The Billionaire's Vinegar (22 page)

At least one other Jefferson bottle had turned up, its origin unclear. In Jerusalem, a restaurateur named Moise Pe’er, who ran a place that was popular with politicians, boasted of owning a Jefferson Margaux from 1789, a year Rodenstock had never publicly claimed was represented in the cache.

In opening the two Jefferson bottles at this tasting, Rodenstock told some people that these were the last of his Jefferson Yquems, though he told Jancis Robinson he still had “one or two” left. The number of Jefferson bottles out on the market was anyone’s guess. Rodenstock claimed that he didn’t “know who exactly owns Jefferson bottles…. The journalists have written so much nonsense on the Jefferson bottles that I have crossed that subject off long ago.” Rodenstock had now opened four at his big tastings, “a couple of half bottles” privately, the Yquem at Yquem, and the Mouton at Mouton. He had traded another Yquem to Lur Saluces, a Lafite to Lloyd Flatt, and sold a Lafite 1784 and a Lafite 1787 to Frericks. In a late-1992 interview, he mentioned having just sold a 1787 Jefferson Yquem; he provided a half-bottle of 1787 Lafite for analysis in Zurich; and two years after that he provided the Zurich lab with a second bottle for analysis, a 1787 Yquem (the results were no more conclusive than the lab’s first test). Besides the three bottles sold by Christie’s (to Forbes, Shanken, and Shiblaq/Al-Fayed), and the five bottles sold by Farr (one to Sokolin, four to Koch), there were another two bottles (a 1784 and a 1787) in the collection of the Swiss wine merchant Badaracco. This amounted to twenty-five plus “one or two,” not including the bottle supposedly in Jerusalem. With more than two dozen bottles drunk, broken, sacrificed to science, or ensconced in collectors’ cellars, Rodenstock’s Jefferson saga seemed finally spent.

The subculture in which the bottles had flourished had also largely come to an end. Partly this was because there were fewer pre-phylloxera first growths around; 1864, 1865, and 1870 Lafites, to name just three, appeared only rarely in auction catalogs now. Many of the bottles simply didn’t exist anymore. Partly the change came about because of soaring prices; the people who could afford the rarities now tended to be rich status-seekers rather than wine obsessives. And partly the era ended because of the dispersal of Rodenstock’s generation of tasters. There was no way to improve on the Yquem marathon. “If ever you have a chance to taste like this, you are lost,” Scheuermann said. “You never will have a chance to come back to common taste.” Scheuermann and his friends had lived through a golden age that could not return.

For these few, the normal quality scale didn’t apply. Was a 100-point wine some barrel-tasted, right-bank upstart anointed by a self-styled arbiter in Monkton, Maryland? No, for these people it was an 1865 Lafite, a 1900 Margaux, a 1945 Mouton, a 1947 Cheval Blanc. “People who haven’t tasted these wines should refrain from judging on a 100-point scale,” Scheuermann said. “They should judge up to 90 or 95. One hundred points means the greatest wines ever produced for us to taste. Boys and girls who haven’t tasted these should refrain from judging.” He paused, as it dawned on him how this sounded. “On the other hand, that’s arrogant.”

Others simply appreciated their experience for what it was and moved on to more commonplace wines. Talking about the rarities wasn’t just arcane, it was obnoxious and boring. People who had shared an intense experience they could discuss only with each other, they kept quiet. “The 1871 Yquem, my favorite, I drank four times,” Otto Jung recalled. “Only about fifteen people in the world have done that. You can’t talk to your normal friends about it.”

It appeared that the full truth about the Jefferson bottles would never be revealed. Thirteen years had passed since they first made news. Circumstantial arguments aside, there was no definitive proof that they had belonged to Jefferson, and none that they hadn’t. When it came to sensory evaluation, the authority on old wines, Michael Broadbent, had deemed the six he tasted to be authentic, while other tasters had expressed skepticism. A scientific test had established that at least one bottle contained young wine, but another test a year later had seemed, at least in the eyes of the wine media, to rebut the idea that all the bottles might be affected. The second test had also thrown into question who had tampered with the bottle from the first test. Every answer had given way to new questions. It seemed unlikely that another scientific test could break the tie. The most famous of the bottles had, after all, been compromised before the eighties were up, the Forbes bottle through its cork slippage, the Sokolin bottle by being broken at the Four Seasons. And the Jefferson bottles were so expensive as to create a strong disincentive for the owner of one, even if skeptical, to destroy it for the sake of…what? Barring an uncharacteristic revelation by Rodenstock, or the unexpected emergence of a previous owner of the bottles, the secret looked as if it would die with Rodenstock.

C
HAPTER
17

K
OCH
B
OTTLES

O
N A
W
EDNESDAY IN
S
EPTEMBER OF
2005,
NEARLY
twenty years after the Forbes family made wine-auction history, their bottle reposed on lower Fifth Avenue, in a suite on the second floor of the Forbes Building. There, amid the hushed sounds of clicking keyboards and chirruping phones, the galleries’ staff was busy with its curatorial mission, which increasingly meant getting rid of things.

Fifteen years after Malcolm’s death, the Forbes children had deaccessioned many of their father’s collections in order to raise funds. In 1993 they auctioned off the Orientalist art that had adorned his palace in Tangiers. Over the next several years they sold his collection of toy soldiers, an Edward Hopper painting (to Steve Martin, the actor, for $10 million), and, through Christie’s, sixty-two American paintings and sculptures. At the time, the
New York Times
reported that, “given the Forbes provenance,” prices could greatly exceed estimates and quoted the chairman of Christie’s in America as saying, “We’re hopeful, but who knows? It’s a great name.” In 2002 the Forbeses sold a number of their historical manuscripts. Economic pressures that year also led to job and benefit cuts at the magazine, and in 2003, over the objections of Kip, his siblings sold off the Victorian painting collection he had lovingly assembled over many years. At the sale at Christie’s London, which Kip reportedly stayed away from because it would be “too sad,” a fan illustrated with a drawing by Charles Keene was snatched up by none other than Michael Broadbent, who had been collecting the nineteenth-century artist’s work since the 1950s. In 2004 the Forbeses sold off their most famous possession, a 180-piece collection of jeweled eggs and other
objets
from the House of Fabergé.

The Forbes brand continued to stand for expert collecting and connoisseurship.
Forbes
magazine published an annual collectors’ issue, and for the preceding three years the company had published a collecting newsletter. The articles didn’t shy away from the issue of counterfeit collectibles in general (“Spotting Fakes”), or fake wine in particular (“In Vino Falsitas,” “Château Faux”), but they did omit the Forbeses’ own susceptibility to being duped. The articles failed to note that a painting by the American artist William Aiken Walkers,
Levee at New Orleans,
which Kip Forbes had purchased for more than $50,000, had turned out to be a forgery.

Even now, their Jefferson bottle continued to pop up in the news and on Internet boards, both because twenty years on it still held its world record, and because it remained a compelling example for those who saw it as the ultimate in human folly. Just a month earlier, the London
Times
had recalled the bottle’s ignominious end in a squib headlined “Blunders of the World.”

On this day in September, Bonnie Kirschstein, who presided over the galleries, wore a black pantsuit. She reached into a box of pristine white cotton gloves, removed two, and put them carefully on her hands, pulling them snug. Then she moved toward a closed door. Standing squarely in front of a security keypad, making it invisible to anyone behind her, she punched in a code and turned the handle. The door opened.

Stepping inside, she flicked a switch, and fluorescents clicked on above her. It was a small, windowless room with a linoleum floor. The temperature and humidity were carefully controlled, and the air was cool and dry. To the right, reaching almost to the ceiling, stood four beige metal bookcases, the kind that have giant dials on the end and slide along tracks to make the most efficient use of limited space. Kirschstein went to the second-to-last case, turned the dial, and wheeled the unit toward the door, exposing the last case.

The room was a way station for objects not yet cataloged, in between exhibits, or waiting to be moved to a deep-storage warehouse. On one shelf of the now-exposed case was a scuffed leather milliner’s box containing Abraham Lincoln’s black stovepipe hat. On the shelf above it was a white plastic auction paddle, printed with the word
CHRISTIE’S
and the number 231. Beside it was a
New York Post
article mounted on a plaque, headlined “What a Corker!” and a yellowing piece of paper, mounted on a board, with a faded indigo scrawl. It was a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Joseph de Rayneval, a diplomat. Behind that, toward the wall, was a black Lucite cradle for displaying the bottle. Next to it, on a three-by-three-foot chocolate-colored piece of silver cloth, was the greenish-brown thing designated in the Forbes curatorial system as Object 85054: the Jefferson bottle. It rested on its side, stored as wine should be.

Since its purchase in 1985, the bottle had emerged from storage only occasionally—to be displayed in the Forbes Galleries, or to be photographed by Christie’s as a prop for wine accessories, or for Jefferson-related promotions. When the Jefferson Hotel in Washington, D.C., opened a new restaurant in 1990, the Forbeses lent the bottle to be displayed for two months.

Now Kirschstein gently retrieved it and brought it out of the room. On a round table, she spread out the cloth, and set the bottle upright on it. The front was clean, the back veiled with a clinging gauze of dust and grit. The black liquid within came only up to the shoulder, a dramatic difference from 1985, when the wine came within an inch and a half of the base of the cork. A black wax seal remained, but the cork, which eighteen years before had been bobbing in the liquid, was nowhere to be seen. If it was an eighteenth-century relic, it seemed out of place in the artificially bright, dun-carpeted offices.

B
ILL
S
OKOLIN, WEARING
thong sandals and his wife’s teal bathrobe, was sitting in his house on Long Island, where he had moved in 1996 after giving up the Manhattan storefront. Three years later, he retired. He spent much of his time by the pool out back, and his skin was mottled from the sun. His son David had taken over the business and now ran it almost entirely as an Internet and telephone operation from a climatized, million-bottle-capacity warehouse here in Southampton. In Bill Sokolin’s home, the bookshelves contained volumes about Jefferson. Plaques from Margaux and Lafite were displayed on a credenza. Behind the house, a neighbor’s patch of vines hugged the property line. Long Island wines were thriving. Margaux’s Paul Pontallier was a consultant to a Long Island winery, and Dave Sokolin was a partner in two vineyards, Bedell and Corey Creek.

Bill Sokolin had been trying to get rid of his broken Jefferson bottle for years. Twice a prospective buyer had offered to exchange a house for it, according to Sokolin. One was in New Jersey, one in Southampton, both in the $250,000–$300,000 range, but Sokolin’s lawyer advised him that it wouldn’t be considered a trade-in-kind and he would be clobbered with taxes. In January 1991, Sokolin tried selling the bottle at auction, through Guernsey’s in Manhattan. “We are ready to set the record for a broken empty wine bottle,” auction house president Arlan Ettinger said at the time. The pre-sale estimate was $20,000–$30,000, and the catalog stated that “it is now generally conceded that the bottles found did indeed belong to Thomas Jefferson.” The bottle didn’t sell.

In 1995, with the movie
Jefferson in Paris
about to be released, Sokolin saw another opportunity. In a letter to customers that whimsically proposed to “Re-elect Jefferson in ’96” and announced that he would donate his Jefferson bottle to Monticello, Sokolin touted a $150-a-case, private-label “Thomas Jefferson Chardonnay” made by a Virginia winery, as well as a limited-edition book,
The Jefferson Legacy,
for $495. He said the broken 1787 Margaux bottle was now worth $750,000, “according to an article in the
New York Observer
” (which had gotten its estimate from Sokolin). Monticello wouldn’t take Sokolin’s bottle, but in 1996 the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C., exhibited it for several months. Briefly, according to Sokolin, the William Jefferson Clinton Library expressed interest in obtaining the bottle. In 2002, Sokolin announced that he was looking for the right charity to which to donate the bottle; he had lowered its valuation to $700,000. Early in 2005, Sokolin gave the American Jewish World Service the right to offer the bottle on eBay “to help raise money for tsunami relief and reconstruction.” The bottle didn’t sell. Finally, in the summer of 2005, Sokolin succeeded in giving the bottle to Love Our Children, a Manhattan charity. When its director came to pick the bottle up, Sokolin got a bit shaky, but now he was glad it was gone.

T
HE THIRD
J
EFFERSON
bottle known to be in the New York area lay in a triangular, glassed-in room in the reception area of
Wine Spectator
’s midtown offices. Marvin Shanken displayed his trophy alongside such other legendary wines as a 1945 Romanée-Conti, an 1847 Yquem, and an 1870 Lafite in magnum.

The last two decades had shown Shanken to have chosen a good business. Between 2002 and 2005, Riedel Crystal had tripled its business in the United States, selling 8 million stems annually. In July the annual Gallup Consumption Habits poll reported that, for the first time, wine had eclipsed beer as Americans’ favorite alcoholic drink. (Thirty-nine percent of respondents said they’d prefer a glass of wine, compared with 36 percent for a glass of beer.) And the wine they were drinking had changed; for the first time in memory, red outsold white in America’s supermarkets. It was a vindicating moment for Shanken, who in purchasing his magazine a quarter-century earlier had gambled on an American wine boom.

Wine Spectator
’s paid circulation had risen every year, and stood now at 380,000 copies a month, for an annual price of fifty dollars. It had subscribers in two hundred countries. In 1992, just when the American tobacco industry was entering its death spiral, Shanken had founded
Cigar Aficionado.
It had been a surprising success. Famous people who didn’t talk to the press lost their shyness when it came to cigars; General Tommy Franks, Michael Jordan, and Francis Ford Coppola were among those who graced the cover. The magazine now had a circulation of 250,000. Shanken also published several other trade publications, as well as staging big events like the Wine Experience and a cigar equivalent, the Big Smoke, plus “lifestyle seminars” on connoisseurship of everything from cheese to chocolate. When people referred to Shanken Communications as “a publishing business,” Shanken would correct them: he was in the education business.
Cigar Aficionado
had taught people how to select, cut, light, smoke, evaluate,
enjoy
a cigar.
Wine Spectator
had introduced its readers to new wines and new winemakers and new regions.

Enabled by the wealth that accompanied his success, Shanken had done a lot of crazy things since his out-of-control bidding against Kip Forbes. The craziest, perhaps, was bidding on a walnut humidor once given to JFK by the comedian Milton Berle, at the 1996 dispersal of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s estate. At the well-publicized New York auction, lines wrapped around the block. The humidor was just one of hundreds of lots. Shanken thought it might go for up to $30,000, but he told his wife he really wanted it. He was more prosperous now, and this time it was he who, with Yablonian self-assurance, would be “going to pick up the humidor.”

Shanken sat out the first few bidding rounds, watching in some astonishment as the number quickly shot up in $10,000 increments to $200,000. Five people were competing for it. At $250,000, Shanken made his first bid. Soon the bidding was at $400,000, and Shanken and a telephone bidder were the only two remaining bidders, still going up in $10,000 increments. When the other man bid $440,000, Shanken decided to end this once and for all. He held up five fingers. “Four hundred fifty thousand?” the auctioneer asked. Shanken shook his head and spread the five fingers wider. “You mean $500,000?” the auctioneer asked. Shanken nodded. “And this piece of shit goes to five ten,” Shanken recalled later of the rival bidder. Shanken bid $520,000, but was ready, or so he would claim, to drop out if the other man outbid him again. The man, a commodities broker in Chicago, did not. Shanken won.

By the time the buyer’s commission and sales tax were added, the total amount he paid for the humidor was $622,000. Shanken briefly considered having it sent to a friend or relative in New Jersey to skirt the sales tax, but thought better of it. And his accountant wouldn’t let him take it as a business expense, because it wasn’t a depreciable asset. He framed the bill and hung it in his office. His wife had been with him but feeling under the weather; he later got mad at her for not having stopped him, but at least now he could afford it. The humidor took its place in a display cabinet in a conference room at his offices, where his other humidors included one given to Winston Churchill in 1941 by the Cuban government, and another signed by Fidel Castro
“Para Marvin.”