The Billionaire's Vinegar (23 page)

T
HE BEST OPPORTUNITY
since the 1985 Forbes exhibition for the general public to see a Jefferson bottle came in September 2005, when the Boston Museum of Fine Arts announced that it would put on an exhibit featuring the eclectic collections of Bill Koch, the six-foot-four fossil-fuel heir who had bought four of the Jefferson bottles in the late 1980s.

Since that time, Koch had patched things up with his brothers, or at least one of them, and had come into his own with a long-shot victory in the America’s Cup in 1992. He owned a privately held energy company called Oxbow, which was a major trader of petroleum coke as well as being the operator of a low-sulfur coal mine in Colorado. He divided his time mainly between homes on Cape Cod and in Palm Beach.

Koch was as passionate as ever about wine. Despite having pruned his cellar by 3,400 bottles through a 1999 sale at Christie’s New York, Koch now owned about 35,000 bottles. It was one of the largest collections in the world. The bottles had cost him $12 million, a lot in wine terms, but a fraction of the $30 million he had paid for the Modigliani above his fireplace, which was just one of many expensive works of art he owned. He bought both broadly (more than 1,400 different wines) and deeply: 60 percent of his wine was Bordeaux, and 35 percent Burgundy. He bought favored wines in quantity, including eight cases and thirty magnums of Latour 1961, and ten cases of 1945 Mouton, and he served $500-a-bottle 1996 Latour at his third wedding. In the glossy coffee-table book published to accompany the Boston MFA show, Koch explained “why I love great wine so much. Not only does it taste beautiful and wonderful and makes you feel great when you’re drinking it—you can also really taste the love the vintner had in making the wine, which is an art form.”

Koch could sometimes seem unserious about the collection. He bought just about any new book on wine, while admitting that he hadn’t read many of them. He liked to take out his bottles and show them off, and once, after producing his Jefferson bottles for a visitor’s benefit, he clinked one against another, chipping off part of the wax seal. “Oh shit!” he said. “Dammit. Oh,
c’est la vie.
They can fix it.” In the summer of 2000, he and his then-wife saw a couples therapist to discuss his drinking. The
New York Post
reported that in Palm Beach Koch had openly talked about checking into rehab. He had since remarried.

But his interest in wine went beyond the usual rich man’s accumulation. When buying at auction, Koch often placed the phone bids himself. In 1991, when he was gunning for the America’s Cup, he relocated his wine collection with him to San Diego during trials. Not long after buying the first of his Jefferson bottles from the Chicago Wine Company, Koch had invested $1 million in the firm. He had a bathroom in his house decorated with corks, labels, case ends, and bottle bases from much of the wine he had drunk. And his enthusiasm for wine colored other of his collections: He owned a Greek drinking cup from 470 BC, as well as a marble head of Dionysus.

He also attended wine events, such as the exclusive 2000 Christie’s tasting in New York, a Latour vertical, where he had his one encounter with Rodenstock. He recalled the encounter as having been limited to his saying hello and nodding. (He had been seated next to Matt Dillon, the actor, but then Dillon moved away. Koch remembered this self-deprecatingly, as if Dillon had found him wanting in some way.)

Koch had obtained a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To win the America’s Cup, he had spent $68 million and hired a team of MIT scientists to build a better boat—with lighter sails, a sleeker hull, and a more hydrodynamic keel. He brought the same rationalistic, free-spending approach to wine. In 1996 he installed a $10,000 state-of-the-art computer system in his 1,750-square-foot primary cellar in Cape Cod. He could walk into his cellar, choose a wine using the touch screen, and get a printout of a map showing exactly where in the cellar to find a particular bottle. A bar code was affixed to every bottle, and as Koch exited the cellar with a bottle in hand, he could swipe it past a scanner, which would automatically update his digitized inventory. Similarly, when decanting older wines, Koch eschewed the traditional candle in favor of using laboratory equipment—including a vacuum pump and a chemical filter. Many connoisseurs consider such filtering anathema, on the theory that it can strip wine of essential qualities, but Koch didn’t buy that argument.

By 2005, 20,000 of his bottles had moved with Koch to Palm Beach, where he had purchased a 36,000-square-foot oceanfront mansion. The new 1,300-square-foot cellar, designed by an Austrian architect and completed in 2001, seemed styled after a European castle—full of salvaged-brick vaults, iron grillwork, Roman mosaics, and candelabra. Sixteen years after Koch had first bought them, the seven eighteenth-century, Rodenstock-sourced bottles remained the centerpiece of his wine collection, and his new Palm Beach cellar included a mirror-backed cage to showcase them.

Though in person he could come off as folksy, awkward, and even shy, few wine collectors of Koch’s magnitude were as publicly proud of their holdings. The show “Things I Love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch,” which opened in Boston on August 31, 2005, promised to include at least one of the four Jefferson bottles. The coffee-table book produced to accompany the show, its covers lined with a photo collage of trophy-wine labels from Koch’s collection, contained images not only of that quartet—Lafite and Mouton, in both 1784 and 1787 vintages—but also of his three other eighteenth-century vintages of Lafite (1737 and 1771) and Latour (1791).

A visitor wandering through the exhibit, expecting to see the bottles, came first upon Koch’s collection of miniature models of every boat that had won or lost the America’s Cup. There were Sitting Bull’s bead belt and breastpiece, Custer’s hunting rifle, and the revolver that killed Jesse James. There were Impressionist paintings, sculptures by Rodin and Botero, and ancient coins. As Koch put it, “My brother Charles collects money. David used to collect girls, but not anymore. Fred collects castles. And I collect everything.”

The wine, or rather the wine bottles, were displayed in the low-lit, high-ceilinged Torf Gallery. There were ten of them, all empty, ranging from an 1865 Latour to a 1921 Pétrus in a big bottle to a Nebuchadnezzar inscribed “America’s Foundation/America’s Cup 1992.” A caption, painted in white on the gray wall in the glass case, announced: “With more than thirty thousand bottles, Bill Koch’s wine collection includes Château Pétrus, Château Latour, and Château Mouton, just to name a few. He is particularly proud of bottles of Mouton and Lafite thought to have been purchased in France by Thomas Jefferson. Some of Koch’s life accomplishments, such as the victory of America
³
in 1992, have been commemorated by specifically designed bottles.”

Strangely, the Jefferson bottles were nowhere to be seen.

C
HAPTER
18

G
HOST
P
ARTICLES

P
ROUD AS
B
ILL
K
OCH WAS OF HIS
J
EFFERSON
bottles, he had grown increasingly concerned about their provenance. During the same period when Koch was assembling the verticals that anchored his wine cellar, he had had a fateful experience involving some rare coins. It began in 1984, when, flush with his buyout money, he acquired for $3.2 million what were believed to be the rarest coins ever found: 1,700 ancient Greek pieces, including thirteen silver decadrachms, in a clay pot unearthed by three prospectors in a field in southern Turkey. Koch thought he could make an easy profit by selling some of the coins, while still retaining the greatest hoard in the world.

Even before Koch bought the coins, there were clues that the Turkish government might be looking for them. (Turkish authorities had been tipped off to the find after one of the peasant treasure finders “bought a Mercedes or did something similarly intelligent,” according to a warning letter sent by a Swiss coin dealer to the Boston MFA classical-art curator who was authenticating the coins for Koch.) In a move he would later regret, Koch satisfied himself with warranties from the Turkish and German dealers that the coins were unencumbered. After a decade-long legal fight with the Turkish government, Koch settled, returning the coins to Turkey in exchange for a plaque to be displayed with them, thanking him.

Now sixty-five, Koch wanted to ensure that there would be no repeat of his decadrachm experience. The MFA had asked him to supply provenances for every object in the show, but with only weeks to go before it opened, the prospects for guaranteeing the authenticity of the Jefferson bottles were dim. In March, Brad Goldstein, his spokesman, had had an initial phone conversation with Susan Stein, the curator at Monticello, that got his antennae up. When Goldstein told Koch of Monticello’s doubts, Koch “was not a happy camper.”

Koch could have been forgiven, at this point, for choosing to leave well enough alone. It must have been tempting simply not to know, to continue to believe he possessed a treasure that might have belonged to Thomas Jefferson. He risked embarrassment if it were revealed that the bottles he had paid so much for and taken such pride in were not what they seemed. He must have known that this was strictly a rich man’s problem, though, as likely to arouse schadenfreude as sympathy.

He also was painfully aware that he made a soft, fat target for the press. When he had subpoenaed his eighty-two-year-old mother, all the jackals could focus on was the stroke she’d had a few months earlier, totally disregarding that she sided with his brothers in the fraternal feud. Yes, he’d wanted to compel her testimony, but after all, he hadn’t known about the stroke at the time; once he found out about it, he abandoned his effort. When he had expelled his mistress from a $2.5-million condo he owned at the Boston Four Seasons, the media harped on how she was a single mother and the eviction had taken place on Christmas Eve so that he could throw a party in the 3,700-square-foot spread, never mind that he could have evicted her thirty days earlier. When he was arrested for domestic violence after his second wife accused him of punching her in the stomach and “[threatening] to beat his whole family to death with his belt,” the hacks were all over it, neglecting to point out that witnesses to the altercation had disputed his wife’s account and that she later recanted it. (The charges were ultimately dismissed.) Although a court issued a restraining order against Koch, his Palm Beach estate was spacious enough that he was able to stay in a beach house on the property and still be in compliance.

Koch’s darker side was mitigated by a disarming willingness to introspect in public—about his years in psychoanalysis, say (“For a long time I didn’t think I was worth shit”), or his short fuse (“I could be a really nasty prick…. [In later years] I would go up to my secretary [and say], ‘You dumb shit, why’d you make that mistake?’ I was that kind of guy”). But the candor didn’t always help his case. A 1994
Vanity Fair
profile, written with Koch’s masochistic cooperation, had been a mutilation without anesthetic, likening his paranoia to Richard Nixon’s and his dissembling to Bill Clinton’s and saying Koch is “a man whose closet is free of skeletons in large part because they all seem to be turning somersaults in his living room.”

Worst of all was the Boston press, which delighted in quoting from naughty love letters between Koch and his “X-rated Protestant princess,” as the evicted mistress styled herself. (“My body parts are like moist orchids in bloom,” she wrote in one fax. Koch, somewhat less steamily, described his ardor as “beyond calculation by the largest computers.”) Boston reporters almost uniformly deemed the MFA show crass and egotistical.
Boston Globe
columnist Alex Beam was especially caustic, gratuitously noting that Koch “rhymes with joke” and disinterring the moldy beat-his-family-to-death-with-a-belt threat allegation. With Koch talking about a lawsuit, the
Globe
subsequently ran a fairly groveling editor’s note acknowledging the conflicting evidence. But who reads editor’s notes? Koch felt he could not get a fair shake.

On the other hand, Koch couldn’t stomach feeling taken advantage of. In 1985, after deciding that his brothers had cheated him in their settlement, Koch had gone back to court. What followed, Bill Koch said later, “would make
Dallas
and
Dynasty
look like a playpen.” There were private detectives and wiretaps and room bugs and body mikes and stolen garbage bags and scurrilous whispering campaigns. There was even a mysterious Israeli “security consultant” whom Koch’s own employees later accused of taping their calls on Koch’s behest (a charge Koch denies). Many more lawsuits followed.
Fortune
called it “perhaps the nastiest family feud in American business history.”

The same mix of traits that had mired Koch in ruinous litigation and led him to victory in the America’s Cup—contrarian determination, a belief in technology and professional investigators, scads of money, a profound need to win, and an impish glee at sticking it to the man (or, it sometimes seemed, the straw man)—would prove equally useful when it came to the Jefferson bottles. In the end, Koch decided to get to the bottom of the matter, and the person he charged with investigating it was a former FBI agent named Jim Elroy.

Elroy had crossed paths with Koch in the 1980s, when Koch, in the midst of the eye-gouging brawl with brothers Charles and David, blew the whistle on their alleged theft of oil from Indian reservations. Elroy served as an investigator for the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, which looked into the accusations and found them to have merit, and Koch was impressed by his work. Elroy, who went by the e-mail sobriquet SEAWOLF410, also happened to share Koch’s interest in sailing.

Now one of Elroy’s men went to Charlottesville, Virginia, and spent several days at Monticello doing his own research into the bottles’ Jefferson connection. Among the people he met was Cinder Goodwin Stanton, who was now the Shannon Senior Research Historian. Twenty years before, she had found the entire matter unpleasant. Her attitude had since mellowed into bemusement. She had no new theories about the bottles, and hadn’t read her own report on them in two decades. When she reexamined it now, she was embarrassed to see that she had written that Hardy Rodenstock was a man “of unquestioned knowledge and integrity.” Her Jefferson research had since led her in other arcane directions; just now she was working on an article about Jefferson’s moldboard plow. As Koch’s investigator retraced the steps taken by Stanton in 1985, he found the same gaps and omissions in the Jeffersonian record as she had. Which is to say almost none. “Jefferson was
anal,
” Elroy recalled.

As Bill Koch’s team expanded their inquiry, they noticed that a lot of people were nervous. Monticello refused to give Goldstein a copy of Stanton’s 1985 report. When a deputy of Elroy’s contacted Farr Vintners, he was referred to the firm’s solicitors. After Elroy spoke with Count Alexandre de Lur Saluces and learned about the Frericks controversy, he began to wonder whether the Jefferson bottles were even real. Lur Saluces told Elroy that, as far as he knew, the document Rodenstock claimed was a page from Yquem’s ledger—showing an order by Jefferson of the 1787 vintage—hadn’t come from Yquem’s archives.

Elroy was drifting straight toward the same morass of subjectivity that had bedeviled all previous challenges to the bottles—the arguments about bottle variation, the blind street of Rodenstock’s reticence, the how-would-you-know-what-it’s-supposed-to-taste-like posture, Monticello’s skepticism versus the impossibility of proving a negative, the inadequacy of existing radio-dating methods, the sensory validations by such luminaries as Broadbent and Jancis Robinson, not to mention the disincentive for Koch to sacrifice a bottle that had cost tens of thousands of dollars for a test that might not be definitive. The odds were against his coming to any more certain a conclusion than had the few people before him who had questioned their bottles.

Then, cruising the Web, Elroy discovered some papers written by a French scientist who had recently invented an unusual device he called a germanium detector.

T
HOUGH HE LIVED
outside of Bordeaux, Philippe Hubert was an unlikely person to have become the world’s leading expert on anything having to do with wine. He had spent his career first as an experimental nuclear physicist, and more recently as a specialist in the ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos. Unlike Bipin Desai, a theoretical physicist whose main activity outside of work was rare vintages, Hubert was a casual mealtime drinker. It was happenstance that led him to wine.

In the late 1970s, when the 8-mile Fréjus road tunnel was being constructed on the French-Italian border, a group of scientists had recognized a rare opportunity. Particle physicists are always on the lookout for bigger and better isolation chambers. So tiny and quiet and subtle are the particles and reactions they are measuring that it is impossible to detect them unless the world’s light and noise and tumult are shut out. With the tunnel being built, the scientists seized the chance to drill through the side of it into the alpine massif and hollow out the deepest underground lab in Europe, more than a mile beneath the summit. The location of the Subterranean Laboratory at Modane, accessible only from the Fréjus tunnel, made for some hairy circumstances, including the need to play Frogger when parking inside the tunnel and crossing the road to the lab entrance without being run over.

The other part of lowering “the background,” as physicists call it, is using lab equipment fabricated from materials with the lowest possible radioactivity. Around 1990, Philippe Hubert and some fellow scientists set about isolating the best materials; to do so, he in turn needed an exquisitely sensitive detector to identify
them.
This was how he came up with the germanium detector.

It consisted of a supercooled metallic crystal sheathed in “archaeological lead” salvaged from a Roman ship sunk two thousand years earlier off the coast of Brittany. The hypersensitive crystal was capable of detecting the subtlest radioactive signals, while the inert lead blocked out other particles that might be distracting. By measuring the pulses generated in the crystal when it was put near radioactive material, it was possible to detect both the amount and kind of radioactivity.

In the late 1990s, Hubert began to wonder if there might not be other uses for his detector. He shared a more modest, less sensitive detector, on the campus of the University of Bordeaux, with the French agency charged with
“répression des fraudes.”
Bernard Medina, an analytical chemist who ran the regional lab for the agency, spent his time testing food products—mainly wine—to assure both their authenticity and, post-Chernobyl, their lack of contamination. Medina and his colleagues studied chocolate, coffee, prunes, salt. They analyzed regional
cepes,
and sniffed out an imposter batch from abroad. Once, Medina helped solve a murder case by establishing that a vinegar stain on a shirt came from a particular bottle.