The Billionaire's Vinegar (4 page)

Broadbent did not invent the secondary market for old wine, but he did reinvent it. Wine had been sold starting with Christie’s first auction in 1766, and first growths had been a staple of its auctions from 1787 on. Over the centuries, Christie’s had auctioned off the cellars of kings, prime ministers, and other grandees, among them the Duke of York, Edward VII, and Benjamin Disraeli (whose homeopath, in treating the prime minister’s asthma and gout, prescribed Lafite). But Christie’s was bombed to the ground in the Second World War. After it was rebuilt, the sale of art, antiques, and jewelry resumed, but not wine. The market had been dormant for a quarter of a century when Broadbent arrived.

Rosebery was a harbinger. That first season, Broadbent’s department held thirty-two sales, which fetched around $600,000. By 1978 the numbers would be up to forty-four sales and a turnover of nearly $5 million. Broadbent was like the man who arrived at a gold rush before it was a rush. He was first to the dig site, and over the next fifteen years he engaged in a frenzy of tomb-raiding. His most spectacular discoveries were nearly all in England and Scotland. Beneath the Earl of Strathmore’s Glamis Castle, in a damp cellar with a freakishly constant temperature of 49 degrees Fahrenheit, he found forty-two magnums of 1870 Château Lafite.

Where Christie’s had been a full-service auction house from its founding, Sotheby’s, which was twenty-two years older, had begun as a bookseller, and had only diversified in the early 1900s. Before Christie’s Rosebery sale, Sotheby’s had handled an art-and-furniture sale for the Rosebery clan, and the poaching of this client awoke Christie’s rival to the fact that, though the sums of money involved were relatively small, a wine department gave an auction house an edge in attracting new business and fully servicing existing clients. The Glamis sale, in 1970, stirred Sotheby’s to action. Glamis Castle was owned by the Bowes-Lyon family, one of whom sat on Sotheby’s board. That year, Sotheby’s launched its own wine department.

Michael Broadbent’s life was awash in wine, but it wasn’t all raised-pinky soirées. Auctioneering can be at once among the most patrician occupations and among the least glamorous. Even eminent gavel-bangers may double as glorified stockboys, cataloging and packing up the contents of moldy, spider-ridden basements and attics. And Broadbent’s wife, Daphne, and their two children were often by his side. Easter holidays meant trips to the wine country. Weekends might be spent on hands and knees in damp, grubby, medieval cellars in France, Hungary, and elsewhere, dodging white salamanders that had never seen the sun, while assembling cardboard boxes and filling them with bottles as soon as Broadbent had cataloged them.

He was a man of habits, most of which involved drinking or work related to it. Every Sunday morning Broadbent could be found in bed, writing his monthly column for
Decanter,
an English wine magazine. Mealtime conversation was wine talk. Starting at age seven, the children were served wine with dinner (only on special occasions were they allowed the option of drinking orange juice or Coke instead). Emma found it a bore, and, after giving the wine business a short try, became a lawyer and later a judge. Bartholomew cottoned to it more; at fifteen, at Château Latour, he drank an 1865 that was a revelation. Michael Broadbent was a staunch observer of that archaic British midmorning pick-me-up known as elevenses; every day he could be found, before noon, enjoying a glass of dry Madeira, German white wine, or Champagne. At 2:45 p.m., he would take a twenty-minute nap. Toward evening he would have a glass of Champagne or Tio Pepe sherry, several glasses of claret, and perhaps a vintage Port. If the regimen sounded like that of a lush, the truth was that Broadbent practiced moderation. He drank often, but he sipped, and he was an evangelist of wine’s preservative properties. His frenetic cycling didn’t hurt, either.

As a result of his meticulous record-keeping, he could tell you that he had tasted more than 40,000 wines as of the mid-1980s. That was more wines than most people had ever consumed, and more old wines than anyone alive. He could tell you the best wine he ever drank (an 1870 Lafite in magnum), the wine he would want if he were marooned on a desert island (a Terrantez 1862 Madeira by HM Borges), the oldest wine he’d ever drunk (a 1653 German hock), and his favorite producer (Lafite). It wasn’t just Lafite’s wines that put Broadbent in mind of the fairer sex; he felt that the vineyard site itself had “almost an erotic shape.”

First-growth claret, from vineyards on Bordeaux’s left bank, was at the center of Broadbent’s auctions, but since the 1855 Classification the stodgy Bordeaux aristocracy had grudgingly acknowledged the parity, in reputation and price if not official status, of a handful of other wines. Cheval Blanc, made in the medieval town of St. Emilion, across the Dordogne River from Bordeaux, and unusual for being produced mainly from the cabernet franc grape, ascended to the first tier via two legendary vintages, 1921 and 1947. Also on the right bank, Pétrus, a merlot-based wine from Pomerol traditionally favored by the Belgians, won the attention of the powerful English market with its 1947 vintage. And Mouton-Rothschild gained actual premier status in 1973 when, by dint of assiduous lobbying, Baron Philippe de Rothschild persuaded the French government to take the unprecedented step of elevating the estate from second to first growth.

As Broadbent’s auctions gained in popularity, the price of old wines bounded upward. In the first five years of the new auctions, Latour 1949 and Mouton-Rothschild 1945 more than quadrupled in price. Lesser wines jumped 200 and 300 percent. Rising values led more people to wonder whether granddad’s old bottles, which had been gathering dust in the cellar for years, might be worth something, and perhaps this Christie’s chap might like to come and take a look. It
was
usually the Christie’s chap. Sotheby’s wine department, having launched four years after Christie’s, had been playing catch-up ever since.

Broadbent was a natural at auction-house hyperbole, and seemed to wring a new record out of every sale. There was always a particular wine or vintage or combination of wines and vintages that, defined in just the right way, had achieved a never-before-seen price or volume record. There was, for instance, the Christie’s sale featuring one hundred dozen bottles of the 1967 vintage of Yquem, “certainly the largest quantity of any one vintage of any fine mature white wine ever to appear at auction.” It was all in how narrowly you sliced the numbers, and Broadbent was a master with the knife. The only thing that attracted more press coverage than price records was especially old and rare wines, and Broadbent excelled at producing these, too.

He had made London into the center of the international auction market for fine wine, and his dominance was undisputed. As befitted a top auctioneer, he effortlessly melded the hustle of a barrow boy and the self-deprecating charm of a courtier. He delighted in rummaging through the Christie’s archives and reading aloud from leather-bound catalogs of its earliest auctions, like the sale on March 18, 1771, which featured “upwards of 100 loads of Good Hay, 6 stacks of Beans…a quantity of Dung…Four Heffers, two cows, a Ram, Swan, Poultry,” and, in the wine department, “a Cask of Elderwine” and “a Firkin with some old Verjuice.” In his own writing, he rendered the dross of wine description into something wicked, marshaling one randy image after another to describe the fermented grape juice he was selling: “a sexy
demi-mondaine
of uncertain age but opulent charm”…“a light, easy, charming middle-aged lady with her slip showing”…and, of course, those “schoolgirls’ uniforms.” Normally his wife typed up his tasting notes, but when he had written an especially salacious one, he would give the job to his secretary instead.

Broadbent was intensely competitive, and he could be defensive and catty on the topic of the rival auction house. The old saw held that Christie’s was made up of gentlemen trying to be auctioneers, and Sotheby’s of auctioneers trying to be gentlemen, yet there was nothing particularly genteel about Broadbent’s approach to competition. “Despite the strenuous efforts of our competitors,” Broadbent crowed to Christie’s clients in 1979, “we continue to dominate the international fine wine market.” Another time, he denounced Sotheby’s “extravagant claims and misleading statements” as “pure propaganda.”

The largely one-sided feud became strident in 1984, when Sotheby’s wine department introduced a 10-percent buyer’s commission. Broadbent was instantly scornful. “It is not a very healthy step,” he told
Decanter
. “We have always strenuously opposed any buyer’s premium on wine.” His counterpart at Sotheby’s, Patrick Grubb, retorted that Sotheby’s catalogs were “of infinitely better quality than those of our rivals!” Broadbent came back with, “Maybe his buyers are happy for part of their extra 10 percent to be devoted to the glamorization of what is essentially a piece of ephemera? The Bible has a phrase for this: ‘a whited sepulchre’!” Two years later, Broadbent had to eat crow as Christie’s followed Sotheby’s lead, adopting a buyer’s premium and revamping its catalogs. Grubb then published a mocking poem, which included the lines “Sepulchral hollow laughter is heard in King Street now / Despite all protestations they’ve killed a sacred cow.”

A few years after that, Broadbent said of Sotheby’s wine department, “The lack of enthusiasm shows.” Sotheby’s wine department, for its part, claimed that while Christie’s did a volume business, Sotheby’s was the quality auctioneer. Sotheby’s competed nearly as avidly in the record-chasing arena, touting, during one season in the early 1980s, its sale of “the largest quantity [of cases of Port] ever sold in any season of wine auctions this century.”

B
ROADBENT WAS GETTING
wine from his fellow countrymen, but he was selling it to Americans. By the mid-seventies, the spike in prices for first growths seen between 1966 and 1971 had become more dramatic, and the really old bottles had been priced out of reach of many connoisseurs. A magnum of 1864 Lafite that had sold for $225 at the Rosebery sale in 1967 went for $10,000 in 1981. American demand was the chief reason. The strength of the auction market had come to depend on the strength of the dollar.

American colonists had preferred fortified wines from Spain and Portugal, such as Madeira and Port, and it was Thomas Jefferson who introduced a number of his peers to the less alcoholic pleasures of table wine. Before leaving France in 1789, Jefferson shipped Sauternes, Burgundy, and still Champagne to New York for the cellars of newly elected President George Washington. As secretary of state, Jefferson placed another large order for Washington and himself. He subsequently advised three other presidents—Adams, Madison, and Monroe—on what wines to serve at state dinners. When Monroe was elected, Jefferson’s congratulatory letter spent three sentences on the election and the remainder on what wines the White House cellar should stock.

Jefferson was steadfast in promoting his favorite beverage. He lobbied for lower tariffs on wine not only for selfish reasons, but ostensibly because he believed in its healthful and even moderating qualities. “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap,” he wrote once, alluding to the rampant abuse of whiskey he saw around him, “and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage.” He made little headway in this campaign with Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who regarded Jefferson as a fop and wine as a luxury.

Still bent on cultivating wine grapes, Jefferson tried growing them at Monticello after he returned from Europe. Again he didn’t succeed, but he corresponded with John Adlum, father of American viticulture, and remained optimistic that America could rival France as a winemaking country. “We could, in the United States,” Jefferson wrote, “make as great a variety of wines as are made in Europe, not exactly of the same kinds, but doubtless as good.”

Jefferson claimed, patriotically if not altogether convincingly, that he had tasted wine made in Maryland that rivaled the very best Burgundy. He felt North Carolina had come the furthest in developing as a wine producer, and that its Scuppernong grape had yielded America’s first “exquisite wine, produced in quantity.”

He was also a proselytizer at the table, and seems to have flirted with the wine enthusiast’s avocational hazard of overestimating others’ interest in the topic. “There was, as usual, the dissertation upon wines, not very edifying,” John Quincy Adams yawned to his diary after one White House dinner hosted by Jefferson. Through his entertaining at Monticello, Jefferson seemed to want to convert Americans, one palate at a time, to wine (as well as to a more broadly defined good life). He drank three to four and a half glasses of wine a day, and he designed a pair of dumbwaiters, flanking the fireplace, that brought bottles directly up from the wine cellar to the dining room. His sizable library included volumes treating of the most up-to-date science on winemaking. Because of trade disruptions during the War of 1812, he suffered from the depletion of his cellar, writing that “wine from long habit has become an indispensable for my health, which is now suffering by its disuse.”

After Jefferson, another prominent American champion of wine would not appear for a long time. By the turn of the twentieth century, Gilded Age families like the Du Ponts and the Morgans owned substantial quantities of wine, and some of the new apartment buildings then going up in Manhattan were constructed with private cellars in the basement for each tenant. But in general, Americans didn’t drink wine. The temperance movement, together with distractions like Prohibition, didn’t help.

In the late 1930s and the 1940s, despite Repeal, Americans were slow to rediscover a taste for wine. Postwar prosperity, and cheap air fares to Europe, began to change this, pushing American consumption of wine to twice what it had been before the war. It was the 1959 vintage in Bordeaux, however, that tipped the balance of power in the wine-buying market from England to America. Dubbed the “vintage of the century” by the French, the 1959s received widespread press coverage—including in
Time, Newsweek,
and an influential article by Art Buchwald—and American interest. By the time Broadbent founded the Christie’s wine department in 1966, the choosiest American collectors had pent-up demand, which they unleashed both in Christie’s sale rooms in London and at an annual auction Broadbent soon launched in the United States, under the aegis of the Heublein drinks conglomerate.