The Billionaire's Vinegar (28 page)

Rodenstock’s default meant that Koch would receive a U.S. court judgment in his favor. His challenge then would be to collect from Rodenstock, which would mean navigating the uncertain terrain of international conventions and German civil procedure. “He’s fucked” was Brad Goldstein’s legalese. “I think we can attach liens under The Hague and in Germany.” Koch was also contemplating filing a second suit against Rodenstock, this one dealing not with the Jefferson bottles but with all the other fakes in his cellar that Koch had been able to link to Rodenstock.

Even if Koch was able to collect the $500,000 he now claimed he had paid for the Jefferson bottles—a questionable figure, given that a Farr Vintners invoice showed Koch to have paid just £116,000 (about $200,000) for three of the four bottles—it was a fraction of what he had spent on the investigation and lawsuit. But Goldstein continued to insist that it had never been about the money for Koch. “If the court says this guy’s a fraudster,” Goldstein said, “it’s a victory.”

It didn’t end the appetite to buy or sell Jefferson bottles. The Antique Wine Company, which had sold the 1787 Yquem the year before, persisted in offering implausible rarities. In the spring, the firm rolled out “The Great Antique Chateau Lafite-Rothschild Collection,” forty-eight vintages including a 1787. Antique Wine Company managing director Stephen Williams made much ado about having subjected the wine to “molecular” and “chemical” analysis, even though such tests could prove only that the wine’s age predated the nuclear era. In late July, the firm offered “Chateau d’Yquem—the greatest ever cellar.” This collection was not marketed publicly, on the firm’s website, but announced in a message sent to a private e-mail list. In addition to numerous early-nineteenth-century vintages, the Yquems included four eighteenth-century vintages. One of them was a 1787 Jefferson bottle, priced at $156,100. Although the Antique Wine Company billed the collection as being of “impeccable provenance,” when pressed as to the Jefferson bottle’s origin, a representative said, “This bottle was found in a private cellar in the United States. We do not have full information on how it got there or its previous ownership. It appears to be one of several bottles sold by Hardy Rodenstock, the discredited German wine dealer.”

T
HE
J
EFFERSON BOTTLES
were
the
example of how people turned suggestible when it came to wine. It was precisely the fact that drinkers brought their own interpretations to wine that led subjects in a University of Bordeaux study to mistake white wine for red, and that led impressionable consumers to decide they liked a wine because Parker did, to buy first growths because they were first, and to detect notes of sweet Cuban tobacco only after someone else had.

The bottles were never about what was in them. The people who bought them weren’t the geeks who got off on comparing the respective degrees of deadness of a 1787 and a 1791. Kip Forbes didn’t pay $156,000 for a taste experience worth $156,000. All those who bought the bottles did so after significant doubts had been aired. And all later learned about the serious challenge posed by the Frericks case: Forbes was notified by Broadbent; Koch had contacted Rodenstock; Shanken’s magazine had run an article about the case. Nor was Rodenstock, evasive and defensive when challenged, ever particularly convincing.

But each buyer had wanted his own piece of frozen history. It was enough that Thomas Jefferson’s initials were right there on the bottles, that the bottles said Lafite and Margaux and Branne-Mouton and Yquem, and that Michael Broadbent had stamped them with his approval. A standard of plausible confirmability had been met. “Let me tell you something,” Bill Sokolin said. “As far as I was concerned, that bottle was real because I believed it. And,” Sokolin added, “because I tasted it, and it was garbage. It was garbage. So I said, ‘Jesus, maybe it’s real.’”

As with all successful cons, the marks and the grifter had been collaborators. One sold the illusion that the others were desperate to buy. But the marks had grown up. Now Asia and Russia were the preferred playing fields for Rodenstock and other purveyors of dubious bottles. It was the once-gullible Americans bringing a European manipulator to justice, a rare comeuppance for two centuries of Old World snobbery.

No one would have shaken his head so sadly at the affair as the author of the Declaration of Independence, whom Koch misidentified, when eulogizing “the mystique” of the bottles, as a framer of the Constitution. In the last years of his life, Jefferson was reduced to drinking lesser wines. He abandoned his earlier habits of ordering straight from the châteaux, instead employing an agent in Nice and asking for simple wines of that region, even expressing a willingness to buy an imitation-Bordeaux merchant’s blend. Thomas Jefferson was drinking cheap table wine, and very happily so.

N
OTES

All quotations not cited here or in the text are drawn from interviews I conducted or incidents I observed. In these notes, I use several abbreviations:
Papers,
for
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson,
edited by Julian Boyd, et al. (Princeton: 1950–);
WS
for
Wine Spectator; VWGJ
for the
Vinifera Wine Growers Journal; MAZ
for
Münchner Abendszeitung; NYT
for the
New York Times;
TJ for Thomas Jefferson; and JMB for J. Michael Broadbent. Currency conversions are based, in each instance, on contemporaneous exchange rates.

1. L
OT
337

For the bid steps and saleroom dialogue in chapters 1 and 6, I relied on a report, “A Piece of History,” published in
The New Yorker
’s Talk of the Town section on January 20, 1986.

more than twice as big
“Wine,”
Financial Times,
August 17, 1985.

more than 160,000 copies
Simon Loftus,
Anatomy of the Wine Trade
(New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 154.

When he arrived at a wine gathering
Jancis Robinson,
Tasting Pleasure
(New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 170.

“black as Egypt’s night”
JMB,
The New Great Vintage Wine Book
(New York: Knopf, 1991), 63.

reminded him of Sophia Loren
Robinson,
Tasting Pleasure,
183.

“schoolgirls’ uniforms”
Ibid.

oldest authenticated vintage red wine
“Oldest Bordeaux? Yes; Jefferson’s? Maybe,”
NYT,
October 30, 1985.

a historical researcher in America
Ibid.

the snow horse of
Robinson,
Tasting Pleasure,
146.

he opened the bidding at £10,000
This is according to the contemporaneous
New Yorker
account; Broadbent recalls opening the bidding somewhere between £3,000 and £5,000.

Only after Kip Forbes bid £50,000
“Passion vs. Reason in Wine Collecting,”
WS,
February 28, 1998.

The previous record
“Record Wine Prices,”
WS,
May 31, 1988.

2. I
NCOGNITO

an order for 250 bottles of Lafite
Letter from TJ to Pichard, February 22, 1788,
Papers
XII, 617–8; translation in John Hailman’s definitive
Thomas Jefferson on Wine
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 148.

legendary in the City of Light
James M. Gabler,
Passions: The Wines and Travels of Thomas Jefferson
(Baltimore: Bacchus Press, 1995), 22.

“a savage of the mountains of America”
Marie Kimball,
Jefferson: The Scene of Europe
(New York: Coward-McCann, 1950), 15.

a powdered wig and a topaz ring
Hailman,
Thomas Jefferson on Wine,
12, 213.

His mansion on the Champs-Élysées
Gabler,
Passions,
30–31.

a household staff that included a
frotteur Howard C. Rice, Jr.,
Thomas Jefferson’s Paris
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 40.

Jefferson hosted frequent dinner parties
William Howard Adams,
The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 19.

Franklin, for one, kept a substantial cellar
Hailman,
Thomas Jefferson on Wine,
75.

“proof that God loves us”
Ibid., 76.

he justified the trip
Letter from TJ to James Madison, January 30, 1787,
Papers
XI, 92–97.

“your voyage is rather for your pleasure”
Letter from Martha Jefferson to TJ, March 8, 1787,
Papers
XI, 203–4.

first part constructed
Hailman,
Thomas Jefferson on Wine,
38.

One story, passed down among Jefferson’s slaves
“Once the Slave of Thomas Jefferson,”
New York World,
January 30, 1898.

first planted vines
Hailman,
Thomas Jefferson on Wine,
372.

encouraged an Italian immigrant
Ibid., 47.

a single trunk
Letter from TJ to Madame de Tott, April 5, 1787,
Papers
XI, 271.

Wanting to experience the real France
Letter from TJ to Chastellux, April 4, 1787,
Papers
XI, 261–62.

he traveled incognito
Letter from TJ to William Short, March 15, 1787,
Papers
XI, 214–16.

basked in the scattered ruins
Letter from TJ to Madame de Tessé, March 20, 1787,
Papers
XI, 226–28.

talked his way into people’s homes
Letter from TJ to Lafayette, April 11, 1787,
Papers
XI, 283–85.

closely studied…the techniques of wine making
TJ, “Notes of a Tour into the Southern Parts of France, &c.,”
Papers
XI, 455–56.

compulsively inquisitive…spoke French well enough
Ibid., 455–57.

luxuriated in the southern sun
Letter from TJ to Willam Short, March 27, 1787,
Papers
XI, 246–48.

soaked his aching wrist ten times a day
Letter from TJ to William Short, April 7, 1787,
Papers
XI, 280–81.

ate the tiny thrushes called ortolans
TJ, “Notes of a Tour,”
Papers
XI, 454.

for nine days, Jefferson left the road
Letter from TJ to William Short, May 21, 1787.

trees full of nightingales
Letter from TJ to Martha Jefferson, May 21, 1787,
Papers
XI, 368–69.

loved traveling this way…wheelless atop the barge
Letter from TJ to William Short, May 21, 1787,
Papers
XI, 371–73.

wouldn’t write a single letter to her
E. M. Halliday,
Understanding Thomas Jefferson
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 69.

corn, rye, and beans…nothing but grapevines
TJ, “Notes of a Tour,”
Papers
XI, 454.

glass windows
Letter from TJ to William Short, May 21, 1787,
Papers
XI, 371–73.

“those seaports with which we trade”
Letter from TJ to William Carmichael, February 18, 1787,
Papers
XI, 164–65.

The place was booming
Hugh Johnson,
The Story of Wine—New Illustrated Edition
(London: Mitchell Beazley, 2005), 138, 145; Arthur Young,
Travels in France & Italy During the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789
(J.M. Dent & Sons/E.P. Dutton, 1915), 57–59.

checked into the Hôtel de Richelieu
TJ,
Papers, Second Series: Jefferson’s Memorandum Books
(edited by Bear and Stanton), 668.

a portable copying press
Letter from TJ to William Stephens Smith, January 15, 1787,
Papers
XI, 46.

had been released from debtor’s prison Jefferson’s Memorandum Books
I, 668n.

“on acct. of…Marocco
[sic]
mission”
Ibid.

bet him a bottle of Burgundy
Letter from TJ to William Short, June 1, 1787,
Papers
XI, 395–96.

visited the ruins
TJ, “Notes of a Tour,”
Papers
XI, 454–55.

day trip southwest to Château Haut-Brion
Ibid., 457.

On his third night in the city Jefferson’s Memorandum Books
I, 668.

The girls who danced and sang there
Young,
Travels in France,
57–58.

enjoyed meals…admired the procession of elms
TJ, “Notes of a Tour,”
Papers
XI, 455.

The quay
Young,
Travels in France,
56–57.

cream-colored oxen
TJ, “Notes of a Tour,”
Papers
XI, 454.

Increasingly the wine was going
André L. Simon,
Bottlescrew Days
(Boston: Small Maynard & Company, 1927), 161.

recent reinvention of the cork and the glass bottle
Johnson,
Story of Wine,
104–6.

the development of cylindrical bottles
Ibid., 164.

“fury of planting”
Nicholas Faith,
The Winemasters of Bordeaux
(London: Prion, 1999), 29–32; Johnson,
The Story of Wine,
140.

a specific hierarchy
Simon,
Bottlescrew Days,
157–58.

“of fine quality”
Letter from TJ to Bondfield, January 24, 1786,
Papers
IX, 210–11.

two livres each
Gabler,
Passions,
132.

the quality pyramid…150,000 bottles annually
TJ, “Notes of a Tour,”
Papers
XI, 454–56.

Pepys
Faith,
Winemasters,
17.

Locke
Ibid., 24.

the
London Gazette
was announcing
Ibid., 26.

The Duc de Richelieu
Faith,
Winemasters,
43–44; Cyril Ray,
Lafite
(New York: Stein & Day, 1969), 20–21.

By the time of Jefferson’s visit in 1787
“Notes of a Tour,”
Papers
XI, 456.

Falernian
Johnson,
The Story of Wine,
36.

Steinwein
Ibid., 155.

finest available year
TJ, “Notes of a Tour,”
Papers,
XI, 457.

“the best vintage…in nine years”
Letter from TJ to Alexander Donald, February 15, 1788,
Papers
XII, 594–95.

252 bottles of 1784 Haut-Brion
Letter to TJ from Feger, Gra-mont & Cie., June 2, 1787, and footnote,
Papers
XI, 396–97.

“I cannot deny myself the pleasure”
Letter from TJ to Francis Eppes, May 26, 1787,
Papers
XI, 378–79.

personal taxonomy of wine
“Jefferson’s Tasting Vocabulary,” R. de Treville Lawrence, III, ed.,
Jefferson and Wine
(The Plains, Virginia: The Vinifera Wine Growers Association, 1989), 108–13.

resolved to make it his standard practice
Letter from TJ to John Bondfield, December 18, 1787,
Papers
XII, 434.

“it is from them alone”
Letter from TJ to Alexander Donald, September 17, 1787,
Papers
XII, 132–34.

Dutch merchants dosed claret
Faith,
Winemasters,
14.

the Bordeaux negociants
Ibid., 67–71.

The Pardoner warned his listeners
Rod Phillips,
A Short History of Wine
(New York: Ecco, 2000), 109.

“Trade morality has come to such a pass…”
H. Warner Allen,
The Romance of Wine
(New York: Dover, 1971), 243.

“the Golden Age of Wine Faking”
Ibid., 238–40.

“coloured to resemble claret”
Faith,
Winemasters,
69.

Paris officials analyzed
Phillips,
A Short History of Wine,
199.

spoke with a broker named Desgrands
“Notes of a Tour,”
Papers
XI, 457.

“I would prefer to receive it directly”
Letter from TJ to d’Yquem, December 18, 1787,
Papers
XII, 435; translation in Lawrence,
Jefferson and Wine,
70–71.

On September 17, 1789, Jefferson hosted
Gouverneur Morris,
A Diary of the French Revolution,
edited by Beatrix Cary Davenport (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), vol. 1, 219–23.

chilly out…a fire crackled
Ibid., 221.

a spare, half-empty look
Adams,
The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson,
21.

much of the contents had already been crated
Ibid.

what he thought would be a six-month leave
Ibid., 22.

guards be posted outside
Rice,
Thomas Jefferson’s Paris,
117.

his house had been robbed
Ibid.

candlesticks
Adams,
The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson,
291.

sat down to eat at four-thirty
Morris,
A Diary of the French Revolution,
vol. 1, 219–23.

James Hemings had learned French cooking
Rice,
Thomas Jefferson’s Paris,
40.

eighty-six packing cases
Rice,
Thomas Jefferson’s Paris,
122.

hampers full of various wines
“List of Baggage Shipped by Jefferson from France,”
Papers
XV, 375–77.

two containers earmarked for John Jay and George Washington
Letter from TJ to John Jay, September 17, 1789,
Papers
XV, 436–37.

Gouverneur Morris bet William Short
George Green Shackelford,
Jefferson’s Adoptive Son
(Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 43.

majordomo was left to dismantle
Letter from TJ to William Short, March 12, 1790,
Papers
XVI, 228–30.

Amid the growing chaos
Letter from William Short to TJ, August 15, 1790,
Papers
XVII, 392–97.

One hundred twenty-five bottles of 1784 Haut-Brion
Letter from John Bondfield to TJ, xber 6, 1788,
Papers
XIV, 336–37.

never arrived
Letter from TJ to John Bondfield, May 17, 1788,
Papers
XIII, 171–72.

short one box of assorted wines
Letter from TJ to James Brown, January 3, 1790, cited in Hailman,
Thomas Jefferson on Wine,
202.

3. T
OMB
R
AIDER

Michael Broadbent vividly recounted the story of his first big auction in “The Anatomy of a Sale,” in
Christie’s Wine Companion,
edited by Patrick Matthews (Topsfield, Massachusetts: Salem House Publishers, 1987), 121–31. Four key sources on the development of the Bordeaux wine trade, and of English claret drinking, were Nicholas Faith’s
Winemasters;
Hugh Johnson’s
Story of Wine;
Edmund Penning-Rowsell’s book
The Wines of Bordeaux
(London: Penguin, 1989) and his article “The First Growths of Bordeaux,” published in the 1987
Christie’s Wine Companion.
A useful article on the history of Christie’s and wine auctions was JMB’s “A Brief History of Wine Auctions,”
VWGJ,
Fall 1986.