The Billionaire's Vinegar (17 page)

H
ANS
-P
ETER
F
RERICKS
lived in a southern suburb of Munich, not far from where Rodenstock had moved after leaving the tiny Westerwald town of Bad Marienberg in 1985. Frericks had gotten rich selling bicycle and car accessories, such as windshield wipers, in supermarkets. When the German government passed a law in 1988 requiring that every car contain four pairs of PVC “anti-AIDS” gloves in their glove compartments for first-aid purposes, Frericks made a killing. He had anticipated the legislation and filled a warehouse with the gloves.

Despite his vaunted enthusiasm for Pétrus, some of his fellow German collectors viewed him as more of a status drinker than a serious wine person. Bearded and shiny-domed, Frericks was wont to get loud and drunk, and he once posed for a magazine photographer in a restaurant kitchen wearing an apron with nothing underneath, buttocks exposed. By the end of the 1980s, his interest in wine was waning, and in 1989, Frericks decided to dispose of a substantial portion of his cellar. He asked Sotheby’s to handle the sale. The head of the auction house’s wine department, at the time, was David Molyneux-Berry, whose habitual look incorporated a bow tie, glasses, Vandyke beard, and ponytail. He had been with the department since its founding in 1970, and had recently become director. Broadbent, competitive as ever, later recalled Molyneux-Berry as “something and nothing, really…When I knew him when we were both at Harvey’s, it was just David Berry. He became Molyneux-Berry when he went to Sotheby’s.”

Molyneux-Berry took Count Heinrich von Spreti, who would later become head of Sotheby’s Germany, along to translate, and they drove to Frericks’s villa. In the cellar they found astonishing rarities, including two Jefferson bottles, a 1784 Lafite and a 1787 Lafite. Rodenstock had sold them privately to Frericks shortly before the Forbes auction revealed how high a price the bottles might fetch, and Frericks had paid only 15,000 and 12,000 marks respectively (equivalent to around $5,100 and $4,000).

The cellar also boasted an Impériale of Mouton Rothschild 1924. That was the year Philippe de Rothschild hired the Cubist-influenced poster artist Jean Carlu to do the label, a bold move in stodgy Bordeaux. Seeing the bottle, Molyneux-Berry gulped. How on earth had this Frericks fellow gotten his hands on
that
? It surprised him that the bottle had a large label. Molyneux-Berry had sold one of these bottles himself at Sotheby’s a few years before, and it had a regular-size label. Here in the Frericks cellar, there were also magnums of Mouton from exceedingly rare years, and magnums of Pétrus 1928. Nearly all were in perfect condition. The magnums felt somehow off to Molyneux-Berry; there wasn’t anything specifically wrong, but they somehow weren’t right, either. Then he realized: On several of the labels, the colors were incorrect. What was supposed to be red was more of a pink; what was supposed to be green was closer to turquoise. Molyneux-Berry believed he was surrounded by fakes.

Frericks had a perfectly maintained cellar book, and without looking at it, Molyneux-Berry began moving around the room, calling out the names and vintages of the bottles he thought were bogus. Behind him, von Spreti, reading from the immaculately kept cellar book, said, “Origin, Rodenstock.” Over and over, “Origin, Rodenstock.” Rodenstock had sold eighty bottles to Frericks, for a total of 150,000 marks, or $71,000. They included, besides the two Jefferson bottles, Lafites from 1844, 1858, 1864, and 1875; Yquems from 1852 and 1869; and Pétrus, all in double magnums, from 1921, 1924, 1926, 1928, and 1929. Every one of the bottles Molyneux-Berry thought were counterfeits turned out to have been sourced from Rodenstock.

Molyneux-Berry took another look at the ’24 Mouton Impériale. Its colors were off, too, but there was something else. Not only were they wrong, they were wrong in a way that was vaguely familiar to Molyneux-Berry. Where had he seen those colors before? Suddenly, Molyneux-Berry remembered. A few years earlier, Mouton-Rothschild had published a coffee-table book, an illustrated history of its artist-commissioned labels. The book had reproduced the label colors in exactly the same wrong way. It was an artifact of the printing process.

After returning to London, Molyneux-Berry did further research. He called Mouton, which confirmed that only three Impériales had been produced in 1924, and that it was highly unlikely any would have had a large label. Molyneux-Berry also phoned Monticello, which informed him of the scholarly doubts about the attribution of the Jefferson bottles. And following the Three Emperors dinner that fall, he heard reports of the suspect Pétrus bottles served there.

Only twice in his twenty years in the auction business had Molyneux-Berry refused a cellar. In one of the situations, “the guy was clearly involved in crime.” In the second, the cellar, containing forty cases of 1982 first growths and 1982 Pétrus, belonged to a South American diplomat in Belgium; the auctioneer was convinced that drug money was being laundered. Now, Molyneux-Berry refused his third. On December 1, 1989, he sent a carefully worded letter to Frericks, politely declining the opportunity to auction his cellar and mentioning “significant doubt as to [the] origin” of some of the wine. “It was code,” Molyneux-Berry said later, “for ‘these bottles are fakes.’”

Soon after, Molyneux-Berry had another encounter with some Rodenstock wines. This time they were consigned to Farr Vintners, the London broker that had recently sold Bill Koch his four Jefferson bottles. The wines included an eighteenth-century Latour, which the head of the château wanted to give to a valued Japanese client. But first he asked Molyneux-Berry to assess the bottle’s condition and provenance for him. Molyneux-Berry went down to the Farr offices and examined the bottle. Supposedly it came from the million-dollar cache Rodenstock claimed to have found in Venezuela. The bottle was old, but there was no provenance attached to it whatsoever. “I can’t say it is,” Molyneux-Berry concluded, “and I can’t say it isn’t.”

By now, Molyneux-Berry was convinced that Rodenstock was a forger. It wasn’t just the Frericks cellar or the Latour. Molyneux-Berry also recalled how several of the bottles Rodenstock had bought from Sotheby’s had extremely low ullages. There had been a 1921 Trockenbeerenauslese like that, and later Molyneux-Berry had heard that Rodenstock had sold a bottle of the same wine, this one filled to the brim. Another time, Rodenstock had bought an empty Cognac bottle from the 1811 Comet vintage; later he had sold a full bottle of the same. Molyneux-Berry couldn’t prove they weren’t entirely different bottles, but they added to his doubts. Molyneux-Berry had come to believe that Rodenstock was “quite an evil man. If you look in his eyes, you see there’s something cruel about him. They say, ‘You don’t know that I’m tricking you.’ He’s having a massive laugh at the wine world.” The auctioneer went to Grey Gowrie, then Sotheby’s chairman, and asked if the auction house might expose Rodenstock. The chairman, as Molyneux-Berry would recall later, replied that there was no percentage in alienating a potential client.

Early in 1991, Molyneux-Berry was flipping through an industry weekly called
Harper’s Wine & Spirit Gazette
when a Christie’s ad caught his eye. There, reproduced and silhouetted, were four large bottles of Pétrus and a 1924 Impériale of Mouton. He recognized them immediately as having come from the Frericks cellar. Molyneux-Berry called Broadbent. “I blew a wobbly,” Molyneux-Berry said later. “It’s not often that I lose my rag, but I said to Michael, ‘How dare you do what you’re doing? I’m certain they’re fakes.’”

“What Pétrus?” Broadbent said.

What Pétrus? As if Broadbent sold 1920s Pétrus all the time? Molyneux-Berry was enraged.

“Michael, how dare you?!” Molyneux-Berry said.
“How dare you?!”

“Well, anyway,” Broadbent said, “Rodenstock has made Frericks withdraw the bottles. They’re not going to be in the sale.”

C
HAPTER
13

R
ADIOACTIVE

M
ICHAEL
B
ROADBENT—NOW IN HIS SIXTIES,
hair gone white—stood in an administrative room on the campus of GSF-Forschungszentrum für Umwelt und Gesundheit, a government research institute in a desolate northern suburb of Munich. Before him was a long table covered with a white cloth. Hans-Peter Frericks and a couple of French journalists from Gault-Millau were to his left, a pair of German scientists to his right, all side by side in a line, all focused on one thing. Frericks had decided to have his bottle of 1787 Lafite forensically analyzed by scientists. It was July 19, 1991, and Broadbent had flown in from London for this. With a set of small hammers, he had just breached the seal. It was clearly less than ten years old. Broadbent drew the cork. It crumbled but came out quite easily, uncommon for a very old wine. Broadbent was worried.

The public doubts about his authentication of the Jefferson bottles hadn’t dissipated. In 1990 a British article on counterfeit wine had quoted Monticello’s Cinder Goodwin, who had married and was now Cinder Stanton, as saying, “I am not particularly impressed with Christie’s research.” Just this year
Wine Spectator
had run a cover story about Jefferson, “America’s First Wine Connoisseur,” accompanied by a sidebar about the Jefferson bottles, titled “Authentic Old Bottles, but Were They Jefferson’s?” Though it took on faith the assessment by Broadbent that the bottles were legitimately old, and failed to mention that the magazine’s proprietor, Marvin Shanken, owned one, the short piece rehashed the old arguments about the attribution to Jefferson. The recent furor between Rodenstock and Frericks posed the most serious challenge yet, and Broadbent was increasingly troubled by Rodenstock’s refusal to reveal—even to him, even now—anything more about the bottles’ provenance.

N
OT LONG AFTER
David Molyneux-Berry had turned down Frericks’s cellar on behalf of Sotheby’s, the Munich businessman had consigned it to Christie’s. When Rodenstock subsequently learned about it, he insisted that he had sold bottles to Frericks on the condition that they would drink them together and with the understanding that they weren’t for resale.

Alleging that he had sold Frericks the Jefferson bottles at a “friendship price” and strictly for the purpose of a Lafite vertical to which he, Rodenstock, was to have been invited, Rodenstock persuaded Broadbent to postpone the sale of the Frericks cellar. Frericks responded by obtaining a court order, issued on December 4, 1990, enjoining Rodenstock from publicly claiming that they had had such an agreement, on penalty of 500,000 marks or six months in jail. Rodenstock appealed the injunction, but later withdrew his appeal.

In the meantime, Frericks, now acutely suspicious, pulled his bottles from Christie’s and began telling anyone who would listen that Rodenstock’s objections to a resale must be due to the bottles being inauthentic. The two men traded accusations in Munich’s tabloids. Frericks suggested that Rodenstock himself had tampered with the bottles. Frericks considered having the wine scientifically analyzed, but hesitated before doing so. If his suspicions were wrong, he would be destroying an irreplaceable historical artifact that had cost him a lot of money to buy. Ultimately, however, he resolved to have one of the two Jefferson bottles tested by GSF. Rodenstock then turned the tables by producing before-and-after photos purporting to show that the seal on the bottle when Rodenstock sold it to Frericks in November 1985 was different from the seal on it now, and that the corks and ullage had changed as well. On July 15, 1991, Frericks swore in court that “[a]t no time did I alter the bottle…I never had the bottles resealed or sealed.” Four days later, on the outskirts of Munich, he and Broadbent came together to open it.

At GSF, Broadbent held the bottle in front of a candle: the sediment looked authentically old. Manfred Wolf, a bearded chemist in a short-sleeved shirt, poured two-thirds of the wine through a funnel into a glass container for analysis. Broadbent splashed a small amount out of the Jefferson bottle into a wineglass. Holding a sheet of white paper out as a backdrop, with Frericks looking on, Broadbent tilted the glass sideways against it, the wine becoming a wider, shallower, more translucent pool. He peered through his half-moon reading glasses. The brownish hue indicated great age. Broadbent sniffed, then sipped. The nose and palate, too, suggested an ancient wine. It tasted, Broadbent said, like the Mouton opened five years earlier at Mouton. He felt relieved. It remained only for the scientists to confirm his sensory impressions.

For much of his career, Broadbent’s eminence as a taster had owed nothing to Rodenstock. In 1980 the Christie’s auctioneer had published his magnum opus.
The Great Vintage Wine Book
was an encyclopedia of tastes, a compendium of notes on every wine that had passed Broadbent’s lips since he first began jotting down his impressions in 1952. The oldest red Bordeaux he had tasted, and the only one from the eighteenth century, was the 1799 Lafite he had tasted one year earlier at Marvin Overton’s vertical in Fort Worth. He had tasted no big-bottle Pétrus older than 1945. The oldest Yquem dated to 1867. There were no notes from Rodenstock tastings, and the German’s name did not appear in the book.

By the time Broadbent updated the book in 1991, his reputation had become wholly entwined with Rodenstock’s. Nearly all of the oldest and rarest bottles he had tasted, from a 1747 Yquem to a 1771 Margaux to the Jefferson bottles to a series of prewar Pétrus in large formats, were supplied by Rodenstock, whose tastings Broadbent had attended annually starting in 1984. In this edition, Broadbent said he had now tasted “one thousand wines” at Rodenstock tastings, and, with the GSF results pending, felt the need to include an appendix laying out his old case for the Jefferson bottles’ authenticity, as well as retailing Rodenstock’s claim that he “was not aware of the significance of the initials T.J. until the first bottle (of the 1784 vintage) was opened at Château d’Yquem.”

In the six months after the opening at GSF, Broadbent would also fly twice to Bordeaux to see the printer of the labels on the large-format Pétrus bottles that had been at the center of much of the skepticism about Rodenstock. The wines dated from as far back as the 1920s, but the printer named at the bottom of the labels, Imprimerie Wetterwald Fréres, was still in business. On the first visit, Broadbent took along a double magnum of Pétrus 1945 that had come from Rodenstock, and a regular bottle of Pétrus 1945 from an unspecified “impeccable source.” The bottles had different labels, but the printer explained to Broadbent that while offset lithography was used for regular-size labels, a different method was used for larger ones. Broadbent came away believing the double-magnum label to be “genuine.” He next returned to Bordeaux with a double magnum of Pétrus 1921 from Rodenstock. “Wetterwald and his printers looked at it through magnifying glasses and pronounced it correct,” Broadbent wrote later. If the GSF tests on Frericks’s Jefferson bottle went as well, maybe the whole controversy could finally be put to rest.

O
N THE DAY
of the test in Munich, Yeter Göksu, standing near Broadbent, had taken a sip of the wine and thought it tasted horrible—sweet and insipid. In her opinion, only an idiot would buy this wine for so much money. An elegant Turkish-born physicist in her forties, with black hair and green eyes, Göksu had recently been conducting experiments on whether food irradiation, the practice of zapping food with gamma rays or electron beams to extend its shelf life, had negative health effects. She had been focusing mainly on dried spices.

Half a liter of the wine in the Frericks bottle went to Wolf, the chemist, who worked in a different branch of the institute; Göksu got the dregs. She would use thermoluminescence, the same technology with which she analyzed irradiated cumin, to date the sediment. Her lab was a suite of rooms in a massive building across the road from her office. They were kept cool and lit by a dim red bulb. If the materials to be studied were exposed to light, it would contaminate the signal they yielded; it was the wine’s purported history of containment in a dark bottle in a dark cellar that allowed it to be dated now by thermoluminescence.

In her lab, Göksu first poured out the five centimeters of liquid remaining in the bottle. Half she set aside for two other scientists to work with; the other half she would analyze herself. Then she turned the bottle upside down to shake out the sediment. A flat, rectangular object with a reddish, coppery hue clunked out onto the table. This was strange. What was a piece of metal doing in the bottom of a two-hundred-year-old bottle of wine? She gave it to some colleagues, Bernhard Hietel and Friedrich Schulz, who operated a linear particle accelerator elsewhere on the campus.

Their specialty was bombarding objects with a high-speed beam of protons fired down a barrel that began in one room and went through a wall into another. By measuring the wavelengths of the energy thrown off by the collision, the physicists could determine the constituent elements of the target. The piece of metal was, as they suspected from its appearance, solid lead. They next bombarded some of the wine itself to see how much lead was in it. Their test showed 11.3 milligrams of lead per liter, a toxic concentration. But this was inconclusive, as other nineteenth-century control bottles, which didn’t have pieces of lead resting in their sediment, also showed a lead content five times as high as some bottles of Bordeaux from the 1980s. To the two men, the lead appeared to be a piece of the protective foil “capsule” that envelops the mouth and neck of modern wine bottles.

Göksu, meanwhile, was busy preparing to conduct her tests. The sediment from Frericks’s Jefferson bottle was silty, with a few crystals mixed in. Göksu had to clean and dry it, ridding it of organic material by soaking it in alcohol, then letting the liquid evaporate. She also washed the dried sediment in an ultrasonic bath. She needed to isolate clean crystals. She ended up with enough for five samples.

Thermoluminescence relies on the recording, over the last several decades, of radiation levels around the world. Scientists know how the intensity of radiation in India differs from that in Iran, which differs from that in Canada, and they know how the intensities in each of these places have fluctuated year-to-year over the past half-century. Tell Göksu a radiation level, and she can say where and when it was recorded.

Crystalline materials such as feldspar and quartz are natural radiation detectors, trapping exactly as much energy in their structures as there is in their immediate environments. Tiny grains of these substances are ubiquitous in nature, and in the microscopic dust that invariably settles on plants. Even after plants have been processed—into, say, the spices Göksu had recently been studying, or the wine she was being asked to assess now—the crystals can be isolated. By heating them, and measuring the light emitted, Göksu could gauge the amount of radiation trapped inside. And that level, because it would exactly mirror the crystals’ original environment, would reveal where, or at least when, the wine originated.

Göksu and a colleague flew to Paris and spent a day, with a Gault-Millau journalist as their guide, visiting three old cellars near the Bastille. Using a scintillator, an unwieldy device similar to a Geiger counter, they took baseline radiation measurements. She needed to factor in any natural environmental radiation that might have been present in the cellar where the bottle was said to have reposed for centuries. Paris, like Munich, was built on chalky ground, and the results were low.

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.