The Billionaire's Vinegar (12 page)

The following year, Rodenstock traded a Jefferson bottle to Lloyd Flatt, a fifty-year-old member of the Group who was planning a monumental tasting. Flatt, who lived in New Orleans, was routinely described by wine writers as an “aerospace consultant,” but he was widely rumored to be involved in the design or sale of weapons. (“He bragged that he sold the Argentines the missile that sank the British cruiser in the Falklands,” recalled a guest who attended his tastings.) Flatt was lean and tall, with a neatly trimmed beard now going gray. His customary outfit of a tailored suit dapperly offset the triangular black patch he had worn over his right eye since a childhood accident. A little boy once walked up to him at an airport and asked if he was a pirate. “Yes,” Flatt responded, in his native Tennessee drawl. “Now go away.”

Flatt had begun buying wine in the late sixties, at Heublein in the United States and Christie’s in London. He thought nothing of setting his alarm for 3:00 a.m. in order to arrange a phone connection to a morning auction in England, and he scoured wine shops around the world. His bottles were nearly all French, and most of those were Bordeaux classed growths. Flatt owned lots of nineteenth-century vintages, and he liked big bottles. Among his most prized wines were a Jéroboam of 1929 Mouton-Rothschild, and double magnums of 1806 Lafite and 1953 Pétrus. Flatt claimed to have tasted more vintages of Pétrus than anyone alive. Later he added Burgundy, aged Champagne, Port, and eaux-de-vie to the mix. He didn’t buy just any old wine, only bottles he felt had impeccable provenance. By the 1980s, the collection at his house on Ursuline Street in the French Quarter was so big that he moved to another house nearby, air-conditioning the vacated house at 55 degrees, installing neutral lighting to facilitate accurate color appraisal, and filling the house entirely with wine.

It was not a museum cellar. Flatt liked to say that he wrote off the cost of a bottle upon purchase, so that even if it appreciated in value, he wouldn’t feel inhibited about popping it open. For people like Flatt, who drank wine almost as ardently as he bought it, wine did not offer the usual psychological balm of compulsive collecting: the satisfaction of completeness, the security of ownership. Wine was different from paintings or stamps or cars. Its very purpose was to be consumed, to register sense impressions and then disappear. It was also, of course, more social. Sharing meant sharing—not, as with paintings, having visiting hours, but actually giving away some of one’s possession.

But even if Flatt’s cellar was meant for drinking, with a rumored 30,000 bottles it was undeniably excessive. This was one of the tacit rules of supercollecting: steadfastly declare that you buy your wine for drinking, not for collecting, despite owning far more bottles than you could ever possibly drink. Another: preach about wine as the drink of moderation while, at the same time, reeking of personal eccentricity. Flatt lived both axioms.

He had attended many of the events organized by fellow members of the Group, and these tastings, like those of their German counterparts, had become trials of one-upmanship, their scale and scope expanding every year. “You’d say to yourself, ‘I haven’t had that. I want that. I must have that,’” Flatt said later. “It became very competitive.”

By the late eighties, Flatt had hosted sprawling verticals of Pétrus, Mouton, Cheval Blanc, and Ausone, which was the one other St. Emilion wine considered to be Cheval’s equal. But the tasting of Lafite that Flatt decided to throw in October 1988 was by far his most ambitious. Of all the Bordeaux in his collection, Lafite reigned supreme. Flatt had more examples of it than of any other wine, and it was his favorite, “an entity within itself,” as he put it, “truly the first of the great growths. It has great finesse, subtlety, elegance and staying power.”

The tasting would take place over three days. Flatt already owned 3,000 Tiffany wineglasses, and he ordered an additional two thousand. And Flatt made sure the entertainment would live up to the rest of the event. The Storyville Stompers, a Dixieland jazz band, would parade the tasters to lunch at a restaurant. Another meal would have the theme of a plantation feast. Peter Duchin, the New York society bandleader, would perform at the 120-guest, black-tie dinner-dance at the Meridien Hotel, which would bring the weekend to a close.

As for the wine, Flatt’s tasting would make Marvin Overton’s pioneering 1979 “Lafite in Texas” shindig seem like small beer. Overton had assembled thirty-six vintages, at the time a huge number. But for this 1988 tasting, which had been in the planning for more than a decade, Flatt assembled no fewer than 115 vintages of the first-of-first growths.

Working in Flatt’s favor, Lafite was perhaps the most collectible wine ever made, built to last and especially popular with those compulsive cellarers in England and Scotland. People kept it around for a long time, and more nineteenth-century vintages of Lafite had survived than of any other red Bordeaux. Even before ramping up for this tasting, Flatt already owned sixty vintages. All had perfect résumés, coming from Lafite itself, from other Bordeaux châteaux (they customarily traded samples with each other), or from the impeccably maintained cellars of great French restaurants.

Now, to round out his tasting, Flatt homed in on the remaining vintages he wanted to include in the vertical. He was especially interested in serving the 1806, which he had acquired at auction in 1976 and which hadn’t appeared in earlier Lafite verticals. An 1803, having already been in the lineup at Overton’s 1979 tasting, interested Flatt less. He watched the market intently, constantly checking in with auctioneers and merchants; whenever a Lafite surfaced that he didn’t yet own, he pounced, checking another vintage off his list. The wines most difficult to acquire were not the pre-Phylloxeras, which were expensive but came up for auction on a fairly reliable basis. The really hard gets were the justifiably obscure vintages: nineteenth-century wines blighted by phylloxera or the powdery fungus called oidium; certain years from the unfortunate decade of the 1930s (Broadbent: “It opened with three atrocious vintages”); and even a few more recent “off” vintages, such as 1951 and 1965.

Flatt faxed updates to friends, and they joined in the bottle hunt. Peter Meltzer, a journalist who had been writing about Flatt for years, was able to contribute a rare 1956. Broadbent considered the vintage so poor that drinking it was “a penance,” but Meltzer happened to own some because 1956 was the year of his wife’s birth. David Milligan, a New York importer of Lafite, got the château to contribute a 1905, a 1931, and a 1941. As the tasting approached, Flatt was still trying to add to the list. When an 1822 came up for auction at Christie’s in September, Flatt bid on it, but as the bidding soared, he dropped out. It would have made a nice inclusion, but even he had his limits. The bottle ended up selling for $20,900.

The rarest Lafite of all was provided by Rodenstock, who bartered with Flatt for a 1784 from the Jefferson cache. Whatever its longer-term provenance, the bottle’s recent history was shaky. Rodenstock had personally delivered the bottle to Malibu, where Flatt kept another home, and Flatt had then carried the bottle by private plane to Washington, D.C., and then to New Orleans. The flight was turbulent. The bottle began to leak. Flatt dipped his finger in the wine and thought it tasted “good.”

On a weekend in October, Flatt’s guests converged in New Orleans for an event billed as “200 Years of Lafite-Rothschild.” There were fourteen of them, the number of people who could comfortably fit at Flatt’s table and reasonably divide a single bottle for tasting purposes. They included Overton, thrower of the 1979 Lafite vertical that was about to be left in the dust, as well as Rodenstock and Michael Broadbent, who had wangled an invite for his son by volunteering Bartholomew’s services as a pourer. Before the weekend was over, Bartholomew, nicknamed Bollew, would repay the kindness by sneaking a glass of Coke into a lineup of brown, older wines his father was appraising. Michael Broadbent would say that for an old wine the color looked about right, yelling, after he smelled it, “Bollew, you little shit!”

Day One of the vertical got under way with a flight of five wines: 1950–54. It was followed by a seven-wine flight (1902–08), which was followed by a five-wine flight (1868–72). The progression was typical for a tasting of this kind, moving backward in time from younger to older, simpler to more complex, more powerful and pleasurable to subtler and more intellectual. The final stop in the day’s time travel was 1784. Rodenstock’s leaky Jefferson bottle.

The wine’s level was into the shoulder, ominously low. The room went quiet as Ralf Frenzel set to work. Save for his youth, Frenzel looked the sommelier’s part, with a black waiter’s vest and a silver tastevin dangling from his neck. Having learned his lesson when the Mouton cracked two years earlier, Frenzel now eschewed his antique bottle-breaching toolkit in favor of a plastic Screwpull.

Sure enough, the cork crumbled, a piece breaking off and falling into the wine. Someone lit a candle stub in a silver stick, decanting the wine according to the traditional method. This involved carefully pouring a wine off its sediment, with a flame backlighting the stream, and stopping as soon as sediment began to flow with it. Frenzel inserted a metal funnel filter in the neck of a curvy, modern decanter to catch cork particles and poured the wine through it. Flatt brought the intact stump of cork to his nose and inhaled.

Writer Terry Robards would later point out that, notionally, this Jefferson bottle was worth “at least as much” as the Forbes bottle, since it was three years older. It might even be worth more, since 1784 was considered a superior vintage. But then Flatt’s guests tasted the wine. This was the first of the Jefferson bottles to be opened and tasted in America, at an event neither run by Rodenstock nor populated exclusively with his loyalists, and the comments about the wine seemed to reflect these less controlled circumstances. Robards and Frank Prial, a writer from the
New York Times,
both deemed the wine “vinegar.” Bartholomew Broadbent would later call it “one of the best balsamic vinegars I ever tasted.”

“The term ‘salad dressing’ was on everyone’s lips,” Robards wrote later, adding, “Only a handful of the other old Lafites proved to be undrinkable, and each of these was basically oxidized, showing the odor of Madeira that is typical of many tired old wines…. What bearing this discovery had on the authenticity of the 1784 Lafite was not immediately apparent, but it was clear that something very different had happened to this particular wine.”

There was that word again:
authenticity
. The best wines were such a singular experience (the spice of Mouton, for instance, or what Michael Broadbent called the “slow strip tease” of Lafite) that seasoned tasters could readily notice a deviation from it. And Robards had observed, in his considerable experience of old wines, that they all followed the same course—paling in color, thinning in aroma and taste, weakening in structure. This wine was markedly different, being very dark and vinegarishly acidic. He speculated that younger wine might have been added, triggering a secondary fermentation in the bottle.

Questions about the Jefferson attribution had been raised nearly three years earlier, and skepticism about the origin of the bottles had circulated as well, but Robards’s comments, which appeared in the December 15, 1988, issue of
Wine Spectator,
were the first to suggest publicly that something might be amiss—not merely spoiled, but strange and uncharacteristic—with the wine inside of those bottles. Previous rumors of a Nazi affiliation now seemed almost quaint next to suggestions that the wine itself might not be as old as the engraving indicated.

Rodenstock and Broadbent were, of course, staunch defenders of the wine. “An ullaged bottle,” Broadbent recorded in his notebook. “Alas, but unsurprisingly ‘over the top,’ oxidised: colour dark brown; nose like pure balsamic vinegar; despite the rich components—undrinkable.” Few knew what a bottle so old should taste like, anyway. The number of people who had experienced pre-1800 wines was tiny, and of that handful, Broadbent and Rodenstock had tasted the most. This—a presumption of infallibility about old wines because they had tasted more than anyone else—was increasingly their fallback posture when questioned.

“I cannot believe that it is anything but genuine,” Broadbent said. “I thought the bottle alone was worth 10,000 pounds.”

I
N THE THREE
months following the Flatt tasting, Rodenstock privately sold four more Jefferson bottles. The buyer of all four was William Ingraham Koch, the scion of a Kansas oil-and-gas fortune. For the past eight years, Koch (pronounced like the soft drink) had been at the center of an epic feud with his family, including his twin brother, David. It had ignited in 1980, when Bill Koch attempted a coup by proxy fight to oust his older brother, Charles, from Wichita-based Koch Industries, then the second-largest privately held company in the country; Charles outmaneuvered him, and Bill, who worked from the Boston area, ended up jobless at age forty. Bill sued his brothers. Their mother told Bill he wasn’t welcome in her house. Eventually, in 1983, Bill took a buyout of his piece of the company. He walked away with $470 million.

Before the Koch brothers cut a deal, Bill’s wealth was illiquid, and he had been in a several-year funk. After receiving the windfall, Koch went on a hedonistic tear. He spent his newfound money on eating and drinking, and collecting houses, art, and wine. Koch had been interested in wine since the 1970s, when he noticed how much better Montrachet, the most famous white Burgundy, tasted than run-of-the-mill stuff. But it was the big payday that turned him into a collector. He started buying an average of 5,000 bottles a year, an acquisition rate he would maintain through the late 1980s.

Systematically, Koch set out to assemble deep verticals of four iconic wines; eventually he would own 95 years of Pétrus, 100 years of Latour, 120 years of Mouton, and 150 years of Lafite (as well as 33 vintages of Hennessey Cognac, back to 1851). It was while assembling these verticals that, in November of 1988, Koch bought a 1787 Branne-Mouton, a Jefferson bottle, from a Midwestern firm called the Chicago Wine Company. Koch was then approached directly by Farr Vintners, the London brokers who had obtained the bottle from Rodenstock and sold it to Chicago Wine.