The Billionaire's Vinegar, Page 5

  How Rodenstock became interested in wine was a story that changed depending on who was asking him and when. There were three stories. The one he told least often, and which was given the least credence, was that he had started drinking wine as a child, with his grandfather. The one he told most often involved a Damascene conversion. After the funeral of a friend’s father in 1976, the son of the deceased served four of the most legendary wines in history out of the family cellar: 1961 Château Palmer, 1945 Mouton-Rothschild, 1947 Cheval Blanc, and 1921 Château d’Yquem. Palmer, a wine that was officially a third growth and unofficially considered to be just below the first growths in quality, was regarded, in the 1961 vintage, as sublime. Rodenstock said that tasting the four wines was a life-altering experience, and that he became instantly obsessed.

  The third story—and the one that those in the German wine scene who had known Rodenstock longest believed to be the truth—was neither as simple as the first nor as mythic as the second. Rodenstock made his living managing Schlager acts—a style of easy-listening German pop music—and according to this version, he had booked some of his clients for a festival in Wiesbaden and gotten stiffed. The promoter had no money, and offered to pay him in cases of wine, his only currency. Rodenstock protested angrily that he drank beer and schnapps, but ended up driving a van to collect the wine. He forgot about it for a while, then during the winter he retrieved some of the bottles from his basement. They were white Burgundies, and he liked them. He bought more wine and soon did, indeed, become obsessed.

  At first Rodenstock would invite music-business friends to drink with him, but as his interests turned increasingly toward the old and rare, he found their nuances were lost on those people. Many wine neophytes have a mentor who guides them through the intricacies of wine when they are just starting out. Self-taught, Rodenstock had no desire for a tutor, but he was eager to find likeminded appreciators with whom to share his experiences. He read Essen und Trinken, the first modern gastronomy magazine in Germany, and signed up for its tours of wine regions. Through these he met the wine journalist Heinz-Gert Woschek, and other readers, and was directly exposed to the châteaux for the first time. He found he had a particular interest in Bordeaux, and he arranged other visits privately.

  When Woschek launched Germany’s first wine magazine, Woscheks Wein Report (soon renamed Alles über Wein), in 1981, Rodenstock began writing long articles that gave him further entrée to the châteaux and their owners. He became a regular buyer at wine auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in London, and at Cave Nicolas, a merchant in Paris. He was a hobbyist who bought wine, but whose commerce with it was otherwise limited to the occasional one- or two-bottle trade with a fellow collector. Though he wasn’t wealthy, old wine was still relatively cheap. He lived with one of his clients, a moderately successful singer named Tina York, who was the younger sister of a well-known Schlager singer named Mary Roos, and her two Yorkies, in a remote area east of the Rhine called the Westerwald. It was a normal house, except that the cellar overflowed with bottles.

  One of the places Rodenstock sought out wine fellowship in those early years was Fuente, a twenty-seven-seat restaurant in the town of Mulheim, near Düsseldorf. Well situated to serve the moneyed trenchermen who ran the big industrial companies headquartered in the region, it occupied an old house with a sign showing a horse being watered. Fuente was a star of the new German gastronomy, and served French nouvelle cuisine. Its lamb filet in pastry and its crayfish salad had drawn praise, and a star, from Michelin’s inspectors. The restaurant had opened in 1976, just when Rodenstock was developing a taste for wine in nearby Essen, and by 1978 he was a regular customer. Rolf-Dieter (Otto) Jung, the young owner with a Dundreary mustache and a cigarette always smoldering in a long holder, had built its wine list into one of the best in the country, with 350 labels and an inventory worth some $150,000. Rodenstock was looking for someone to talk to about wine, and would come in alone with a bottle or two to share with Jung.

  GERMANY, LIKE AMERICA, had only a modest tradition of enthusiasm for fine Bordeaux. At the end of the nineteenth century, one Hamburg restaurant had made a point of keeping at least one bottle of each of the sixty-two classed growths in its cellar. But the country remained essentially a beer-and-schnapps kind of place until the early 1970s, when its Western half began to experience a gastronomic awakening. As the decade progressed, wine lovers in a few centers like Hamburg and Wiesbaden started to find each other.

  Some were restaurant owners; some were journalists; some were private collectors. They organized tastings and traded invitations, sometimes with members of the American Group. The transatlantic alliance quickly fell apart because “the Americans were unsophisticated and not generous,” said one participant. “They served some horrible bottles, and didn’t reciprocate in kind.” A German collector who was a half-Jewish Holocaust survivor was also put off when a member of the Group, at the Los Angeles restaurant Scandia, described fellow member Tawfiq Khoury, a Palestinian, as a “sand nigger.”

  The most zealous of the Germans were distinguished by an obsession with a particular kind of wine, and they nicknamed each other accordingly. Uwe Könecke, who owned a small-truck dealership, became “Magnum Uwe” because of his preference for large-format bottles. A Swiss German named Walter Eigensatz, who with his wife owned several spas, was known as “Mr. Cheval Blanc.” A Munich businessman by the name of Hans-Peter Frericks was dubbed “Herr Pétrus.” Hardy Rodenstock was “Monsieur Yquem.”

  There was something defiantly timeless about Yquem. Its syrupy concentration derived not only from noble rot but also from a meticulous, and expensive, production process. It went beyond the dramatically low yield. Each harvest, the château would send pickers through the vineyard an average of five times, and up to eleven, selecting only those grapes ready to be picked. The château hewed to rigorously high standards and, some years, released no wine at all. The result was a Sauternes that fetched astronomical prices and inspired cultish fervor, in no one so much as Rodenstock.

  The wine scene in which Rodenstock began to move consisted largely of people who had amassed impressive collections, not just of young vintages but of old ones as well. They started to host tastings focused around rarities, which at first weren’t so hard to find. Old Bordeaux came up fairly often at auction, and they weren’t outrageously expensive. It was easy to find 1928s and 1929s of Latour and Mouton. You almost didn’t need to collect; the stuff was available at the store. One shop in Hamburg carried Burgundy from the 1930s and 1940s for eight dollars a bottle.

  There was a romantic aspect to it all. Rodenstock and his new friends were “drinking history,” as they liked to say, and would commonly wax historical about what Goethe, Schiller, or Napoleon was doing in the year of the vintage they happened to be opening just then. There was a visual allure to the parade of old bottles, which could be delightfully heterogeneous. Because of the historic inconsistency of bottling (sometimes by customers’ butlers, sometimes by merchants, sometimes by châteaux), you could see three Lafites from the same year that all looked different. This was truer of wines older than the 1920s, when Baron Philippe de Rothschild first château-bottled his entire production, the first growths following suit soon thereafter.

  In many ways, the rarities game was Star Trek for grown-ups. No women were invited to tastings, and the male collectors’ explanations for this tended to be halfhearted: There was only one bottle of each wine, not enough for spouses; it was wrong to forbid women to wear perfume, yet that would be necessary at a wine tasting. The reality was that the gender mix, or lack thereof, mirrored the wine world in general.

  The boys’ club fostered a competitive atmosphere, and the connoisseurs prided themselves on deciding that an authority such as Broadbent was wrong in his assessment of a particular wine. Nothing pleased them more than to discover a “shadow vintage,” a year that was a great value because its proximity to a more famous vintage had caused it to be overlooked; come up with a brilliant
new food-and-wine pairing; or have an inside line on esoterica such as Yquem’s little-known red wine, produced in small quantities for the consumption of its pickers at harvest time. The collectors oneupped each other with individual bottles—if one had a magnum, another had a double magnum—and with the lavishness of their tastings. In 1983, Walter Eigensatz, Mr. Cheval Blanc, hosted a vertical of his favorite wine in Wiesbaden and arranged for two white horses to lead a pre-tasting parade through the streets of the city.

  The collectors would also try to psych each other out. A “Parker 100” tasting in Hamburg, which featured wines that had received a perfect score from the increasingly influential American wine critic Robert Parker, included what the Germans called a “pirate,” a mystery bottle—in this case, a mystery double magnum. Everyone stood around sniffing at their glasses and making guesses. Rodenstock went up to a well-fed, stubble-haired journalist named Mario Scheuermann and said he thought it was an old Pétrus. “Definitely not,” Scheuermann said. “It’s a ’61 La Chappelle.” It could not be, Rodenstock said; the 1961 La Chappelle, a red from the Rhône Valley, did not exist in big bottles. Scheuermann insisted it was, until Rodenstock conceded, “Little boy, maybe you are right.” And Scheuermann was. Mischievously, the host had decanted four regular bottles into the larger bottle. Scheuermann was able to guess this because the ’61 La Chappelle was his favorite wine. He had drunk it fifty times.

  Egos and posturing aside, there was a genuine intellectual thrust to the tastings. The point, at least for the more serious collectors, was to learn more about Bordeaux; it was easier to begin to understand the character of a wine by comparing and analyzing different versions of the same thing than by studying things that were entirely different. “You know wine if you are able to drink good wine. In this way you get a matrix in the brain for tasting wine,” Fuente owner Otto Jung explained years later. “I laugh when someone says, ‘That’s a typical ’82,’ when he has only drunk three.” To really know a château, you had to have tasted its wine over a century of vintages.

  To be a great taster also depended on one’s palate sensitivity and palate memory. Some members of the Rodenstock clique had an almost synesthetic reaction to wines; they didn’t merely smell and taste them, they saw them, each with its own shape and structure and character. Wines, for these super-tasters—as a Yale researcher has designated the small percentage of people with an especially high density of taste buds—were as starkly distinct and instantly recognizable as faces. Rodenstock was a good taster. Maybe he wasn’t the virtuoso some friends described (one claimed that given a room of unmarked 1985 Bordeaux, Rodenstock could pick out each château), but he was exceptional.

  Even the best palates could be humbled in a blind tasting, in which labels were concealed. Sometimes you caught a wine immediately; sometimes you could sit in front of it for five hours and still not get it. The conventional wisdom held that beginners often performed better at this, because they didn’t know all the exceptions to the exceptions. Harry Waugh, the English wine merchant and writer, was once asked how often he confused Bordeaux with Burgundy. “Not since lunch,” he replied.

  Some tasters frowned on blind tasting. It was one thing to know the names of the wines on a table, and simply not know which glass contained which. That was interesting. But purely blind tasting was, they argued, a trivializing parlor game that wowed outsiders but wasn’t a learning exercise.

  The art of drinking the very oldest rarities required an extra degree of connoisseurship—almost a kind of necrophilia. The normal sequence when evaluating a wine might be look-smell-taste, but when opening an old wine, Broadbent thought that one should smell first. The color wasn’t going to change, whereas with an old wine, the smell very likely would. An old wine exposed to oxygen normally evolved much more rapidly than a younger wine. The initial bouquet would tell you a lot more than the color, yet it might last only thirty seconds. Then again, an old wine could surprise you. That 1893 Margaux might first merely taste drinkable, merely be recognizable as wine, yet two hours later have opened up into something rich with red-berry fruit, with what some connoisseurs poetically called “the sweetness of death.” This was one of the unpredictabilities of old wine that fascinated people like Rodenstock. Opening one of these bottles could be like waking something up gradually, or igniting something that burned brightly before quickly petering out. You never knew which it would be.

  EVEN AMONG HIS clique of obsessives, Rodenstock stood out as a monomaniac. He segued from managing bands to collecting music-publishing royalties, and increasingly devoted his time to looking for bottles, networking, and attending auctions. He became engaged to Patricia Woschek, daughter of Heinz-Gert, who owned Alles über Wein. It was impossible to talk to him about anything other than wine, and nearly everyone with whom he associated was somehow involved with it. In 1980 he hosted the first of what would become annual tastings.

  He chose the restaurant Fuente as the setting. At the time, tastings in Germany tended to be monastic affairs, with bland slices of bread, a few grams of cheese, and wine. Tastings in conjunction with meals were a novelty. Rodenstock supplied the wine, and Otto Jung, who was looking to boost his restaurant’s profile, provided the food and service. The first year, Rodenstock’s guests were a small group—“fifteen freaks,” in Jung’s words. A few were friends from the music business, some were wine people, and some were celebrities—mainly politicians and soccer stars—whom Rodenstock somehow knew. The tasting made the newspapers when Walter Scheel, the former president of West Germany, showed up at the tiny restaurant in a motorcade, sirens screaming.

  The annual tastings quickly grew into endurance tests. Even Broadbent, who began attending the event in 1984, wasn’t prepared for how grueling the black-tie affair would be. That year the group sat down to eat at noon, and didn’t get up until midnight. Halfway through, Broadbent had a headache, and back at his hotel he threw up. He blamed it on the food, and the next year he made sure to have more bread and water and less rich French cuisine.

  Each year, Jung and Rodenstock thought they wouldn’t be able to top themselves the next, but then they would. There would be more people and better food; there would be more wines, and the wines would be older and rarer. There was an imperial quality to Rodenstock’s life. It was a baroque succession of epic meals and wines, and he paid for all the wines at his tastings, which made the lucky few who were invited exceedingly grateful. As Kaiser, however, Rodenstock would get angry if someone was five minutes late. And he brooked no dissent, dropping anyone who dared disagree with him about anything.

  Through his largesse, and the specter of its withdrawal, he also controlled journalists. “If someone had written negatively about the tastings,” Woschek explained, “they would never have been invited again.” Alles über Wein published nothing about Rodenstock’s background or personality. Acolytes would exalt a mildly irreverent aside by Rodenstock into high comedy, laughingly recalling the time when, after buying a case of half-bottles of 1958 Latour, he announced that it wasn’t great wine but it “goes well with roulade,” a homely German dish featuring some filling swaddled in a roll of beef. By the early 1980s it was clear to people like Woschek and Mario Scheuermann that his knowledge had surpassed theirs.

  IT WAS NOT just the tastings that gave Rodenstock his growing cachet. He was also becoming known for the bottles—often in a large format—he unfailingly served at those events. There were old Constantia wines, famous wines from the Western Cape of South Africa that had been popular in the nineteenth century; a pre-Napoleonic royal Tokaji, dating to 1649, from the Royal House of Saxony; and another from the Royal Cellar in Bavaria. Even Rodenstock’s jaded friends were awed by some of his discoveries.

  It was Rodenstock who years later would produce a tappit hen of 1811 Lafite at a tasting in Hamburg. A tappit hen was an extinct, extremely rare, bulbous style of bottle, and 1811 was considered the best Bordeaux vintage of the first half of the nineteenth century; it was known to connoisseurs as
“the comet year,” for the nine months in which the giant streak of light that transfixed Pierre in War and Peace was visible from the earth. A team of sommeliers brought the tappit hen into the restaurant’s dining room in a wooden box, and the men crowded around like children about to unwrap Christmas presents. “If this bottle falls down, that’s a hundred thousand marks,” someone said. “No one clap your hands.” Twenty people had contributed 5,000 marks each (roughly $3,000) to finance the purchase of the tappit hen, and Rodenstock donated a 1900 Margaux and an 1864 Lafite for the event.

  His friends were increasingly curious where he got his bottles. From the start, Rodenstock had been unvaryingly private. As the years passed, he rarely invited anyone to his home or revealed anything about his personal life or finances. Friends knew that he had several different cellars, including one in Switzerland, but most never saw any of them. Though his tastings, with their celebrity and journalist guests, seemed geared for maximum publicity, Rodenstock was actually quite shy. He never got up and spoke, asking people like Woschek, Scheuermann, and the Austrian crystal magnate Georg Riedel to do so instead. He was similarly ambivalent about being photographed. He disliked smiling on command, and he insisted that Woschek grant him approval of which shots would be published in Alles über Wein, often vetoing the editor’s selections. Jung, after five years of co-hosting tastings, was still using the formal “you” with Rodenstock, something Jung did with no one else he had known for so long.