorked at Margaux, both to avert a repeat of the Forbes spotlight debacle and to validate the wine’s authenticity. Estate director Paul Pontallier, fearful of the bottle’s fragility and uncertain of its origin, wouldn’t touch it. The bottle stayed in Bordeaux until Broadbent was able to return in August. Then, with the cellarmaster and Pontallier looking on, Broadbent performed the operation himself.

Broadbent first removed the capsule by chipping gently at the wax (the bottle’s glass neck was thicker than that of the bottle broken at Mouton). When he removed the cork, which was black and wizened, its length surprised him. He poured a little of the wine into a glass, and he and the other two men each sampled it. “Despite its oxidation, the colour was a fairly healthy orange-rimmed red brown,” Broadbent noted, “with just a whiff of what clearly might once have been a marvellously rich wine.”

Except for a Rodenstock-sourced 1771 Margaux he had been served that May, this 1784 Margaux was the oldest dry red wine Broadbent had ever tasted; the Mouton he had drunk was a 1787, and the 1784 a sweet white Yquem. Without topping the bottle up, Broadbent delicately eased in a new wedge-shaped cork he had brought with him. Then he heated some wax, gently dipped the neck and cork into it to form a seal, and gave the bottle a twirl. To his relief, it didn’t break. When Broadbent called Shanken to say “mission accomplished,” he reported that “you could still taste the fruit.” Broadbent slipped a sock over the bottle, secured it in a wooden box, and carried it by Concorde, at Shanken’s expense, to New York.

Shanken’s purchase made less news than had its higher-priced forerunners, but lent important new credibility to the Jefferson bottles. Forbes and Shiblaq/Al-Fayed were rich, showy, wine-world outsiders. Their bottles were bangles. Shanken was something else. As the owner, publisher, and editor of the premier wine magazine in a country increasingly obsessed with wine, his decision to buy a Jefferson bottle was meaningful. And his purchase, unlike Forbes’s, came after the scholarly doubts about the Jefferson attribution had been well aired. If Shanken still believed the bottle was for real, then it was no longer just Broadbent and Rodenstock and Château d’Yquem standing behind the cache. Margaux’s willingness to let Broadbent recork the bottle at the château—thereby bestowing its official imprimatur—provided still another blue-chip endorsement.

B
ROADBENT SOON HAD
a chance to taste two more of the Jefferson bottles. At Rodenstock’s annual tasting in September 1987, this one at the Arlberg Hospiz Hotel in western Austria, the German opened a 1787 Margaux. “Slight ullage,” Broadbent noted, “wizened black cork, thick, gritty, puce-coloured sediment, the wine itself deeper than expected; little nose at first but exposure to air revived it quite sweetly; richly flavoured, well balanced.”