The Billionaire's Vinegar (20 page)

In the matter of the five cases of 1986 DRC Montrachet arriving in Japan in 1990, the Japanese customer noticed that the labels read “Appellation Romanée-Conti Controlée” rather than the correct “Appellation Montrachet Controllée.” In hindsight, given that only two hundred cases of DRC Montrachet were produced each year, a five-case allocation to a single consumer was itself suspicious.

So was the 1947 Romanée-Conti from Lloyd Flatt’s cellar, since no such wine was ever produced. In 1945 the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti had belatedly yielded to phylloxera and torn up all its vines, replanting with American rootstocks; from 1946 to 1951, as the DRC waited for the newly planted vines to mature, no wines were bottled under its label. Despite this small problem, neither Flatt nor Christie’s Chicago caught it; only when Christie’s published the auction catalog did a rival auctioneer helpfully call up and point it out.

Sometimes it was the wine inside the bottles that didn’t look right. Maybe the ullage was telltale: a fifty-year-old wine, say, that showed little or no evaporation. In the 1980s, Tim Littler, from Whitwhams, bought a Jéroboam of 1869 Mouton at Christie’s London. When he got home to Manchester, he left the bottle upright on a table. Later, when he turned to look at it, he could see right through. Alarmed, he held the bottle up to the light. The fluid inside seemed far too translucent for a red Bordeaux, and, strangely, no sediment was swirling around from moving the wine by train from London. Littler opened the bottle and, sure enough, it contained colored water. He called Broadbent, who called the consignor, a Danish restaurateur who became aggressive with the English auctioneer. Littler theorized that the bottle had been drunk decades earlier, then filled with colored water for the sake of display; the restaurant had then changed hands a few times, and the new owners had no way of knowing that the bottle contained diluted ink.

In 1987, a bottle labeled as vintage Port exploded in an office at Sotheby’s London. The cork shot out, hitting the ceiling, and wine sprayed all over the desk of Christopher Ross, the unlucky auction-house employee. The seal turned out to be candle wax dyed black, the contents a mix of Safeway-brand plonk and a partially fermented homemade concoction. Ross visited the consignor of the bottle, Colin Lutman, at home in Kent, and warned Lutman that he might have been victimized by a forger. Lutman had already sold several bottles at auction, including two bottles of “1924 Croft” at Christie’s. Ross also warned Christie’s about Lutman, and was told, incorrectly, that Lutman hadn’t sold through them. Lutman tried selling again through Sotheby’s, which called the police, who in turn contacted Christie’s, which had itself just had another three bottles consigned to them by Lutman. When the police arrived at Lutman’s home in Kent, they interrupted him in the midst of creating a new batch. He got off with a £750 fine.

In all these instances, something was visibly wrong with the wine or bottle or cork or capsule; no doubt, many more skillful fakes were simply never detected. The structure of the business was such that collectible wine often went unscrutinized, even as it was bought and sold and traded among merchants and auction houses and restaurants and collectors. Wine might be purchased at auction, sight unseen, by a telephone bidder, and then held “in bond” in a storage warehouse for decades before being resold. If it was an intact case, an auction house might never look at what was inside. Montrachet came in a wooden box girdled by a metal band that had to be cut to remove it; retailers often moved cases without ever opening them to inspect their contents. The 1981 and 1982 Pétrus wasn’t detected until it reached Paris and London and the wooden boxes were opened. The boom in buying wine purely for the sake of investment had only exacerbated this phenomenon, which wine people made light of in an oft-recycled story.

“Abe bought a shipment of sardines that had already been traded many times and each time profitably,” went one version. “Unlike previous buyers, Abe took the trouble of procuring a box of his purchase. The sardines were terrible. He telephoned Joe, from whom he had bought them, only to be told, ‘But Abe, those sardines are for trading, not eating.’”

A
S CONCERN ABOUT
the counterfeiting problem grew, there were fitful indications that a scientific solution might be found. A technique developed in France in the late 1980s, nuclear magnetic resonance, could not identify vintage, but could determine where the source grapes had been grown. An auction house challenged a Champagne consignment using radiocarbon dating. The University of Seville would soon come up with a spectrometry test used to compare trace metals in wine and grape source.

But just about everyone other than the châteaux believed that the responsibility, and the only truly effective response, must lie with the châteaux themselves. The easiest problem to attack, from a château standpoint, was older vintages. As of 1990, leading châteaux had become suspicious of a wave of requests to recork old bottles, and become warier of recorking. Recorking opened a loophole for counterfeiters, both in creating an atmosphere in which nonoriginal corks and labels and unnaturally small ullage were considered acceptable, and in providing a mechanism to launder fake wine into wine with an official seal of approval. Given that châteaux had long reconditioned bottles by using different, less rare vintages to top up, the idea that an old bottle was purely what it purported to be was naïve. The practice of recorking therefore provided counterfeiters with yet another plausible argument for why an old wine might taste different from another bottle of the same vintage. Lafite, whose winemakers, starting in the mid-1980s, had regularly flown around the world to recork customers’ bottles, would end the program by 2005. Yquem’s Lur Saluces, who was a member of the brand-protecting Comité Colbert, banned recorking of all Yquem bottles older than 1940.

Countermeasures with regard to new vintages were slower to arrive, with many châteaux resistant to taking meaningful precautions. A few did adopt new anti-counterfeiting technology. Haut-Brion had been embossing its bottles since 1957. Starting with its 1988 vintage, Château Pétrus became one of the first winemakers to take steps specifically to combat counterfeiting, introducing a label containing a hidden code visible only under ultraviolet light. In 1996, Pétrus also began etching its name in its bottles. Margaux, too, was an early adopter, laser-etching each bottle with a château and vintage code starting with the 1989 vintage, and adding a bottle-specific random number, laser-etched in the neck, with the 1995 vintage. Margaux would also add an embossed
M
in the bottle’s punt, vintage-specific corks and capsules, and anti-counterfeit labels, as well as weighing each case and encoding the poundage in a bar code stamped on the outside, so that bottle theft could be detected without removing the case’s sealing bands.

“It makes their life difficult,” Margaux’s Paul Pontallier said of would-be counterfeiters. “You could maybe fake a few bottles, but you couldn’t do it at an industrial level.”

In 1996, Lafite began using engraved bottles. Lur Saluces took several steps to make it harder to fake Yquem, contracting with a printer of currency to use special watermarked paper, embedded with a signature pattern of particles visible only under ultraviolet light. He also introduced the use of a particularly adhesive glue, which did not endear him to those collectors who liked to soak labels off bottles and paste them into scrapbooks. The glass bottles, too, were embossed with certain marks. In Burgundy, the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti put a new system in place, including using embossed script on the label, changing the color and thickness of the bottle glass, and fixing labels more securely. After Langton’s discovery of the fake Grange, Australia’s Penfolds began laser-etching its bottles.

As an international cash business involving commodities, with little transparency in the distribution chain, rare wine seemed ripe for exploitation by organized money launderers, and the FBI and New Scotland Yard began looking into fine-wine merchants in the United States and the UK regarding possible fake bottles. The investigators spoke of Asia as a major new target of counterfeiters; while parts of the continent, especially Singapore and Hong Kong, were home to serious connoisseurs, many new-money collectors were naïve (Pétrus and Coke being a popular combination). Soon after his “In Vino Veritas?” essay appeared in
The Wine Advocate,
Robert Parker received a visit from two FBI agents; he spent a day with them, giving a tutorial in the wine business. “They led me to believe it was pretty serious and widespread,” Parker recalled, “and that the Russian Mafia was involved. The question was, ‘How do you prove it?’”

I
N
1997, a year after the secret anti-counterfeiting meeting in London, Sotheby’s was presented with a fitting opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to sound provenance. A handful of other Jefferson bottles had surfaced, and Sotheby’s announced that it would sell them. Though they didn’t come from Rodenstock, and had a much different history, the bottles were a remarkable thing for the auction house to offer. Serena Sutcliffe had very publicly spoken of the rising problem of fake wine, and the three Jefferson bottles sold by Christie’s, though she didn’t say so publicly, were Exhibit A when it came to suspect old vintages.

While the seller remained anonymous—Sotheby’s listed the lot of three Madeiras as “Property of a Nobleman”—the bottles seemed to have a very clear and convincing chain of ownership. Each bore a paper slip label attesting to its origin. All were Madeiras dating back to 1800, and as the auction catalog laid it out, they had been “purchased at sale of effects; President Jefferson; by Honl. Philip Evan Thomas of Maryland 1843.” The labels showed the succession of owners through whom the bottles were then passed down, ending with their purchase by Douglas H. Thomas in 1890. The consignor was Thomas’s great-grandson.

As Madeiras, these bottles stood a greater chance of being drinkable than eighteenth-century Bordeaux, but their conditions varied significantly. One was empty; Sotheby’s estimated it would fetch between $2,500 and $3,500. One was less than half-full, its contents brown and cloudy; this was estimated at $6,000 to $8,000. The bottle in the best condition, with ullage at mid-to-low shoulder, was estimated to fetch between $10,000 and $15,000. Nonetheless, the catalog cautioned warily that all of the bottles were being “sold on the basis of their historical relevance only and purchasers should assume that the wine is not fit for consumption.”

“These bottles, once belonging to President Thomas Jefferson, have miraculously survived being passed through generations and are of extraordinary historical importance,” Sotheby’s enthused. Beyond the slip labels, there were contemporaneous documents to back them up: an 1890 auction catalog mentioning the bottles as part of a sale of the estate of the daughter of Philip Evan Thomas, and an October 11, 1904,
Baltimore Sun
article recounting a dinner at which Douglas H. Thomas had made a toast with the Madeira. The dinner, which featured “crab flakes, Belvedere, in chafing dish” and “fancy ices,” had wrapped up with the “Jefferson Madeira Vintage, 1800.” The
Sun
article, from ninety-three years before, laid out the wine’s pedigree exactly as the tattered slip labels did. The provenance seemed solid. Sotheby’s saw no reason to contact Monticello to obtain a second opinion.

At the auction, on Friday, May 16, 1997, the bottle estimated at $10,000–$15,000 sold for $23,000. The winning telephone bidder was Barrie Larvin, wine director at the Rio Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, who oversaw a $6-million collection of some 100,000 bottles, including an assortment of Yquem worth $1 million. The year before, Larvin had shown a penchant for attention-getting bids when he bought a couple of Nebuchadnezzars of 1985 and 1989 Mouton for $33,350 each, and the following year he would place a winning bid of $20,000 for a 27-liter bottle of Dry Creek Vineyard 1995 Reserve Merlot, the largest bottle in the world. Now Larvin announced that he would open the Jefferson Madeira that July 4 or wait until the Millennium and sell sips for $100 each. Larvin also bought the empty Jefferson Madeira bottle for $6,000 as something to possibly offer in the casino’s gift shop. In 1999
Wine Spectator
identified these bottles, without qualification, as having “once belonged to President Thomas Jefferson.”

As promised, Larvin offered tastes of the Jefferson Madeira on the New Year’s Eve of the Millennium, though for $2,500 a pour rather than $100 a taste. When he was halfway through opening it, though, the cork crumbled, and he aborted the mission. Three days later, while in the casino cellar with a winemaker visiting from Australia, Larvin decided on the spur of the moment to open the bottle with a corkscrew.

He poured a small amount into a glass, then sealed the remainder in an airtight decanter. The wine had a dark amber color and smelled like Madeira. “The bouquet was extremely powerful,” the winemaker reported. “It had hints of almonds, caramel, and burnt sugar aromas all mixed seamlessly with the rich, smooth spirit. Everything in the aroma followed through to the palate, perhaps without the same intensity, but still surprisingly well. The palate was reminiscent of raisins. The characteristic acidity of Madeira seemed to have fallen away, but the spirit made it deliciously warm to finish. I couldn’t detect any fruit flavors in the wine—the palate was all about secondary bottle characteristics—as indeed one would expect after two hundred years in the bottle!”

Whether it had been in the bottle for two hundred years, however, turned out to be a question. The Sotheby’s provenance had referred to an 1843 sale of Jefferson’s effects, but the only such sale known to the experts at Monticello had occurred in 1827, the year after Jefferson’s death. Serena Sutcliffe, informed years later of Monticello’s doubts, replied that Sotheby’s “research involved our book experts who analysed the paper and the handwriting. It all tallied. We were comfortable with the origin, the glass, the bottle, the writing—it all matched. A lot of work went into it.” Later she added, “The origin of the Madeira was solid and totally satisfactory. Funny that any other theory was never mentioned at the time…. As I am sure you know, there are many ‘Jefferson scholars,’ just as there are many Rembrandt scholars! Not to mention the Jane Austen tribe.”