The Billionaire's Vinegar (19 page)

In actuality, Rodenstock had not proved his case. Although old, both wine and cork had been shown to be younger than 1787. Moreover, the 1985 lab result purporting to show that the cork in the 1787 Yquem was “original” had analyzed its chemical composition but proven nothing about the age of the wine or the cork. To the contrary, Heinz Eschnauer, a German chemist to whom Rodenstock had sent part of the cork, specifically rejected Rodenstock’s contention that it was possible to confirm the wine’s age based on the tests he performed. This was the same scientist who, according to a note by Broadbent in a 1986 auction catalog, had “rigorously examined” the 1784 Yquem Christie’s ended up selling to Iyad Shiblaq/Dodi Al-Fayed. Most damningly, on December 14, 1992, the Munich court found that in the case of the Frericks bottle tested earlier, Rodenstock “adulterated the wine or knowingly offered adulterated wine.”

Remarkably, the explicit finding of guilt went unnoted in the wine media, the science of the 1985 tests went unanalyzed, and Rodenstock and Broadbent reveled in their test result, glossing over the fact that it wasn’t actually exculpatory. On December 15, 1992, writing from Monte Carlo, Rodenstock told
Rarities
co-editor Dennis Foley, who was sympathetic to the German, that the recent test had vindicated him: There was no post-1962 wine in the bottle that had just been carbon dated; moreover, “the wine couldn’t be younger than 1795 on average.” Rodenstock raised questions about GSF’s impartiality—why had it taken a year to do the test and announce the results?—and suggested again that Frericks must have manipulated the bottle provided to GSF.

The New Year came and went. On January 7, 1993, Broadbent eagerly wrote to Kip Forbes to reassure him. “Dear Kit,” his letter began, inauspiciously. “First of all, thank you for the charming family Christmas card. Always beautifully done.” Broadbent went on to say that the Zurich bottle had passed “with flying colors” and that “there is no reason to doubt that any of the Jefferson bottles which emanated directly from Hardy Rodenstock’s cellar have been tampered with.”

He also asserted that Cinder Stanton’s allegation that Jefferson never had his bottles engraved had been “disproved,” citing a September 17, 1789, letter from Jefferson to John Jay that Broadbent had discovered after the original furor in 1985. (Broadbent had since amassed a substantial Jefferson library.) In a postscript regarding a shipment of wine to George Washington, Jefferson had written, “Every bottle is marked (with a diamond) with the initial letter of the wine it contains.” Though the evidence related only to a single shipment of wine—a shipment to Washington rather than to himself, which included no red Bordeaux and only the generically described “Sauternes”—and mentioned only a one-initial engraving, Broadbent claimed vindication. One month later, in a letter to Margaret Kelly, the Forbes Galleries curator at the time of the original auction, Broadbent was more pointed. “The researchers at Monticello said that there was simply no evidence of Jefferson giving instructions for bottles to be identified by engraving,” Broadbent wrote. “How wrong they are.”

That spring, a lawyer for another owner of some Jefferson bottles, Bill Koch, expressed concern about the Frericks dispute. Koch’s office hired a Munich lawyer, Jack Schiffer, to look into it. Schiffer was satisfied by the evidence of the Bonani test, and Koch didn’t pursue the matter further.

On January 21, Rodenstock gloated to Foley, who was preparing a big article on the whole affair for
Rarities,
that the minister of research who had oversight of GSF, Hans Riesenhuber, had been fired two days earlier. Rodenstock suggested that the ouster was due to mistakes related to the Frericks test, including not charging Frericks for its cost. The following month, on February 15, Rodenstock wrote to Foley again. In this letter, Rodenstock set down a few further thoughts about Pétrus large-format bottles, the Jefferson-Yquem connection, and the recent Bonani/Hall tests, and he enclosed copies of friendly letters to him from Frericks sent as recently as the late 1980s. Only “jealousy and envy,” Rodenstock said, could have motivated Frericks to come forward with doubts years later. On February 23, Michael Broadbent wrote to Foley, including the 1789 Jefferson letter to John Jay mentioning diamond engraving, and concluded, “Let’s hope the whole subject can now be dropped.”

Rodenstock and Frericks tentatively agreed to a settlement in which they would stop denouncing one another and drop their respective legal claims, but Rodenstock couldn’t help himself. “Churchill always said that it is important who wins the last battle,” Rodenstock crowed. “As the experts have accepted, the wine can only be authentic. This has been proved by the exact and encompassing examinations in Oxford and Zurich. Whoever it was who poured new wine in the other bottle in an attempt to harm me, thank God he didn’t succeed.”

When Foley’s
Rarities
article came out, it included an entirely personal tangent about Frericks, describing him as a drunk and, quoting a German newspaper, “a flathead.” Frericks and Rodenstock wouldn’t reach a final settlement until 1995.

I
N SPITE OF
the scandal, Rodenstock claimed that his business had grown substantially from 1991 to 1992, and he continued to make the international wine scene. He was now often accompanied by Helga Lehner, a blond Munich actress he had married in 1991. In early 1994, Rodenstock and Georg Riedel hosted a blind tasting of French versus Napa wines, attended by twenty-four journalists, including Hugh Johnson, dean of English wine writers. The following year, in November, Rodenstock attended a lavish tasting in Ohio hosted by an ob-gyn who stored his 18,000-bottle collection in an underground bank vault he had bought and repurposed. And Rodenstock received two important new endorsements which suggested that the luster of his name had been at least partially restored by the tests in Zurich and at Oxford.

The first came from the Rothschilds, the first family of Bordeaux, whose name graced two of the five first growths. In 1994 the family acquired one of the Jefferson bottles to display at Waddesdon Manor, ancestral seat of an Anglo-Austrian branch of the dynasty and now a part-time tourist site overseen by Lord Jacob Rothschild and owned by England’s National Trust. The Waddesdon Wine Cellars were opening, and Michael Broadbent, who had kept the empty pint-sized bottle from the Bonani test at Christie’s on King Street, presented it to Lord Rothschild at London’s Spencer House on February 15. (Château Lafite itself donated a magnum of 1870, and Philippine de Rothschild, when she saw it, made a one-upping gift of 1868 Mouton.) The following week, Lord Rothschild sent a thank-you note to Rodenstock. The bottle took its place in a Lucite case in the cellar. A few years later, at the invitation of Lord Rothschild, Rodenstock and his wife would attend a lunch thrown at Waddesdon by Gordon Getty.

In 1995, Rodenstock executed his greatest public-relations coup yet, drawing Hugh Johnson and Robert Parker to his annual tasting. Johnson normally avoided such events (two years earlier, he had written witheringly about “the awe-inspiring vulgarity of some of America’s wine spectaculars”). Parker, though, was the real catch. He had, by this time, achieved an importance in the wine world unmatched by critics in other fields. It was hard for a retailer to sell a wine Parker didn’t like, and hard not to sell one he had praised. Though Parker was controversial—for his power over the market, for the largely European perception that he favored “obvious,” overconcentrated wines, for the silly precision of his 100-point scoring system—he was widely respected for his independence, integrity, and indifference to Bordeaux’s traditional hierarchy. He had launched his newsletter,
The Wine Advocate,
with Ralph Nader as his model, did not accept advertising, and, unlike many other wine writers, eschewed junkets and gift bottles.

Parker had some experience with old-wine collectors. It had been Bipin Desai who arranged for him to first taste Margaux 1900, which Parker then awarded 100 points in
The Wine Advocate
. But for the most part, Parker steered clear of mega-tastings, and he had declined several invitations to previous Rodenstock events. Eventually the two men were brought together by Daniel Oliveros and Jeff Sokolin, the Russian-born cousin of Bill Sokolin, for whom both men had worked before launching their own rarities business, Royal Wine Merchants. Among colleagues, Oliveros and Sokolin were known as “the sexy boys,” because they seemed to have an exclusive line on “sexy juice”—old bottles in large formats that nobody else offered. They were close to Parker, and they were believed to serve as Rodenstock’s distributors in America.

At some events in 1994 and 1995, Parker met Rodenstock and found, as he would later tell his newsletter subscribers, that “the unkind remarks I had read about him were untrue. A man of extraordinary charm and graciousness, Rodenstock is a true wine lover in the greatest sense of the word, as well as exceptionally knowledgeable, and generous to a fault (he charges nothing for the opportunity to participate in his tastings). His passion for wine history, and of course, the world’s greatest wines, is irrefutable.” Parker went on to say he had been persuaded to attend Rodenstock’s annual tasting in 1995 by three things: Rodenstock’s conviction that Pomerol had been given short shrift by the wine media, his “obsession with finding extraordinarily old bottles of Pomerol from private cellars in Europe,” and his sheer “passion and enthusiasm.”

At the tasting, held at the Königshof Hotel in Munich, Rodenstock included a vertical showcasing l’Eglise Clinet, a relatively unknown Pomerol estate. Parker tasted many older vintages of the wine for the first time, and later gave them top scores. At the same event, Rodenstock pulled out all the stops with a 10:00 a.m. “pre-Phylloxera breakfast,” at which he served sixteen pre-phylloxera wines blind, including both an 1874 Ausone and an 1847 Rausan-Segla. Parker was the guest of honor. He called the 1811 and 1847 Yquems “the greatest Yquems I have tasted.” The 1811 was “liquefied crême brûlée” the 1847 “would have received more than 100 points if possible.” A photograph captured him and Rodenstock huddled together, talking about the wines. On his flight home to Baltimore, by way of London, Parker “set a personal record for mineral water consumption,” he wrote in his newsletter.

“Not only was the weekend the most extraordinary three days of wine tasting, superb eating, and wine camaraderie that I have ever experienced, but it stands as the wine event of my lifetime,” Parker wrote. If he had any doubts about the authenticity of the bottles, they were laid to rest by the presence of Broadbent. “The condition of the bottles was extraordinary,” Parker wrote. “No other than Michael Broadbent authenticated the age of the bottles.” In the next edition of Parker’s massive
Bordeaux,
his reference guide to the world’s greatest wine region, the critic thanked Rodenstock and included several tasting notes from the 1995 tasting.

As the most powerful person in the wine world, someone depended on by rich neophytes unsure of their palates, Parker had just given Hardy Rodenstock an exceedingly valuable public seal of approval. Rodenstock began boasting that, before the tasting, he had bought up all the old l’Eglise Clinet on the market, confident that Parker would award high scores and send the wine’s price soaring.

C
HAPTER
15

“A
WASH IN
F
AKES”

I
N
1996
A SECRET CONCLAVE OF FIFTEEN LEADING
players in the rare-wine market met in a boardroom at the Intercontinental Hotel in London. Merchants and auctioneers who normally competed with each other, they included Serena Sutcliffe from Sotheby’s, a representative from Christie’s, Stephen Browett from Farr Vintners, and Tim Littler, the Whitwhams merchant whose Jefferson bottle had been broken by Bill Sokolin. Sotheby’s insisted that everyone sign confidentiality agreements. The topic of discussion was wine piracy.

In the last three years, fine-wine prices had exploded. In late 1993, New York State legalized wine auctions, and in 1995 and 1996, auction totals in the United States surpassed those in the UK. In 1996, worldwide wine auction sales exceeded $70 million, more than twice the amount in 1994. A lot more wine was being sold, and the center of the auction market had shifted from its historical base in England to the United States.

The profits to be made from selling trophy wines, and the relative ease of forging them, had yielded a flood of bogus bottles on the market. Invariably they were the wines with the most shocking price tags—cult labels, in cult vintages. Pétrus ’61. Romanée-Conti ’90. Mouton-Rothschild ’45. Cheval Blanc ’47. Le Pin ’82. Often they were in magnums.

The prices for these rarities had seemed to soar in the 1980s, but in the 1990s they rose vertically. In 1996 a case of six magnums of ’82 Le Pin fetched $47,740 at Sotheby’s, while a case of ’45 Mouton brought in $112,500 at Zachys-Christie’s in New York. With the exception of Mouton, Cheval Blanc, and a few others, these wines had tiny productions—Pétrus, rarely more than 3,500 cases a year; Le Pin, six hundred cases on average—and their rarity only added to their cachet and market value. Yet Pétrus ’82 was raining from the sky. Merchants who never used to see ’45, ’47, or ’61 Pétrus in magnum were now being offered it every week. Littler and a few others believed the trade needed to take action.

The London summit began ambitiously. A letter was drafted, with the idea of collectively sending it to the major French châteaux and negociants asking for more-stringent anti-piracy measures: short capsules, so corks could be read; embedded codes in the labels; vintages embossed in the bottle glass. Someone from Farr, which, despite having become a well-respected player, hadn’t entirely escaped its upstart reputation, mentioned the name of a Burgundy broker based in Paris: he was a major source of theirs, and they’d been encountering problems with a lot of the DRC they received from him. It was speculated that Rodenstock might get some of his wine from the broker. Farr said they’d stop using the man if everyone else would.

But self-interest and apathy conspired to kill the whole initiative. Half the room wouldn’t agree to stop using the dubious source of rare Burgundy. As for the letter, a British broker predicted glumly that the French would say, “That’s why you shouldn’t buy from foreign negociants, only straight from the châteaux.” The letter was never sent. The meeting went nowhere. Given the confidentiality agreements, it also went unreported at the time.

“Serena told me Sotheby’s couldn’t be seen as in association with Farr Vintners,” one participant recalled, claiming that her behavior then quickly changed. “Suddenly, Serena disapproved. Two weeks later, she gave an interview to the
Times
about the counterfeiting problem.” The merchant laughed bitterly. “Sotheby’s does no checks at all.”

I
N WINE CIRCLES,
talking openly about fraudulent wine remained virtually taboo, and Christie’s and Sotheby’s continued to disagree about the scope of the problem. Sutcliffe was singularly outspoken about its seriousness, and given to pronouncements regarding provenance, like, “If the trail goes dead, you have to drop the transaction.” Two years later she would tell
Wine Spectator
that the market was “awash in fakes.” Christie’s Broadbent and Paul Bowker, along with Rodenstock, were dismissive, minimizing the problem as exaggerated.

Yet it was clearly expanding. Only a year after raving about the Rodenstock tasting, Robert Parker published an essay titled “In Vino Veritas?” The article focused on “the growing evidence of phony bottles” in “the gray market,” meaning distribution channels outside of authorized supply chains. “[R]are wine may be the only luxury-priced commodity in the world that does not come with a guarantee of authenticity,” Parker wrote. “The appearance of dishonest segments of society with only one objective, to take full advantage of the enormous opportunity that exists to make a quick buck by selling bogus wines, is not that shocking. This has always been a problem, but based on the number of letters and telephone calls I have received from victims who have been the recipients of suspiciously-labeled wines, with even more unusual contents, it is a subject that needs to be addressed.”

Parker himself had seen numerous fakes, but added that all of his own experiences dealing with the gray market had been on the up-and-up. When he republished the essay in the next edition of his big book, he added a few sentences reporting that Pétrus owner Christian Moueix said that old vintages of Pétrus in big bottles, especially, should be considered suspect. Soon his fax machine was buzzing with indignant letters from Rodenstock.

R
EPORTS OF FAKERY,
since the episode with the fabricated Warhol Mouton labels, had been sporadic prior to the early 1990s. When there were incidents, they often involved the 1982 vintage, which had drawn speculators and seen price increases unlike any other modern vintage. Near the end of 1985, French police arrested several people in the right-bank city of Libourne and seized some seventy cases of regional plonk masquerading as 1981 and 1982 Pétrus. In 1990, five cases of 1986 DRC Montrachet, sold by the Wine Merchant of Beverly Hills to a Japanese collector, turned out to be cheap Pouilly-Fumé, gussied up with fake labels.

As wine prices, especially those of luxury labels, soared in the early nineties, incidents began cropping up much more regularly. In 1995, at a dinner in Hong Kong, a merchant from England’s Corney & Barrow was served a fake magnum of 1982 Le Pin. In 1996 an attempt to sell fake 1982 Le Pin was uncovered in the UK; the forger had simply relabeled and altered the corks of some 1987 Le Pin, which sold for £1,300 ($2,000) less per bottle. In the late 1990s a London customer became suspicious of a bottle of 1982 Pétrus he had bought from a New York wine merchant for $2,000. He took it to château owner Christian Moueix, who examined it in the presence of
Wine Spectator
’s James Suckling. The bottle seemed legitimate until the capsule was removed and the cork drawn; the cork had two small indentations on its sides, indicating that it had previously been removed. It also lacked a vintage mark; the old one had apparently been sanded off. Moueix and Suckling tasted the wine, which was obviously not a 1982; they speculated it was Pétrus, but a lesser and much cheaper vintage, such as 1980 or 1984. In March of 1998, Langton’s, an auction house in Australia, discovered some phony 1990 Penfold’s Grange, the most famous red wine Down Under.

Older fakes were a less common occurrence, in part because older wines constituted only a sliver of the market. But they were worth much more money than young wines, and easier to pull off. In 1985 two American businessmen bought a magnum of 1865 Lafite, supposedly from the legendary Rosebery cellar, for $12,000. When they opened it, at a $1,500-a-head fundraising dinner in San Francisco, several people present who had previously tasted 1865 Rosebery Lafites deemed it fake. Marvin Overton III thought it was 1911 Lafite. Robert Mondavi said the cork looked five or ten years old. One of the two businessmen who had acquired the bottle thought it tasted like a faded rosé. Then came the string of incidents involving questionable, Rodenstock-sourced bottles at mega-tastings in the late 1980s. And among the wines offered for sale by Christie’s in Chicago, as part of the sale of Lloyd Flatt’s cellar in 1990, was a bottle of 1947 Romanée-Conti that turned out to be a bottle of 1964 Échezaux with a dummied-up label. An Impériale of 1947 Cheval Blanc, auctioned at Christie’s in 1997, sold for $112,500 despite doubts by both the château and a leading Swiss collector that such a bottle was ever made at the château; nonetheless, the château had given the bottle its imprimatur by providing a new label. Near the end of 1997, a bunch of low-priced, fake 1900 Taylor Fladgate and 1908 Sandeman vintage Port appeared on the London market.

Also suspicious was the prevalence of certain old vintages that had only been produced in limited quantities in the first place. The high number of cases of 1945 and 1947 Mouton sold at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in the previous twenty-five years raised eyebrows, given the relatively small production of those vintages. A German restaurant was reported to have served two cases a year of 1959 Pétrus for six years at tasting events; this was a wine that estate owner Christian Moueix had tasted only twice, and of which Pétrus itself owned only one bottle. By the late 1990s, Serena Sutcliffe was convinced that there were a lot of fake 1947s on the market.

A
N ENTERPRISING FORGER
could employ any of several methods to counterfeit wine. He might switch the contents of a case, substituting cheaper bottles for more expensive ones, confident that by the time the case was opened, years later, he’d be long gone. He could apply the same logic to bottles, soaking the label off of a more expensive wine and gluing it onto a cheaper one. When the bottle was eventually opened, he’d be forgotten, or the taster wouldn’t have the knowledge or confidence to know the difference. Alternatively, instead of switching the bottle or label, the forger could switch the wine itself, siphoning out a more expensive one and replacing it with something inferior.

Old bottles, either empty or terribly ullaged, could be bought and reconditioned. A trick with DRC was to scuff the part of the label bearing the serial number, as if it had been a victim of normal handling. Labels could be reproduced with a color photocopier. Colin Lutman, an English forger of Port in the 1980s, went to more creative lengths, having apparently blasted one bottle with a shotgun to give it the pitted look of age, sprayed others with aerosolized dust, stained labels with orange juice and tea, and used sepia ink to reproduce château names on the labels.

More-sophisticated methods were also available. At the molecular level, a forger could add a proportionate amount of C-14 to simulate a vintage. To fool noses and palates, he could introduce an essence that mimicked aged oak. Émile Peynaud, the great French oenologist, once conducted an experiment in which he left a red wine and a Sauternes in a warm, damp lab oven for three weeks. At the end of the period, the red wine was undrinkable, but the Sauternes tasted like an old one and was very good. In the late 1990s, “a German sommelier with a vast knowledge of rare, old Bordeaux” offered the
Wine Spectator
’s Suckling detailed recipes for specific fakes, including a 1961 Pétrus, any mature vintage of Latour, and a 1945 Mouton. These recipes mostly involved lesser vintages of the same wine, doctored a bit, or other good wines that resembled them. Suckling didn’t name the sommelier in the article, but Ralf Frenzel, Rodenstock’s old sidekick, later acknowledged it had been he. “Whoever says that these great wines cannot be duplicated is not being honest with themselves,” Frenzel had said, under cover of anonymity.

Wine was among the easiest collectibles to fake. As a luxury commodity—more like a Louis Vuitton bag or a Rolex watch than like a unique painting by a famous artist—a bottle of fine wine wasn’t carefully tracked in its peregrinations. “This is the only product in the world,” Robert Parker said later, “that you can sell for thousands of dollars without a certificate of origin.” The rare-wine world, clubby and closemouthed, had allowed the problem to flourish by countenancing a gray market. And wine was made to be left alone in the dark for years, untasted and often unseen. Even when it was opened, tasting wine was rarely conclusive: few tasters were skilled enough to detect frauds, and an accused could always chalk up a strange taste to “bottle variation” or, with older bottles, the vinodiversity that characterized different merchants’ bottlings of the same wine. Experienced tasters had, after all, been divided about the questionable Rodenstock wines at the 1980s L. A. tastings. The limits of science precluded analyzing the wine itself without opening the bottle, a trade-off that owners of very expensive bottles were reluctant to make.

Of course, even if you did decide, when tasting a wine, that it was fake, you had also just destroyed the evidence.

T
HE MOTLEY WAYS
to make fake wine were matched only by the variety of clues that could lead to its detection. Sometimes, instead of asking market value for a fake, and counting on the wine’s scarcity to generate demand among gray-market middlemen, a forger would make the mistake of setting a price that was too good to be true. Often the mimicry was shoddy and unresearched. In the Mouton episode in 1982, the gold lettering was neither embossed nor as brilliant as real gold leaf, the paper had a gray tinge, there were typographical errors, and the capsule lacked the real Rothschild seal. The 1981 and 1982 Pétrus faked in the mid-eighties bore wrong-colored foil capsules and stumpy, unbranded corks. The fraudsters behind the 1990 Penfolds Grange had meticulously copied the cases, packing tissue, and corks; their undoing had been spelling errors—“pour” was spelled “poor” on the label—and incorrectly colored bar codes (black instead of red).