The Billionaire's Vinegar (27 page)

T
HOSE WHO HAD
vouched for the bottles over the last two decades varied in their responses. Jancis Robinson was quick to put news of the suits on her website, writing that “I should perhaps have smelled a rat,” but pointing out that she had mentioned the questions about the authenticity of Rodenstock’s bottles in a late-1990s newspaper column. Alexandre de Lur Saluces, who in 1986 had called Rodenstock “my friend” and said he saw “no reason to doubt the authenticity” of the Jefferson bottles, now stated that he had always been skeptical of the bottle he tasted in 1985.
Winespectator.com
, in the awkward position of belonging to someone who owned one of the bottles, stayed silent.
Decanter.com
published a story that dealt with the role of Broadbent, despite his being one of its star columnists. Robert Parker’s opinion of the non-Jefferson Rodenstock bottles he drank in 1995 hadn’t changed: “[T]he wines I tasted were great wines—real or fake.” Robinson handled the delicate matter of her old friend Broadbent’s role by not mentioning it in her write-up of the scandal, instead leaving that work to a reader’s post she published on her site. “I knew he’d had a tough time in the [newspaper],” Robinson later explained. “I suppose I was being a bit protective of him.”

Those who had sold the bottles began pointing fingers, all in the same direction. Farr Vintners, which had sold more of the bottles on Rodenstock’s behalf than anyone else, emphasized that it had been a mere conduit. “Our position,” Farr’s Stephen Browett wrote in an e-mail, “is that we made it clear to our buyers at that time that we were not guaranteeing the quality of the bottles and made it absolutely clear that Mr. Rodenstock was the source of them. We just took a commission. At that time the wines had been authenticated by Michael Broadbent of Christie’s who was regarded as the world’s leading expert.” In another e-mail, Browett added, “I don’t think that anyone would have bought or sold these bottles without his expert opinion.”

“Looking back, more questions could have been asked” was the gentle bureaucratese used by Christie’s North America wine head Richard Brierley as he threw his department’s venerable, seventy-nine-year-old chairman emeritus under the bus. The auction house told the
Wall Street Journal
that Broadbent wasn’t available to comment.

Privately, Broadbent was shaken by the news of the lawsuits, if not enlightened. A few days after they were filed, he said Rodenstock was “an absolute fool for not revealing where he got the bottles,” as if there were still possibly a legitimate answer to that question. In Koch’s lawsuit and the subsequent news coverage, Broadbent saw “an obsessive witch-hunt.”

There was a general sadness among Broadbent’s many admirers, who could not deny that the affair had left him, as one collector put it, “very damaged.” His old-vintage bible, which continued to be quoted from liberally in every new Christie’s auction catalog, was riddled with tasting notes from Rodenstock bottles. Nearly all of the rarest wines, in a book premised on its comprehensiveness and inclusion of wines almost no other living person had tasted, Broadbent had drunk courtesy of the German. Any number of others had been drunk courtesy of friends of Rodenstock, and had likely come from him.

With his 2002 edition of his big book, far from quietly cutting back on the number of notes derived from Rodenstock tastings, Broadbent strewed them throughout. No one collector appeared as often as he, and Broadbent wrote of Rodenstock’s “close friends, among whose number I am lucky to count myself…Hardy is a remarkably modest man, but jealous of his sources, though many of his rare wines have been bought at Christie’s. Through his immense generosity I have not only had the opportunity to taste an enormous range of great and very rare wines, but have met a very wide circle of enthusiasts and collectors, becoming one of the privileged fixtures at Hardy’s events.” Unlike the previous edition, in this one Broadbent included no special appendix delving into the provenance of the Jefferson bottles.

No one was suggesting that Broadbent had had criminal intent, but only that he had put on salesman’s blinders. And again the Hitler diaries came rushing back with their striking parallels. One of the reputations that suffered most in that earlier scandal had been that of the Oxbridge historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who authenticated the diaries. Trevor-Roper’s misguided authentication, however, evaporated in a matter of days. Broadbent continued to insist that the Jefferson bottles were legitimate for more than twenty years, through many Rodenstock bottle sales, innumerable tastings of Rodenstock wines, and multiple editions of his increasingly Rodenstock-reliant book.

“I think he felt vulnerable,” Jancis Robinson said later. “This has been a very important part of what he has done, but I think even today he has been convinced that he has enough evidence.”

And Broadbent wasn’t giving up the fight. Twenty years before, the
New York Post
had reported that the real buyer of the 1784 Jefferson Yquem purchased by the “teetotaler” named Iyad Shiblaq was Dodi Al-Fayed. Broadbent knew otherwise. Following the 1986 auction, he and his wife had dined with Shiblaq at the Jordanian’s gambling club in London. Shiblaq himself had been the purchaser of the bottle.

Now Broadbent tracked him down and persuaded him to lend his bottle to Broadbent so he could have his own experts examine the engraving. Afterward, Broadbent declared that Christie’s had commissioned the new examination and that “we can confirm that the engraving is exactly correct, French and of the period,” but a Christie’s spokesman disavowed knowledge of the reappraisal, and Broadbent wouldn’t allow independent inspection of the experts’ report. In a chatty fax to Rodenstock in November, Broadbent revealed that the new appraisal had been done by Hugo Morley-Fletcher, the former head of Christie’s ceramics and glass department, who had done the original appraisal of the 1787 Lafite back in 1985; he was now a consultant who served as an expert on the TV program
Antiques Roadshow UK
. Koch’s team remained confident that the Shiblaq bottle was as fake as all the others.

In January, Broadbent underwent major heart surgery. Afterward, he cut down on his public appearances. When he attended an event honoring a Bordeaux winemaker in London, Jancis Robinson thought he looked “very frail.” In early May he retired from Christie’s board of directors, though he remained a senior consultant to the wine department.

T
HE RARE-WINE POOL
was indelibly tainted. “Whoever’s doing this,” Bipin Desai had said of fakes, the month before Koch filed his suit, “they have to be caught. They’re spoiling the old wine market—slowly, steadily destroying it like a cancer.” Estimates of the number of fakes in circulation were usually given as 5 percent of the market, but ran much higher for certain cult bottles. Suddenly the flashier offerings of some merchants began to seem almost ridiculous. There was the provenanceless 1784 Lafite advertised in the catalog for Christie’s September auction in New York, which the auction house yanked from the sale at the last minute. There was the 1787 Yquem sold earlier in the year by the Antique Wine Company in London to a private American collector for $90,000. Rumors were rife that some collectors were knowingly unloading fakes from their cellars at auction.

Koch’s lawyers now sent letters to Christie’s, Zachys, Farr Vintners, Royal Wine Merchants (the company of Jeff Sokolin and Daniel Oliveros), a Washington State importer named Bordeaux Wine Locators, which had been the consignor of many of the questionable bottles Koch had bought at auction, and collector Eric Greenberg, among others, warning them not to destroy any documents. Koch’s attorneys were getting ready to serve a raft of subpoenas. “That’s the day a lot of assholes are going to pucker,” said Brad Goldstein, who seemed invigorated by the whole affair.

Goldstein snidely referred to Greenberg, who had been invited by Steven Spielberg to join the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and then been given its Ambassadors for Humanity award, as “Mr. Shoah.” Goldstein was practically salivating at the prospect of deposing Rodenstock: “It will be a show trial.” The aggressive newsmagazine
Stern
was “like the Gestapo,” Goldstein said approvingly. A German journalist who seemed to be falling prey to Rodenstock’s misdirection, on the other hand, was wasting his time “separating fly shit from pepper.”

A lot of stones were about to be overturned. Numerous wine-world icons—Shanken and
Wine Spectator
, Parker and
The Wine Advocate,
Rodenstock, Robinson, Broadbent and Christie’s, Farr Vintners, Riedel—had been touched by the affair. Scores of tasting notes would need to be reconsidered, if not discarded. Jancis Robinson hopefully suggested that the whole thing could be “cathartic” for the business. She had always considered the Jefferson bottles “an intriguing and suspicious mystery,” she said later, but when she now asked Rodenstock exactly how many of the bottles had been in his original find, and he answered “about thirty,” she was struck by his vagueness about such valuable objects.

Robinson found herself becoming more cautious. When she was asked to conduct a tasting in March at the Palais Coburg in Vienna, which would feature a ’34 Romanée-Conti, she asked for a complete list of where the hosts had obtained the wines. “It was probably looking a gift horse in the mouth, and I felt bad doing it,” she said later, “but I didn’t know them.”

The same month, the
Wall Street Journal
reported that the FBI’s art fraud unit had opened an investigation into counterfeit wine, and that a grand jury in New York was hearing evidence. Subpoenas had been sent to Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Zachys.

In Bordeaux, where for years most châteaux had done little to stanch the problem, some owners were jubilant, or at least ready to face the problem head-on. “We are very pleased,” said Christian Moueix of Château Pétrus, “that this has finally become a scandal.” When Robinson traveled to Bordeaux in April for the annual
en primeur
barrel tastings, the first thing that Château Margaux owner Corinne Mentzelopoulos said to her was “Now, what are we going to do about this fake business?”

If any person or business was going to benefit from the mess, it was Sotheby’s, and more than one observer saw a subtle Sotheby’s revenge plot playing out. Christie’s had long been aligned with Rodenstock, and not only through Broadbent. When Christopher Burr, who briefly headed Christie’s wine department after Broadbent, helped put together a tasting in Paris in 2001, he later wrote that it had been a challenge “assembling the best of these wines from unquestionable provenance, no mean task, but fortune and some visionary wine men helped, such as Hardy Rodenstock—a legendary wine collector.” It was entirely possible that the bottles were all real, but if Rodenstock’s name stood for one thing, it was questionable, not unquestionable, provenance.

Serena Sutcliffe, meanwhile, had spent the last fifteen years positioning the Sotheby’s wine department as the discriminating auctioneers, the house that didn’t sell Rodenstock’s bottles and that was vocal about the rising problem of counterfeit wine. While still lagging behind Christie’s wine department overall, Sotheby’s had pulled ahead of it in the important North American market. Koch, having used Christie’s when he sold part of his collection in 1999, had since seemed to subtly shift his allegiance to its rival. In early 2006 he was scheduled to host a wine event with Sotheby’s North American wine director, and it was a former Sotheby’s wine head, David Molyneux-Berry, whom Koch hired to vet his cellar as part of the investigation. It was also Sotheby’s that tipped off Russell Frye to the problems of his cellar and put him in touch with Molyneux-Berry, through whom he joined forces with Koch. As if to cosmically rub the turn of fortunes in Broadbent’s face, five weeks before Koch filed suit, France, in recognition of her promotion of its wines, made Serena Sutcliffe the first member of the British wine trade to be awarded the Légion d’honneur.

“Sotheby’s must be gleeful!” Broadbent remarked bitterly after Koch’s suit was filed.

I
N
J
UNE
2007, nearly a year after Koch sued, Rodenstock found a way, at least temporarily, to wriggle free. He had hired a German lawyer at a New York firm to defend him and endured months of pretrial motions and preliminary discovery. On June 1, Rodenstock’s lawyers received a stack of discovery documents from Koch, including the e-mail correspondence between Koch’s office and Andreas Klein, Rodenstock’s former Munich neighbor and landlord. Later that same day, Rodenstock sent a fax directly to the judge overseeing
Koch v. Rodenstock
and pled his case. Koch, he said, was “a psychopath.”

“You will surely understand that I don’t want to have dealings with such a person,” Rodenstock wrote, adding that “the quarrel with him has come up to a more than primitive level I don’t want to bear any longer.”

Later, Rodenstock informed the court that he had spent more than $150,000 in legal fees and was not able “to continue to participate in the proceeding.” His lawyer petitioned the court to withdraw as Rodenstock’s counsel, and Magistrate Judge Debra Freeman scheduled a teleconference with Rodenstock’s and Koch’s lawyers and Rodenstock himself. Rodenstock, however, refused to take part, saying through his lawyer that he “cannot accept the friendly offer of a telephone conference, for which he thanks the court.”

The court was not moved by his gratitude. “Contrary to Mr. Rodenstock’s prior understanding,” Judge Freeman wrote in a June 22 order, “the Court is not extending him a ‘friendly offer’ to participate in a conference. Rather, the Court is
ordering
Mr. Rodenstock to appear on July 5, in person or by telephone,
and he is cautioned that his failure to appear may result in the imposition of sanctions against him.
”

Rodenstock asked for and was granted a week’s reprieve, and in the meantime his Munich lawyer sent a letter to Andreas Klein—and to Klein’s mother-in-law and former employer (from whose e-mail server Klein had written to Koch)—threatening a libel suit. The New York case conference finally took place on July 11, in a courthouse in lower Manhattan, only one block from City Hall, where Rodenstock had married Helga Lehner in October 1991 (on that occasion, he had given his father’s name as “Alfred Görke Rodenstock”). It was a strangely disembodied affair. Both Koch and Rodenstock dialed into the courtroom’s speakerphone, with an interpreter hired by Rodenstock’s New York lawyer standing by to translate Rodenstock’s testimony. Rodenstock said that because he had no residence in the United States, and hadn’t sold bottles to Koch directly, he had been “sued in an illegal way” and was not subject to the New York court’s jurisdiction. He no longer intended to pay for counsel, or even to take part in the suit. In short, and after several warnings from the judge, he stated his intent to default. He would fight Koch in The Hague, if necessary, Rodenstock said. Judge Freeman asked if Rodenstock wished to say anything else. “Thank you very much for everything and for the phone conference,” Rodenstock said.