The Billionaire's Vinegar (13 page)

Farr said they had three more, and partner Lindsay Hamilton flew to New York with the bottles—a 1784 Branne-Mouton, a 1784 Lafite, and a 1787 Lafite, all inscribed “Th.J.”—in a big leather lawyer’s briefcase and delivered them to Bill Koch at his Fifth Avenue apartment. For the group of three, Koch paid £116,000, or about $200,000. One month after buying the three Jefferson bottles from Farr, Koch bought another batch of (non-Jefferson) bottles from the brokers, including three eighteenth-century wines (1737 and 1771 “La Fitte,” and a 1791 “La Tour”) sourced from Rodenstock and priced, collectively, at £91,000 ($159,250).

Where were all these bottles coming from? 1771?
1737?
They were Koch’s oldest wines. The 1737 was way beyond anything even Broadbent had encountered. When Broadbent auctioned the Forbes bottle, a mere 1787, it was the oldest authenticated vintage claret Christie’s had ever handled. Even the earliest Christie’s catalogs, published during the 1760s and 1770s and 1780s, made no specific mention of red wine as old as the bottles Koch had just bought. In Broadbent’s
Great Vintage Wine Book,
1771 and 1791 were among the very few eighteenth-century vintages mentioned, and not because he had tasted them, but because they had been acclaimed in their time. Their turning up now seemed a remarkable coincidence. But selling the bottles to Koch put them in the hands of an enthusiastic collector, not a scholar, and using the private market for the transaction meant that it went unobserved by most people in the wine world.

The bottles were of a piece with a curious phenomenon in the old-wine scene in the latter half of the 1980s: the appearance of ever-rarer rarities. The 1970s and early 1980s had seen the progressive depletion of the buried stocks of Europe, thanks largely to Broadbent. “They don’t exist now,” Broadbent told an interviewer once. “They’ve been explored like the Pyramids or the tombs of the Nile. They’ve all been desecrated by me.” Yet in the years since his streak of discoveries, several more bottles from the eighteenth century had surfaced. A possible explanation was that Broadbent had done the strip-mining, and a new breed of bottle hunters was digging deeper. Then again, it seemed strange that the bottle hunter raising his shovel in triumph was invariably Hardy Rodenstock.

Koch, in the mold of Forbes and Shiblaq/Al-Fayed, was a deep-pocketed outsider whose extravagant purchase of the bottles did nothing to validate them to wine-world insiders. For Chicago Wine Company and Farr Vintners to sell the bottles, however, was to provide yet two more seals of approval for Rodenstock and his bottles. The list of respected wine-world players willing to vouch for the bottles—Michael Broadbent, Christie’s, Marvin Shanken, Château Margaux, Château d’Yquem—had just gotten a little bit longer.

Farr, in particular, was a major player, an upstart which, in a very short time, had emerged as the foremost London broker of Bordeaux futures as well as a leader in the rarities market. “We used to call them ‘the weasels,’” Broadbent recalled. Now Farr was the top seller of Jefferson bottles. Four—the number Farr had sold to Koch, three directly and one through Chicago Wine—was one more than even Broadbent had sold. And Farr had sold a fifth.

C
HAPTER
10

A P
LEASANT
S
TAIN, BUT
N
OT A
G
REAT
O
NE

B
ILL
S
OKOLIN WAS MAKING HIS WAY ACROSS THE ROOM
to see Rusty Staub when he had the first inkling that something had gone terribly wrong. It was Sunday, April 24, 1989, and Sokolin was at a black-tie, $250-a-head, seven-course, seventeen-wine dinner at the Four Seasons. During the week the restaurant played host to Manhattan’s power elite; on Sundays it was often closed to accommodate the great and grand of the wine world at private events such as this. Sokolin, a wine-shop owner, was a controversial figure among his colleagues, known for his roster of well-heeled clients, his loopy newsletter soliloquies, and a Barnumesque promotional style (when a newspaper once termed him “an incorrigible hypemeister,” Sokolin wrote to thank the editor). At this moment, the proprietor of D. Sokolin & Co. was navigating the Pool Room, a high-ceilinged, midcentury-modern space bordered with stubby palm trees and surrounding an elevated, square, white marble pool rippling with azure water.

Nearly two hundred people were here, among them every wine retailer of note in the New York area, including Michael Aaron from Sherry-Lehmann and Don Zacharia from Zachys. Former major-league baseball player Staub, now a restaurateur, had brought Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez. But what Sokolin was most excited about, what had goaded him to bring the bottle, were the guests of honor: Châteaux Margaux owners Laura and Corinne Mentzelopoulos and Paul Pontallier, the estate’s urbane director.

Sokolin happened to be in possession of a Margaux the likes of which most of these people had never seen. A
1787
Margaux. A Jefferson bottle. The most expensive bottle of wine in the world, as far as Sokolin was concerned.
Guinness
might bestow that honor on Malcolm Forbes, but Sokolin’s bottle was insured for $212,000, $56,000 above the price of the Forbes Lafite. Tonight, Sokolin couldn’t resist showing the bottle around, and as a former minor-league baseball player, he was especially eager to show it to Staub.

The realization that something was dripping on his leg was not immediate. Sokolin kept walking, but the sensation of moisture didn’t go away. He looked down at his tuxedo pants and saw a dark patch.

Had someone spilled coffee on him? He hadn’t noticed it. Had he had an accident? He wasn’t
that
old. But then—

No.

No.

Sokolin stopped walking.

He turned around and retraced his steps, as if doing so would unwind what he dimly feared was happening.

He got back to the table where he and his wife Gloria were sitting with the heads of Campari and Chateau & Estate and Southern Wines & Spirits and an executive from American Express.

His leg was still wet. No use putting it off any longer: He opened the bag.

Wine had spilled out. Worse, there were two large holes in the side of the bottle. A pair of irregularly shaped pieces of glass lay at the bottom of the bag.

“I broke the bottle,” Sokolin announced, locking eyes with the Campari executive. “I’m going home.”

There were gasps. He looked around the table, in shock. The people sitting there looked at him, speechless. And Sokolin walked back across the room, aware of nothing beyond himself and the bottle he clutched upright in its soggy bag. Red drops were falling now, on the blue-and-gray carpet.

Sokolin’s Margaux was already dodgy in the eyes of a number of colleagues in the room. It was one of the controversial Jefferson bottles. The level of wine seemed improbably high for something so old. The seal looked new. And in hindsight, his actions at the dinner would strike several guests as suspicious. Sokolin was, after all, a notorious self-promoter who had been touting the bottle aggressively. He had brought a fragile, extremely valuable bottle to a crowded event. He had handled it clumsily. The bottle was insured for a lot of money. And once Sokolin had fully grasped what was going on, he had fled the room.

The bottle’s ill-starred journey had begun in late 1987, when Farr Vintners partner Stephen Browett flew from London to Munich. Hardy Rodenstock met him at the airport with the 1787 Margaux, and Browett flew straight to Manchester, where he handed the bottle, tucked inside a tennis bag, to Tim Littler, who had agreed to buy it for £37,000. Littler hailed from an old Cheshire wine-trade family. His grandfather had bought Whitwhams, a Manchester-area merchant, and by the 1980s it was a significant player in the rare-wine market. Browett had lunch with Littler, then boarded a train back to London.

The standard Whitwhams markup was 100 percent, and the bottle was listed in its February 1988 catalog at £75,000. No sooner had the catalog appeared than Littler thought: What’s the point of selling the
second
-most expensive bottle of wine in the world? The Forbes bottle had gone for £105,000. In the next Whitwhams catalog, which came out that September, Littler upped the price of his bottle to £125,000.

In the Whitwhams cellar one day, an employee noticed that the bottle was leaking through a bubble in the heavy wax that capped it. One of the firm’s directors flew the bottle to Bordeaux to have it recorked at Château Margaux. With Paul Pontallier and Corinne Mentzelopoulos looking on, the cellarmaster added a bit more than an inch of 1959 wine and inserted an unusual, wedge-shaped cork. It fit loosely. Back in Manchester, Littler saw that the bottle continued to ooze.

This time he decided to recork it himself. Recorking was a specialty of Whitwhams, which performed the service on 2,000 bottles of wine a year. Some connoisseurs objected to the practice, and had found wines recorked by Whitwhams, in particular, to be subpar. But Littler defended recorking, which provided a merchant with an opportunity to assess a bottle’s contents before reselling it, as a quality-control mechanism that benefited customers.

Normally, recorking a wine was straightforward: take out the old cork, put in a new one. But you had to be careful putting a new cork into the oldest bottles, as the increased air pressure could blow out the base. A 1787 Margaux called for extra caution. Like the Forbes Lafite, this Margaux was in a hand-blown bottle, heavy at the bottom and much thinner near the top. Worried that the glass would shatter, Littler taped the neck and eased the cork out with his hands.

He couldn’t let this opportunity pass. He tipped out a few drops of the wine into a glass. It was the color of iodine. Littler tasted it. Later he wouldn’t recall the flavor, other than “prunes” and that it was “certainly much more than” merely “interesting” or “alive.” He resealed the bottle.

The old-wine market ebbed and flowed. Littler might go half a year without selling a bottle, then move six in a week. All it took was one interested buyer. But after several months he still hadn’t found a customer for the Jefferson bottle. Meanwhile, a New York retailer he knew named Bill Sokolin said he had a client who was interested but wanted to see the bottle before committing.

Sokolin had pretty much fallen into the business started by his father. After attending Tufts, where he excelled at baseball, he had played for a string of teams in the Brooklyn Dodgers farm system, then was drafted into the army. Stationed in Virginia, he was spared from combat by his assignment to the service baseball, basketball, and football teams. Sokolin completed his service and, as a stopgap, went to work for his father. At the time, his father sold mainly hard liquor; what little wine he carried was plonk.

This was in the late 1950s, just when well-off Americans were becoming more interested in wine. Bill Sokolin saw an opportunity, and he rebuilt his father’s business around Bordeaux. When wine prices started to soar in the 1960s, Sokolin became an evangelist of wine as investment, ultimately writing two books on the topic. William Buckley Jr. was a longtime client; in his memoir, Buckley wrote of Sokolin’s enthusiasm for wine, “It would positively have killed Bill Sokolin if he had been born, say, in Saudi Arabia. I suspect both his hands and both his feet would have been amputated by the time he was sixteen, because Bill Sokolin cannot be kept from wine tasting.”

When the ballyhooed 1982 Bordeaux vintage came out, Sokolin sided with a few old-guard critics in arguing that it was overrated, taking out full-page ads in the
New York Times
in which he dismissed the gushing praise for the ’82s by up-and-coming wine critic Robert Parker. Sokolin was colossally wrong about the vintage, which proved to be the best investment in wine history and made Parker’s name as a critic.

Over the years, through his business, Sokolin met several U.S. presidents. Just after Ronald Reagan was first elected, he called Sokolin and said, “Where’s my wine?” Reagan had ordered some from Sokolin on the advice of Bill Buckley. “In front of me,” Sokolin replied. He had been unable to deliver the wine to the White House without the approval of the Secret Service. With the approval, Sokolin could get the wine to him in three or four hours. Reagan took care of it right away.

But it was a dead president who tugged at Sokolin’s imagination. Having heard of Thomas Jefferson’s interest in wine, “I started to read a little, and then I started to read a lot.” Sokolin bought more than a hundred books about Jefferson. When Sokolin met Jimmy Carter, he took the opportunity to discuss Jefferson with a sitting president. Sokolin also used the newsletters he sent regularly to his clients as a platform to talk about Jefferson. In one essay, Sokolin argued that it was Jefferson who first introduced wine futures to America. Sokolin had a mystical streak and, in a commentary of which he was especially proud, imagined a three-way conversation among Ernest Hemingway, Jefferson, and Winston Churchill. Another time, he wrote a letter to Ambassador Jefferson as if he were still alive.

Sokolin first heard of the Jefferson bottles when he read an account of the Forbes purchase in
Wine Spectator
. Later, when he visited the Forbes Galleries to view the 1787 Lafite, he was shocked that it was displayed under a spotlight and warned the security guard. Then, when the cork slipped, Sokolin says, Kip Forbes called him and asked what to do. Sokolin told him there were two options: either throw out the wine, or let Sokolin jump on a plane and take it to Lafite for recorking. The Forbeses decided to keep the bottle as it was.

Sokolin learned that he might be able to get his own Jefferson bottle when Littler, with whom he’d done business in the past and who knew of his Jeffersonian proclivities, called and said, “Bill, I think I’ve got your bottle.” Littler said he could arrange for Sokolin to take the bottle on consignment. The two men began to explore their options for complimentary transport. Air France offered to fly Littler and the bottle to America by Concorde, but that would require Littler to get to London. British Airways flew straight from Manchester, and volunteered two first-class tickets—one for Littler, one for the bottle. After making sure Sokolin had obtained insurance, on Friday, October 22, 1988, Littler set out for the Manchester airport.

British Airways issued a press release about the flight and photographed Littler and the bottle checking in and taking their seats on the plane, where a clutch of publicists and flight attendants dressed up the Margaux, peeking out of the same tennis bag in which Littler had received it, with blanket, headphones, and seat belt. Landing at JFK in New York at 6:00 p.m., Littler went through customs, gave the bottle to Sokolin, turned on his heel, and boarded a return flight to England. There, a hand-scrawled fax from his friends at Farr Vintners awaited him. It accompanied one of the pictures of Littler and the bottle that had appeared in a newspaper, and said, “Don’t Die of Ignorance: Always wear gloves when you’ve got your fingers in a punt.” In the photo, Littler’s thumb was in the “punt,” the concavity in the base of a wine bottle.

The following day, Sokolin’s interested party had a heart attack while playing golf and died, Sokolin told Littler. Therefore he no longer had a customer. Littler said he was going to be in New York a month later and would collect the bottle at that time. But then Sokolin said he had another client who was interested, and Littler’s trip was pushed back a few months. The bottle stayed with Sokolin.

Sokolin displayed it in his shop and encouraged wine journalists to write about it. He also sent a fax to Malcolm Forbes with the latest D. Sokolin price list, touting the arrival of the 1787 Jefferson Margaux:

Dear Malcolm,

This is an event of some magnitude. And it ain’t the price—250,000 for this bottle.

Th. Jefferson’s spirit is in this bottle.

He and G Washington had a COMPANY—called the WINE COMPANY—chartered in 1774.

THE PURPOSE—to get the DEMON RUM out of the Colonies—The equivalent of drugs today.

And replace it with WINE…WINE

It’s a good story and better than the ones the candidates have chosen.

This little bottle will start drugs out as requested by the SPIRIT OF JEFFERSON…