The Billionaire's Vinegar (21 page)

It was true that the community of Rembrandt scholars had been riven by controversy regarding the authenticity of certain paintings, that specialists in Jane Austen were at odds over her sexuality, and that Jefferson experts had carried on a long debate over the paternity of Sally Hemings’s children. But Sutcliffe, an auctioneer without expertise in Thomas Jefferson, was now talking about the leading center of Jefferson scholarship, Monticello, as if it were a fringe group, and treating the well-documented history of the disposition of Jefferson’s estate as if it were a matter of interpretation. Her audacity would pale, though, next to that shown by Rodenstock at his next tasting.

C
HAPTER
16

T
HE
L
AST
V
ERTICAL

F
OR HIS
1996
TASTING
, R
ODENSTOCK HAD HIRED
Andrea Bocelli, the blind Neapolitan tenor, to sing; for his next, he had in mind something even grander—a weeklong extravaganza devoted to a single wine. He spent two years preparing. The invitations to his Château d’Yquem Festival, mailed eight months in advance, boasted that guests would sample more vintages of the iconic Sauternes—125, from 1784 to 1991—“than anyone else in the world—including the owner.” Two of these—the 1784 and the 1787—would be Jefferson bottles. The event, at Munich’s Königshof Hotel, began on Sunday, August 30, 1998, and lasted seven days. When not drinking Rodenstock’s wines, from the Rodenstock-designed Riedel Sauternes glass, guests could smoke his cigars; the wine dealer, now fifty-six, had recently launched a signature Hardy Rodenstock line of Robustos and Churchills, rolled in the Dominican Republic and marketed by a Hamburg manufacturer of high-end wine closets.

“This was hard work,” Mario Scheuermann recalled of that year’s Ironman of wine. “It was really the final tasting. It was impossible to top this.”

To the initiated, a roll call of the absent was as revealing as the guest list. None of the core members of Rodenstock’s 1980s collecting circle was there, not Mr. Cheval Blanc or Herr Pétrus or Magnum Uwe. Another major German collector had finally left the fold two years earlier. The collector’s enormous cellar included what was possibly the world’s greatest private assemblage of DRC. He had been amassing a horizontal of 1961 Bordeaux in double magnums, and he was looking for a Super Second called Lynch-Bages. Neither the collector nor Bipin Desai, whose ability to ferret out rarities was topped only by Rodenstock, was able to find such a bottle. Two years later, Rodenstock called to say he had found
two
double magnums of the stuff. The collector told Lynch-Bages owner Jean-Michel Cazes about Rodenstock’s find, and Cazes said he doubted such bottles had ever existed. The collector decided not to buy the bottles, and Rodenstock got angry. Then, in 1996, the collector was seeking an 1847 Yquem, and Rodenstock offered him a bottle at “a friendship price” of 12,000 Deutschmarks, less than one-third the market price. Again, the collector declined, and at that point became non grata at Rodenstock’s tastings.

Desai, too, didn’t attend the 1998 Yquem tasting. Desai had continued to associate with Rodenstock into the mid-nineties, but had gradually become more distant from him. (Among other reasons, Desai was now in touch with a Venezuelan food journalist, who, despite years of inquiries, hadn’t been able to find anyone who could confirm the existence of the Caracas cellar from which Rodenstock had supposedly garnered some of his most impressive bottles.)

Most glaring, given the focus of the tasting, was the absence of Yquem’s proprietor. Rodenstock had invited Lur Saluces; the count told friends he had never opened the invitation. (Elsewhere, he and Eigensatz reviewed the list of Yquem vintages served, and speculated that forty of them, many never before seen on the market, were fakes.)

Some of the changes in attendance resulted from a transformation of the wine scene. The American Group, by now, had effectively disbanded. In the early 1990s, after being diagnosed with cancer and recovering overnight in what he deemed a miracle, fifty-seven-year-old neurosurgeon Marvin Overton had become a Pentecostal evangelist, selling much of his 10,000-bottle collection and giving away the rest. “I was an excellent heathen,” he said, “and now I’m an excellent Christian.” In 1997, Tawfiq Khoury, now sixty-seven and moving to Hawaii, sold much of his collection at a joint Zachys-Christie’s auction for $3.2 million. He kept 10,000 bottles. Lloyd Flatt, after auctioning his cellar in 1990 in the face of a divorce, had begun to rebuild, but the old days of the Group were long over.

Serena Sutcliffe, who attended the Rodenstock blowout in 1989, had signed on as Sotheby’s wine director two years later. Under her direction, the department had made great gains and now was a real challenger to Christie’s. In 1997, Sotheby’s two-day May sale of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 18,000-bottle cellar brought in more than $6 million, making it the largest wine sale up to that time. In 1999, Sotheby’s and Sherry-Lehman would jointly hold an auction in New York of wine from the cellar of Norwegian investor Christen Sveaas, which fetched $14.4 million. (Christie’s had already sold the other half of Sveaas’s cellar, billing it as “the world’s most exclusive private wine cellar ever to have appeared at auction,” for more than $11 million.)

Michael Broadbent couldn’t stand Sutcliffe. Regal and stylish, she was the second woman ever to be certified as a Master of Wine. In contrast to Broadbent, she tended to employ gushing and fanciful descriptors for wine (“jammy wonder” “the Cairo spice bazaar”). And, just as Keith Richards had taken out a policy on his guitar-plucking fingers, she had insured her palate. It was no empty gesture. The eminent English importer and writer Harry Waugh, late in life, had been in a car accident that threw him into his dashboard and killed his sense of smell. For someone whose livelihood depended on her nose, the idea of losing it was horrifying. Robert Parker, too, had such an insurance policy (for $1 million). But it all added up to a glittery, modern persona that chafed against Broadbent’s old-school sensibilities.

Not long before Rodenstock’s 1998 Yquem tasting, Broadbent had taped an interview for
Vintner’s Tales,
a BBC documentary hosted by Jancis Robinson, in which he acknowledged that he refused to attend tastings where Sutcliffe would be present, explaining, “I find that there is a chemistry between people and I find, really, if you want to know the truth, her haughty and rather nose-in-the-air. The word, if you really want the word, is pretentious. They are going to kill me for this. She probably thinks I am a most tiresome person, too.” Sutcliffe declined to appear in the series.

Three years later, Walter Eigensatz would host a tasting at his and his wife’s spa in Bad Schwalbach, and arrange for two cars to fetch the British contingent arriving at the Frankfurt airport. One was to carry Broadbent and Robinson, the other Sutcliffe. When one of the cars broke down on the way to fetch them, the three were forced to spend a car ride together. “It was very awkward,” Eigensatz recalled.

An outsider would never have guessed the extent to which Rodenstock’s reputation had been tarnished. Although privately, leading Bordeaux châteaux owners and the most knowledgeable German, Swiss, and American collectors had long since become disenchanted with Rodenstock, a number of prominent wine world people still held to their opinions of him, or at least to their willingness to accept his largesse. Jancis Robinson remained dreamy about the “pre-revolutionary bouquet” of the Jefferson Mouton opened in 1986, which “was reticent at first and then built up to a great cloud of sweetness hanging over the whole room.” In addition to the big books by Broadbent and Parker, the definitive studies of both Yquem and Margaux still depended heavily on Rodenstock bottles for their tasting notes for the oldest vintages.

Over the course of the weeklong Château d’Yquem Festival, the guest list ballooned from thirty people the first night to sixty at the final, black-tie dinner. Most of Rodenstock’s journalist friends were there, as was his old sommelier Ralf Frenzel, who had since left the business. Broadbent came, along with crystal maker Georg Riedel. From Pomerol, Denis Durantou, of Château l’Eglise Clinet, attended; from the Piemonte came Angelo Gaja, the charismatic Italian wine pioneer. Most of the guests, though, were people new to wine, not professionally involved with it, or not deeply knowledgeable about it. There was the usual passel of German celebrities, as well as a lot of deep-pocketed collectors, many from the German-speaking countries. A few were from America, including a New Jersey food company executive named Steve Verlin, whose enormous personal collection of wine was one of the foundations of the new, celebrated New York restaurant Veritas.

The most telling new contingent was from Asia. Rodenstock had been dealing wine to Japanese industrialists as early as 1990, and by 1994 he had begun inviting Hong Kong collectors to his annual tasting. But the 1998 blowout made clear just how important the Asian market had become to his business. The roster of Hong Kong guests was impressive, and included members of the powerful Liu banking family. Henry Tang, a member of the crown colony’s executive council, and James Tien, chairman of the island’s Chamber of Commerce, held forth in Cantonese while placing large wagers on the identity of certain wines.

E
ACH DAY WAS
staged with German precision. The schedule featured a morning tasting, beginning at 10:00 a.m. sharp, followed by a light lunch (meaning just two courses, one red wine, and one white wine), with a heroic dinner in the evening. At the Sunday-night dinner that kicked off the event, a young Russian tenor sang opera arias. The final evening, small-trumpet virtuoso Otto Sauter performed Baroque pieces.

Rodenstock, on the defensive, had printed booklets for each guest, containing expert analyses of the wine and glass from other Jefferson bottles in the cache. After the corks had been drawn, ever so gently, Rodenstock put them on a silver tray and showed them around the room. The tasting proceeded without much controversy, though even Broadbent found the 1858 to have an odd vanilla character. “I don’t think this is right,” he said aloud. “Something is wrong.”

Rodenstock, for his part, said that the point of the mammoth vertical was to prove conclusively his long-voiced contention that pre-phylloxera wines were superior to post-phylloxera wines. Though this thesis dovetailed conveniently with the commercial niche of a man with a unique penchant for discovering pre-Phylloxera wines, Rodenstock claimed he had made a lot of money investing in stocks and didn’t need to sell wine to live. He said he was mostly retired from the wine business, and that he just wanted to win the pre-phylloxera debate. “I’ve said it before, and now nobody can challenge it,” he crowed, between drafts on one of his namesake Robustos. “Nobody can say Hardy Rodenstock doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and you’re all my witnesses.”

To make the limited quantities of the rarer vintages go further—forty of them dated from the nineteenth century—only nine glasses were poured from each bottle, three people sharing each glass. But each person still drank a daunting amount of wine. In addition to the 125 vintages of Yquem, Rodenstock served 130 other wines during the week. He upped the ante by threatening to eject anyone caught spitting; Broadbent and
Wine Spectator
’s Per-Henrik Mansson took their chances, hiding spittoons in their laps. It was all a bit much for some. “[I]t is crazy, really,” commented Jancis Robinson, who split her glass of older wines with Georg Riedel and Angelo Gaja, “to be chewing over the relative merits of such extraordinary relics.”

Every night, near midnight, the Liu brothers (“Ping and Pong,” as Mario Scheuermann flippantly referred to them) would come down to the lobby with $5,000-per-kilo black tea, given them by their grandmother, which had been fermented in caves for over one hundred years. The brothers said a cup of the tea would prevent a hangover. The first night, everyone kind of laughed about it. The second night, they sipped at it. The third night, people were begging for it. “The tea was very good,” said a participant. “I have no idea whether it really helped.”

R
ODENSTOCK WAITED UNTIL
Friday morning to serve the Jefferson bottles. That day, he wore a royal-blue dress shirt with a white collar, a striped tie with matching pocket square, a double-breasted navy suit, and large aviator-style eyeglasses. He and his wife sat at a small round table with soccer legend Franz Beckenbauer and his wife.

Beckenbauer was given the honor of opening the 1784. The wine was decanted through a metal funnel filter. Everyone wanted a look. Angelo Gaja peered intently at the engraving. Georg Riedel posed with it for photos.

Jancis Robinson tasted both Jefferson wines and was convinced they were old. “They were the deepest of deep browns with a slightly greenish rim. At first they smelled slightly moldy,” she recalled later, “but then the miracle of great old wine began to work, and the scent of the wines themselves came through. The 1784 had a gentle, distinctly feminine fragrance of roses, with a great persistence of flavor that reached a peak about fifteen minutes after the wines were poured. The more assertive, longer-lasting 1787 had chunkier, richer, distinctly autumnal aromas of burnt sugar and undergrowth.”

To
Wine Spectator
’s Mansson, a correspondent based in Switzerland, the 1784 “tasted as if it were decades younger, perhaps from the mid-1800s,” while the 1787 “was clean but showed the passage of two centuries in its faded fruit flavors and a dry, tart finish.”

O
NE OF THE
lasting mysteries of the Jefferson bottles had been the exact number Rodenstock started out with. Though he told friends, at the time of the discovery, that there were twenty-four of the bottles, he had always been vague when speaking with journalists. The most exact he would get was to say there were “more than a dozen.” Even Michael Broadbent had been led to believe there were only “thirteen or fourteen bottles in all.” Friends explained this fuzziness away as a shrewd businessman’s tactic, saying it was easier to make something seem rare if one didn’t mention that there were twenty-three more where that came from. Skeptics saw the reticence as one more question mark around the bottles’ authenticity, countering that it was easier to indefinitely come up with new bottles if there wasn’t a record of how many there were to begin with.