The Billionaire's Vinegar

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 Lot 337

  2 Incognito

  3 Tomb Raider

  4 Monsieur Yquem

  5 Provenance

  6 “We Did What You Told Us”

  7 Imaginary Value

  8 The Sweetness of Death

  9 Salad Dressing

  10 A Pleasant Stain, but Not a Great One

  11 The Diviner of Wines

  12 A Built-in Preference for the Obvious

  13 Radioactive

  14 Letters from Hubsi

  15 “Awash in Fakes”

  16 The Last Vertical

  17 Koch Bottles

  18 Ghost Particles

  19 Tailing Meinhard

  20 The Finish

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To my parents,

  and in memory of Claire Wickham Woodroffe

  CHAPTER 1

  LOT 337

  A HUSH HAD COME OVER THE WEST ROOM. PHOTOGRAPHERS’ flashes strobed the standing-room-only crowd silently, and the lone sound was the crisp voice of the auctioneer. To the world, Michael Broadbent projected a central-casting British cool, but under the bespoke suit, he was practicing a kind of mind control that calmed him in these situations. The trick was to focus narrowly, almost autistically, on numbers: lot number, number of bidders, paddle numbers, bid steps.

  Even after all these years, he still found it bracingly creative to conjure excitement out of a heap of dirty old bottles. No matter how many of them the fifty-eight-year-old Broadbent might see, he retained his boyish sense of marvel at the longevity of wine. Inert antiques were all very well, but there was magic in old wine—a mysterious and wonderful alchemy in something that could live and change for two hundred years and still be drinkable.

  Auctioneer was Broadbent’s most public role, but it was only one of his distinctions in the wine world. In London he cut a familiar figure, pedaling to work each day on his Dutch ladies’ bicycle with basket, legs gunning furiously, a trilby hat perched on his head. Often he was elsewhere, and he kept up a brutal schedule. As founding director of the Christie’s wine department, he had spent the last two decades crisscrossing the planet, cataloging the dank and dusty contents of rich men’s cellars, tasting tens of thousands of fine wines, and jotting his impressions in slender red hardcover notebooks. Those unassuming scribblings amounted to the most comprehensive diary of wine ever recorded. That diary now consisted of sixty of the Ideal notebooks, and he had collected them in a published tome that was the standard reference on old wines. Under Broadbent’s direction, Christie’s had largely invented and come to dominate the global market in old and rare wines. While Christie’s as a whole was smaller than its great rival, Sotheby’s, its wine department was more than twice as big, bringing in £7.3 million the previous season.

  Broadbent’s peers in the trade acknowledged that his palate was the most experienced in the world. His pocket textbook on wine tasting, the definitive work of its kind, was in its eleventh edition, having sold more than 160,000 copies, and had been translated into eight languages. Any collector hosting an event that aspired to any seriousness made sure to invite Broadbent and his famously sensitive nose. When he arrived at a wine gathering, if so much as a trace of woodsmoke or the merest whiff of cigarette ash besmirched the air, Broadbent would scrunch up his nose, and everything would come to a halt while windows and doors were flung open.

  A lean six feet tall, Broadbent had a fringy sweep of whitening hair, and his smile, distinctly hail-fellow-well-met, was tempered by the cocked eyebrow of a worldly man. He looked more aristocratic than many of the dukes and princes alongside whom he sat on Christie’s board of directors.

  When Broadbent tasted, he would lay his wristwatch next to his little red notebook, so that he could time the wine’s changes in the glass. During lulls, if a piano was on hand, he might charm guests with some Brahms, or he might go off by himself to sketch the local scenery.

  He was happy to opine, at these tastings, on the wines under consideration. He had a knack for putting wine into memorable words. Sometimes he borrowed from literature, describing one wine as “black as Egypt’s night.” More often, he minted his own rakish descriptions, seeing a woman in every wine. A ’79 Pétrus reminded him of Sophia Loren: “You can admire them, but you don’t want to go to bed with them.” A double magnum of ’47 Cantenac-Brown evoked chocolate and “schoolgirls’ uniforms.”

  THE TASTE OF the wine he was selling right now in London, just past 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, December 5, 1985, was impossible to know. December 5 had special meaning for Broadbent; it was the same date that James Christie, in 1766, had held the auction house’s very first sale. Moments earlier, Broadbent had stepped up to the rostrum in a three-piece suit with a pocket square, and peered out at the room through his eyeglasses.

  Lot 337 was the first item of the afternoon session and had been carefully removed from its green felt berth in a glass case nearby. Lucy Godsal, a secretary in Broadbent’s office, held the bottle aloft for the room to see. She looked very Christie’s—blond, headband, pearl necklace—and Broadbent liked her; she was smart, hardworking, and pretty.

  Broadbent had never sold anything quite like this before. A Château Lafite from 1787, it was the oldest authenticated vintage red wine ever to come up for auction at Christie’s. And that was the least of its merits. The bottle was engraved with the initials “Th.J.” As Broadbent had described it in the auction catalog, “Th.J. are the initials of Thomas Jefferson.” Almost miraculously, the bottle was full of wine and appeared to have survived two centuries intact. The container itself was beautiful and distinctive. “This is one time,” Broadbent quipped to the crowd, “when the buyer will get something back on the bottle.”

  The admittedly fragmentary tale of how the bottle had been found only added to its mystique. According to Hardy Rodenstock, the German collector who had consigned the bottle to Christie’s, in the spring of 1985 workers tearing down a house in Paris had broken through a false wall in the basement and happened upon a hidden cache of extremely old wines. The Lafite, inscribed with the initials of the Founding Father, who had lived in Paris from 1784 to 1789 and was the foremost American wine connoisseur of his day, had been among them.

  The integrity of the seals, and the high fill levels, Rodenstock had told Broadbent, were remarkable for their age. The cellar had been almost hermetically preserved, its steady temperature in the sweet spot of 50 to 57 degrees Fahrenheit. Rodenstock theorized that the bottles had been walled up to protect them during the chaos of the French Revolution, and had lain undisturbed for two hundred years.

  Not surprisingly, Rodenstock refused to divulge the precise location, the exact number of bottles, or anything else about the discovery, despite Broadbent’s entreaties. Rodenstock was the leading private collector in Europe, and he had already made a name for himself in rare-wine circles as an unusually skilled bottle hunter. Though he was a longtime customer of Christie’s, Rodenstock was a competitor when it came to obtaining private cellars. Private-cellar purchases were often cash deals that went unreported to tax authorities. A certain reticence about his sources was to be expected.

  Broadbent felt there were a couple of possibilities. One was that the bottle had indeed been discovered during the excavations of the old Marais district in Paris, much of which had recently been torn up and redeveloped. A rumor less credited by Broadbent, and which he had no intention of putting in the catalog copy, was that the bottle had been part of some sort of Nazi cellar.

  Broadbent knew Rodenstock well, trusted him, and would not normally be too
concerned with how he had obtained the bottle. But to Broadbent’s annoyance, a historical researcher in America had recently been making noises in the press, questioning whether the bottle was in fact Jefferson’s. Broadbent had conducted his own research and was satisfied that the circumstantial evidence argued overwhelmingly in favor of the attribution. He couldn’t prove it, but on balance, the inducements to proceed outweighed any risk of embarrassment.

  The auctioneer’s delight in an object that would sell itself accounted for only half of Broadbent’s excitement. There was also the oenophile’s anticipation, for Lafite was Broadbent’s favorite wine. He loved the way it developed in the glass, revealing new depths and facets as it breathed. He thought Lafite the acme of elegance, a racehorse beside the snow horse of Mouton and the cart horse of Latour. But to open a bottle as old as this was to play roulette; Broadbent couldn’t help wondering what it might taste like. And how to price such an object? When cataloging it for auction, Broadbent gave the estimate as “inestimable.” He was rather pleased with his pun.

  A number of commission bids—those placed in advance by bidders who could not, or didn’t want to, attend—had come in. Château Lafite-Rothschild, modern successor to the eighteenth-century vineyard, had placed a £5,000 bid; this had been so eclipsed by other advance bids that the Château was out of the running before the session even began. Broadbent could feel confident that a new single-bottle price record was about to be set.

  In the West Room, he opened the bidding at £10,000. At first the bids came slowly, moving in £2,000 increments. A paddle would rise here. Another would bob up there. But things quickly heated up, and soon several people were raising paddles at every step.

  Broadbent knew everyone in the London trade, and many of them were here in this room, but he reserved his greatest expectations for the Americans. The Jefferson connection, the strength of the dollar (it had hit a historic high earlier in the year), recent auction history—all these factors would surely tempt a deep-pocketed Yank to repatriate the bottle. Marvin Shanken, publisher of the magazine Wine Spectator, was here today, but Broadbent’s highest hopes were aimed at the fellow who sat left of the center aisle from where Broadbent stood: Christoper “Kip” Forbes, the thirty-five-year-old son of publisher Malcolm Forbes.

  Broadbent didn’t think much of Malcolm Forbes, finding him to be “a mean sort of chap.” He knew that the American publisher collected first growths, the top-ranked Bordeaux reds, though only in lousy vintages. But it was undeniable that Forbes had money and would spend it for something he wanted, and Kip soon entered the bidding.

  The price volleyed remorselessly to £20,000, then £30,000. At £40,000, it seemed, fleetingly, that a cap might have been reached, but the bidding resurged. Only after Kip Forbes bid £50,000—$75,000—did all the other paddles stay down. This was a new record for a bottle of wine, by a wide margin. The previous record, set the year before at an auction in Dallas, was $38,000 for a Jéroboam (equivalent to six bottles) of 1870 Mouton-Rothschild; the record for a normal-size bottle was $31,000, paid in 1980 for an 1822 Lafite. Today’s price now far exceeded Broadbent’s most wishful imaginings. He felt vindicated by his decision to go ahead with the sale.

  He began the ritual countdown. “Any more?”

  He scanned the crowd for takers. “Any more?”

  Again Broadbent looked around the room, daring the bidders with his eyes to outdo Forbes. Nothing.

  Then, at the rear of the room, he saw a movement.

  CHAPTER 2

  INCOGNITO

  ON FEBRUARY 22, 1788, WRITING FROM PARIS, THOMAS Jefferson placed an order for 250 bottles of Lafite. In the past he would have sent the letter to one of the merchants through whom he had previously made his wine requests. But on this occasion he wrote directly to the owner of the property, having recently become wise to the dangers of doing otherwise.

  Now forty-four years old, Jefferson was an especially tall man by eighteenth-century standards, topping six foot two, with an erect posture, a ruddy, freckled face, and fair, reddish hair. He had spent the last four years as American commissioner, and then minister, to France. Faint tremors of class struggle had become the insistent rumblings of the early French Revolution, and Jefferson was torn. The author of the Declaration of Independence sympathized with the poor and oppressed, while the gourmand and the architect of Monticello was drawn to the refinements of salon culture.

  He had welcomed the chance to come to Europe. Jefferson’s beloved wife, Martha, had died when he was just thirty-nine, leaving him a grieving widower and single father. And Jefferson had dreamed of coming to France since he was a young man. The diversions of Paris were exactly what he needed to lift him out of his depression. In contrast to his earthier fellow minister, Ben Franklin, who was legendary in the City of Light for wearing a beaver hat and biting the heads off asparagus, Jefferson fit right in.

  Though he called himself “a savage of the mountains of America,” in France Jefferson took to wearing a powdered wig and a topaz ring. His mansion on the Champs-Élysées was a place of blue silk damask curtains, crystal decanters, a well-stocked wine cellar, and a household staff that included a frotteur, whose sole function was to clean the parquet floors by spinning around with brushes strapped to his feet. Intoxicated with the French high life, Jefferson hosted frequent dinner parties, serving some of the best wines of France.

  Jefferson was not the only Founding Father who was fond of wine. Franklin, for one, kept a substantial cellar in Paris and called wine “proof that God loves us and that he likes to see us happy.” But Jefferson, who had been ordering wine for many years, had recently acquired an unmatched breadth and depth of knowledge about the subject.

  Not only had he learned which were the best wines, but he had also become savvy about the mischief to which an unwary consumer might fall prey. In his 1788 letter to the owner of Lafite, Jefferson spelled out his concern directly: “If it would be possible to have them bottled and packed at your estate, it would doubtless be a guarantee that the wine was genuine, and the drawing-off and so forth well done.” Jefferson owed his newfound wine sophistication to a life-changing trip he had made the year before.

  THE TIME WAS ripe for an escape from Paris. He had become infatuated with a married English-Italian woman, Maria Cosway, but by early 1787 the romance seemed to have fizzled. In February, with his daughter Patsy safely cloistered in a convent school and his official duties in the hands of William Short, his trusted personal secretary, Jefferson embarked on a tour of France and northern Italy. He had dislocated his right wrist in a mysterious accident—historians have speculated that he was trying to jump over a fence to impress Cosway—and he justified the trip as being curative.

  His itinerary also happened to take him through all of the country’s major wine regions. In view of Jefferson’s personal debts, which were already substantial, and the momentous challenges facing the struggling young country that was paying his way in Europe, the decision to take a three-and-a-half-month vacation could be seen as almost comically self-indulgent. Patsy Jefferson noted rather freshly, in a letter to her father a week after he left Paris, that she was “inclined to think that your voyage is rather for your pleasure than for your health.”

  Jefferson had been keen on wine for a long time. When he began building Monticello in 1769, at the age of twenty-six, the first part constructed was the wine cellar. As the second governor of Virginia, Jefferson gained access to an official stock of Bordeaux, Burgundy, German Rieslings, and Champagne. One story, passed down among Jefferson’s slaves, held that his Virginia cellar had been emptied three years before he left for France, when British troops, commanded by the reviled Banastre “The Butcher” Tarleton, destroyed Jefferson’s casks and smashed his bottles with their swords, flooding the dirt floor.

  It wasn’t just drinking wine that interested Jefferson. True independence, he was sure, meant agricultural self-sufficiency. Americans would have to make their own wine if they didn’t want to
rely on imports. Jefferson had first planted vines at Monticello in 1771, and a few years before his trip to Europe, he had encouraged an Italian immigrant named Filippo Mazzei to grow European wine-grape varieties by giving him 193 acres in Monticello’s backyard. Both efforts failed, but Jefferson remained hopeful for American wine.

  Now, as his horse-drawn carriage clattered along the post roads of France, he at last had a chance to see the most fabled vineyards in the world. He traveled light, bringing only a single trunk with him. Wanting to experience the real France, unfiltered by preferential treatment and unburdened by diplomatic obligations, he traveled incognito, the plan being to hire a different valet in each town, so that no one would find out who he was.

  Jefferson drank France in with guzzling intemperance. Aesthete and classicist, he basked in the scattered ruins of the Roman Empire. Social observer, he talked his way into people’s homes to see how they lived, ate their bread, and lay on their beds as if to rest but really to feel their softness. Farmer and wine aficionado, he moved from Burgundy to the Rhône Valley to Bordeaux; in each of these wine-growing areas, he closely studied the grapes grown, the composition of the soil, and the techniques of winemaking. He scrutinized the training of vines and the disparate blending methods. He obsessed over the production capacities of each château and the prices charged for each wine.

  Jefferson was compulsively inquisitive, and he spoke French well enough to grill laborers and cellarmasters alike. How many years before a vine started to yield good fruit? Twenty-five. Did the winemakers dung their soil? A little. Did the vineyard overseer’s pay include board? No, just room and drink. Jefferson’s interest was more than pedantic; he was devouring all information that might help his young country to make its own wine.

  At Aix-en-Provence, he luxuriated in the southern sun and soaked his aching wrist ten times a day in the spa town’s mineral-rich waters. At Agen, he ate the tiny thrushes called ortolans. For nine days, Jefferson left the road altogether, barging two hundred miles from the Mediterranean coast up the canal of Languedoc to Toulouse, serenaded by trees full of nightingales. He loved traveling this way, and divided his time between walking on the bank alongside the slow-moving boat and sitting in his coach, which rested wheelless atop the barge. Away from the crush of duty and unknown to those around him, he was able to relax and reflect—and perhaps get Maria Cosway out of his mind. During the entire 3,000-mile trip, he wouldn’t write a single letter to her.