Uncorking a mystery
Last September, The New Yorker published an essay on a wine-related subject by Patrick Radden Keefe. The New Yorker is known for articles that can carry a reader from a Saturday morning bath, through lunch and into the afternoon.
Keefe’s was one of those —and it was one of the most compelling articles I have ever read, not just about wine but on any subject.
The story is so complex and layered that the wine press and the U.S. District Court in New York have been covering it for the past year. Now a book by Benjamin Wallace has come out on the subject — The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine.
The bottle in question is the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at auction. Shaped like a bowling pin, the dark-green bottle with a black wax cap had no label but was etched with the initials “Th.J.”; word “Lafitte”; and the year 1787.
The bottle had been offered at auction in 1985 by famous wine collector Hardy Rodenstock, who reportedly found it with a collection of bottles behind a brick wall in a Paris apartment. The initials purportedly belonged to none other than America’s first and foremost wine collector, Thomas Jefferson. The wine, Château Lafite (as it is now spelled), the First Growth Bordeaux, was and still is one of the world’s most collectable wines.
London-based Michael Broadbent is the world’s most revered taster and writer of wine. The title of his 2002 book — Vintage Wine: Fifty Years of Tasting Three Centuries of Wine — pretty much sums up his résumé. The silver-haired, bike-riding English gentleman has studiously chronicled his singular opportunities to taste and review some of the world’s best and oldest wines. As head of Christie’s wine department in 1985, he was called upon to evaluate the bottle in question — the first of the Jefferson bottles to be auctioned.
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Christie’s auction-house glass experts confirmed the bottle and engraving were
18th-century French. Broadbent wrote the notes for the auction catalog, saying the 1787 Lafitte bottle “can rightly be considered one of the world’s greatest rarities.” The level of the wine was “exceptionally high” and the “color remarkably deep” for such an old wine.
The 1787 Lafitte is the second wine-tasting note in Broadbent’s book. It reads: “A wine of some notoriety. It was the first of the ‘Jefferson’ wines to come on the market when a single bottle was sold at Christie’s in 1985. Unsurprisingly, I well recall the occasion, for in advance of the sale no one had any idea of its worth, so the owner agreed to let it go without reserve. Instead of the usual estimate in the catalog, I coined the phrase ‘inestimable.’
“Starting at 2,000 pounds, the bidding went quite speedily up to 7,000 and then to 10,000 until eventually two bidders were left in the running. I finally brought the hammer down at 105,000 pounds ($157,000), still a world record auction price for a single bottle of wine. The successful bidder was Christopher Forbes, the underbidder Marvin Shankin (owner of Wine Spectator magazine). Flown in the Forbes private jet to New York that evening, (the wine) had pride of place on Jefferson’s dining table in the Presidential Memorabilia section of the Forbes Museum.
“Regarding tasting, I have two notes, both made under laboratory conditions. The first (time) I opened (the bottle was) in Munich in 1987. Both seal and cork looked old, the wine was brown-tinged and the nose and taste distinctly old. Yet, after a very long delay, the laboratory reported that the wine contained an unspecified amount post-1960 (wine). Shock, horror and much publicity. Subsequently in August 1992 a half bottle from the original collection was analyzed by two pre-eminent men in the field, Dr. Bonani in Zurich and Professor Edward Hall in Oxford. Once again I was charged with cork drawing and tasting (that same Jefferson bottle), witnessed by Dr. Bonani, the owner and a lawyer. No question about the bottle. It was correct and subsequently, after a long expensive process, the cork and the wine were also found to be absolutely correct.”
America’s minister to France between 1784 and 1789, Thomas Jefferson had developed and pursued a fascination with French wine. While living in France, he sought out and sent cases of his favorite Burgundy, Bordeaux and Champagne to himself and President George Washington as “samples of the best of the country which I beg to present to yourself, in order that you may decide whether you wish to have any, and which of them for your table hereafter.”
In 1801, when Jefferson became our young country’s third president, he spent $7,500 on wine his first term — nearly a third of his annual $25,000 salary. During his two terms as president, it is documented that Jefferson bought more than 20,000 bottles of wine. He was the consummate host — the nation’s sommelier-in-chief.
One of Jefferson’s favorite wines from Bordeaux was Lafite, and he sought out and purchased many cases of Lafite from the famed 1787 vintage while living in Paris. At this time in Bordeaux, bottles were “labeled” as purchased, often with the initials of the purchaser along with the vintage and château name.
When he fled Paris in 1789 at the outbreak of the French Revolution, Jefferson packed hampers full of various wines, including two containers earmarked for John Jay and George Washington. He left possessions in his Paris apartment, assuming he would return, but he never did. His majordomo was left to dismantle his Paris household. A batch of possessions arrived at Monticello just before Christmas 1789. It was short one box of assorted wines.
A former German music publisher, Hardy Rodenstock lives in Munich, Monte Carlo and Bordeaux, and was believed to be part of the wealthy Rodenstock family that manufactured designer eyeglasses. He became an intrepid hunter of rare wines in the 1970s, and in the ’80s began throwing lavish wine tastings attended by wine critics and celebrities alike. Michael Broadbent regularly attended Rodenstock events and acknowledges that through Rodenstock’s generosity he has been able to taste many of the wine world’s greatest rarities.
Always impeccably dressed, wearing custom-tailored shirts and trendy Rodenstock eyeglasses, Rodenstock opened hundreds of rare wines at his weekend-long tastings — all provided at his own expense and served in custom “Rodenstock” wine glasses made by his friend Georg Riedel.
Rodenstock reveled in the fame of having discovered the Jefferson bottles after the record sale at Christie’s in 1985. They were the first in a series of his remarkable “finds.” Rodenstock has refused to say who sold him the Th.J. bottles and has held back information regarding the exact location of the alleged walled-in cellar in Paris.
After the famous 1985 Christie’s auction, other collectors purchased wines from the Jefferson bottles, including Marvin Shaken and American tycoon Bill Koch. In 1988, Koch spent a half-million dollars on four of the Jefferson bottles, including a 1787 Lafite.
In 2005 the Boston Museum of Fine Arts prepared an exhibition of some of Koch’s multimillion-dollar collection of art and antiques, including his four Jefferson bottles. Aside from Broadbent’s authentication of the Forbes bottle, there was no other record of authenticity on the wines. Koch’s staff, seeking authenticity, contacted the Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. After a few days, the curator of Monticello phoned back and reported, “We don’t believe those bottles ever belonged to Thomas Jefferson.”
Notorious for filing lawsuits, Koch filed one against Rodenstock, hoping to prove him a fraud. In his New Yorker article, Keefe — who interviewed Koch — quotes him as saying, “I’ve bought so much art, so many guns, so many other things, that if somebody’s out to cheat me I want the son of a bitch to pay for it. Also it’s a fun detective story.” Koch has spent more than twice the original half-million dollars paid for his four Jefferson bottles on litigation and investigations led by his private detective, Jim Elroy.
There are no scientific tests that can prove the grape varietals or vintages in a bottle of wine. Elroy, a former FBI agent, has been trying to prove that Rodenstock concocted forgeries by mixing various wines with a dollop of port wine as forgers have been known to do. Using Koch’s endless monetary resources, Elroy, a tenacious detective, has proved that Rodenstock is not one of the famous Rodenstocks after all. Elroy also has as evidence piles of wine labels and forger’s tools found in a Rodenstock Munich apartment.
In bullet-proof, impact-resistant cases, Elroy flew two of Koch’s Jefferson bottles to a lab in the Alps where they were placed in a special piece of equipment surrounded by 10 inches of lead and subjected to high-tech carbon dating-like testing. The tests proved inconclusive, showing only that contents of the bottles predated the atomic age.
But Elroy was not to be deterred; through an FBI tool expert he proved that the bottles could not have been engraved by the 18th-century copper wheel used in Jefferson’s day. Instead, the expert said, they looked like they had been done with a handheld dentist’s tool, powered by electricity.
In January of this year, the U.S. District Court in New York dismissed Koch’s lawsuit, ruling that the “allegations are insufficient to warrant this court’s assertion of jurisdiction over Rodenstock.” Koch refiled the case in the same court in early February, and indicated more lawsuits are to follow.
Stay tuned.
By Greg O’Byrne – The New Mexican
