The Billionaire's Vinegar (3 page)

Claret, as the English called the light, blended style of red wine particular to Bordeaux, was well established by now, as were the top vineyards; a specific hierarchy had been generally acknowledged since at least 1730, when Bordeaux brokers divided the vineyards into three classes. The ranking mirrored the prices different wines fetched on the market and had been consistent for more than fifty years.

Until now, when Jefferson had ordered wine from Bordeaux, he had done so through an agent, and his requests had been generic. Just a year earlier he had asked John Bondfield, America’s consul in Bordeaux who had supplied Ben Franklin with wine, to arrange a shipment of twelve dozen bottles of red Bordeaux and twelve dozen of white, “of fine quality,” in either bottles or casks, as Bondfield saw fit. For these bottles, Jefferson paid two livres each. Now that he was in Bordeaux, Jefferson could see the quality pyramid for himself. He learned that the best white Bordeaux came from the Sauternes district, and that the best of these was a sweet wine called Yquem, which sold the equivalent of 150,000 bottles annually. And he learned that four red wines, from vineyards planted in the seventeenth century, fetched the highest prices of all.

Haut-Brion, variously spelled by English writers as Ho Bryan, Oberon, and Obrian, had been the first of the Bordeaux wines to be specifically sought after in England. In 1663 the diarist Samuel Pepys noted that he drank “a sort of French wine called Ho Bryan that hath a good and most particular taste that I ever met with,” and fourteen years later the political philosopher John Locke visited the estate. By around 1700, the
London Gazette
was announcing coffeehouse auctions of “Lafitte, Margouze and La Tour,” all located on the tongue of land northwest of the city known as the Médoc. The Duc de Richelieu, a libertine exiled to Bordeaux in the middle of the century, held all-night orgies and developed a taste for the wines of the region, in particular Lafite. Upon his return to the Versailles court of Louis XV, the duke spread the Lafite gospel, telling the king it was “the secret of eternal youth,” and it became a fashionable wine. By the time of Jefferson’s visit in 1787, the privileged quartet that would subsequently be known as the
premiers crus,
or first growths, sold for up to two and a half times the price of the next-best wines. Haut-Brion sold the equivalent of 75,000 bottles a year, Latour 125,000, Margaux 150,000, and Lafite 175,000.

Jefferson recorded all this, as well as the names of several second-and third-tier wines, among the latter a wine called Mouton. He also learned about Bordeaux vintages. The rule of vintage variation was ancient: If a crop’s quality fluctuates with annual weather, so must anything made from that crop. The most famous wine in ancient Rome was called Falernian, and its 121 BC vintage was legendary. AD 1540 was a storied vintage for Steinwein, a white wine favored by King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

In Bordeaux’s off years, vintage purity fell by the wayside, and vintages would be blended; in good years, the wines were made separately. When Jefferson visited the region, the finest available year was 1784, “the best vintage which has happened in nine years,” as Jefferson wrote to a friend. “I may safely assure you therefore that, according to the taste of this country and of England there cannot be a bottle of better Bordeaux produced in France.”

Before sailing north from the Quai on May 29, five days after his arrival, Jefferson put his new knowledge to use, ordering 252 bottles of 1784 Haut-Brion from a local merchant, including seventy-two bottles to be sent directly to his brother-in-law Francis Eppes in Virginia. “I cannot deny myself the pleasure of asking you to participate of a small parcel of wine I have been chusing for myself,” he wrote to Eppes. “I do it the rather as it will furnish you a specimen of what is the very best Bourdeaux wine.” Instead of Haut-Brion, however, the merchant filled the order with 1784 Margaux.

Jefferson got back to Paris on June 10, 1787, refreshed and perhaps ready for another romantic attachment. The next month his younger daughter, Polly, arrived from America, attended by a light-skinned, fourteen-year-old slave girl named Sally Hemings.

Despite his three-and-a-half-month trip, Jefferson’s connoisseurship was in one respect still a blunt instrument. His personal taxonomy of wine was divided into a mere five categories: sweet, acid, dry, silky, and astringent. The characteristics he was most concerned about were rudimentary things like hardiness, since the wine needed to survive long, bumpy journeys. In his letters he would enthuse about a particular wine’s “strength” or “flavor,” or speak of “the best vintage” of a wine or of “the most celebrated” producers. That was about as precise as he got.

But in a number of important ways, Jefferson’s 1787 trip had made him the greatest wine connoisseur writing in any language at the time. Learning the best vineyards and vintages was part of it, but two shifts in Jefferson’s behavior hinted at a deeper, more hard-won sophistication. He was no longer asking someone else which wines to buy, instead deciding for himself. And he was becoming skeptical about the integrity of the wines, an issue seemingly as old as wine itself. He now resolved to make it his standard practice to order wine straight from the châteaux. That September he told a friend that, when it came to buying direct, he could “assure you that it is from them alone that genuine wine is to be got, and not from any wine merchant whatever.”

There were all sorts of reasons and ways to fiddle with the product. Some meddling was customary “improvement,” and some was the work of charlatans. Dutch merchants dosed claret with brandy to help it survive rugged journeys to distant markets, and added sugar and spices to bring it in line with the Low Country taste for sweeter, more resinous wine. The Bordeaux negociants who sold to the English market tailored the wine to that nation’s gin-and-Portbenumbed palates by spiking it with stronger Spanish or French wine as well as distilled spirits. Newer wine might be mixed with old to extend its shelf life; water, or inferior wine, might be mixed with good stuff in order to stretch it; less appealing vintages were worked on to make them taste better.

None of this was new. In the
Canterbury Tales,
the Pardoner warned his listeners to avoid “mysteriously” mixed wines. Much earlier, Pliny bemoaned the problem of doctored wine: “Now not even the greatest can enjoy pure wines anywhere…. Trade morality has come to such a pass that only labels and cellar names are sold, and the must is adulterated while it is still in the press. And the result is a strange paradox; the wine of least repute is least sophisticated and most wholesome.” The Romans were so liberal in their manipulations—using smoke, fire, and seawater to accelerate the aging process—that British writer H. Warner Allen would later describe their era as “the Golden Age of Wine Faking.”

It remained a problem in Thomas Jefferson’s day. An early-nineteenth-century recipe called for a “very inferior French wine sold to the adulterators” to be “mixed with rough cider, and coloured to resemble claret” by adding cochineal and vegetable dye. Just seven years after Jefferson’s visit to Bordeaux, Paris officials analyzed wine samples from sixty-eight merchants and declared that only eight of them could be legitimately called wine. During his Bordeaux visit, Jefferson spoke with a broker named Desgrands, who said he and his peers never mixed the best wines, but only the lesser ones, and then to improve them.

Upon his return to Paris, Jefferson was duly skeptical. “I would prefer to receive it directly from your hands,” he wrote from Paris to Monsieur d’Yquem in December of 1787, requesting 250 bottles of 1784 Yquem, “because I would be sure that it is genuine, good and sound.” The following year, he placed his order with the owner of Lafite.

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
17, 1789, Jefferson hosted a dinner party in Paris. Among the guests were Gouverneur Morris—a high-born, peg-legged New York lawyer and politician who kept the same mistress as the bishop of Autun, also known as Talleyrand; the Marquis de Lafayette, the red-haired, thirty-two-year-old aristocrat-revolutionary; the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, with whom Jefferson liked to discuss farming experiments, and who a few years later would be stoned to death and disemboweled by a mob in front of his wife and mother; and the Marquis de Condorcet, the vaunted mathematician and
philosophe
who had a bleached pallor and was given to biting his nails.

It was chilly out, and a fire crackled in the drawing room. The house, at the intersection of the Champs-Élysées and the rue de Berri on the western edge of the city, had a spare, half-empty look; much of the contents had already been crated for shipment to Monticello, since Jefferson was soon to quit Paris for what he thought would be a six-month leave in America. Two months earlier, a mob had overrun the Bastille. Paris was in tumult, and Jefferson had requested that guards be posted outside; his house had been robbed three times recently, the candlesticks taken from his dining table, and he had put bars and bells on the windows.

The group sat down to eat at four-thirty in the afternoon, and they discussed rumors that Louis XVI was plotting an escape from France. Paris was suffering a bread shortage, but the repast was almost certainly accompanied by fine wines. Jefferson’s slave James Hemings had learned French cooking through several apprenticeships and now ran Jefferson’s Paris kitchen. While recognizing that he had more to learn from Europeans about the pleasures of the table than they from him, Jefferson was not strictly deferential. During his stay in Paris, he pressed pecans on the French, served corn on the cob grown in his Paris garden, and accompanied it with Virginia ham.

Nine days later, Jefferson departed overland for Le Havre, from which he crossed the English Channel and boarded a ship bound for the infant United States. Among the eighty-six packing cases of European finery that he had bought and shipped back to America were hampers full of various wines, including two containers earmarked for John Jay and George Washington.

Jefferson intended to return to Paris, but Gouverneur Morris bet William Short, Jefferson’s secretary, a beaver hat that Jefferson would not. As it turned out, Morris won the bet: Jefferson was appointed secretary of state. His majordomo was left to dismantle the Paris household. He sold his master’s horses, chariot, cabriolet, and paper press, and packed up the rest of his furniture for shipment to Philadelphia, swaddling each box in oilcloth. Each of Jefferson’s books he wrapped in paper.

Amid the growing chaos of Revolutionary France, a silver-plated harness for Jefferson’s horses, as well as his coach cushions, was stolen. Some wine, too, remained unaccounted for. One hundred twenty-five bottles of 1784 Haut-Brion that Jefferson had ordered in May 1788 never arrived. And a batch of provisions that arrived at Monticello just before Christmas of 1789 was short one box of assorted wines.

C
HAPTER
3

T
OMB
R
AIDER

W
HEN
M
ICHAEL
B
ROADBENT ARRIVED AT
H
OPETOUN
House, after negotiating the long driveway in the dark, it was clear that he had interrupted Lord Linlithgow, who opened the door wearing crimson suspenders. The butler arrived at the door at the same time, still pulling on his black jacket. The marquis and his servant had both been watching the Miss World competition on TV, and were now trading opinions about the contestants.

It was October 1966. A senior partner at Christie’s had introduced Broadbent to his friend “Charlie,” the Marquis of Linlithgow, who mentioned that he and his brother were growing rather weary of their hit-or-miss collection of eighteenth-century Madeira. Broadbent had asked whether he might come up from London to see the cellar, and now here he was, in a mansion on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Broadbent chatted briefly with His Lordship over a glass of whiskey by the fireplace, then went to bed.

He was new to his job as head of Christie’s fledgling wine department, and nervous. He couldn’t sleep, so he opened
My Life and Loves,
the sexually explicit memoirs of Frank Harris, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century womanizer and magazine editor.

When the sun came up, Broadbent descended to the cellars. They were directly beneath the flagstones of the main hall, and organized into bins, columbarium-like walls of stone niches containing not ashes but wine. Everything was covered in dust, but it didn’t matter. In houses like this, the bottles didn’t have labels; you knew what was in them through a combination of bin labels and cellar books. One wall at a time, moving top to bottom, left to right, Broadbent wrote down the inventory: the Madeiras, claret, Port, Champagne, and some weird old liqueurs.

As he was leaving, Lord Linlithgow mentioned that his neighbor Harry, sixth Earl of Rosebery, was “getting on” and had a cellar full of old claret he might be happy to unload. The marquis handed Broadbent a scrap of paper with a list of wines. It was impressive. Lord Rosebery was the son of Hannah de Rothschild, and his cellar consisted mainly of pre-phylloxera Lafite. Phylloxera was the yellow root louse that devastated Bordeaux’s vineyards in the late 1870s. Eventually, winemakers survived the epidemic by grafting French vines onto American rootstocks, which were immune to the pest. (The susceptibility of ungrafted European vines, on the other hand, explained in part why Jefferson’s and Filippo Mazzei’s 1770s experiments with them in the United States had failed.) Many connoisseurs believed that the wines of Bordeaux had never again attained their earlier level of quality and ageability. For such collectors, a trove of pre-phylloxera first growths was the Grail.

Soon after his visit with Lord Linlithgow, Broadbent returned to Scotland to visit Lord Rosebery’s pile there. This one, Dalmeny, had its own golf course. The butler led Broadbent to the cellar, a stone room with a gravel floor and slate bins. There were rows upon rows of double magnums of 1865 Lafite, enormous bottles that put Broadbent in mind of the howitzer shells he had seen during his stint in the Royal Artillery. He packed what he could fit into his car and hurtled down the A1 motorway to London. Next he visited Mentmore, Lord Rosebery’s home in Buckinghamshire, where the front hall contained an enormous table displaying Lord Rosebery’s many hats and walking sticks, all neatly arrayed. The cellars here were much larger than those at Dalmeny, and Broadbent spent a full day cataloging the contents. He took a break only to have lunch with Lord Rosebery and his wife, who bickered as if he weren’t there.

On Thursday, May 31, 1967, in the Great Rooms at its King Street headquarters in London, Christie’s held its first “Finest and Rarest Wines” sale. The selection, which, besides the cellars of Linlithgow and Rosebery, included lots from “Amiya, Dowager Countess of Sandwich” and “the Right Honourable the Lord Brunt-isfield,” was a dream for collectors. There were quaint, lopsided, mouth-blown bottles of oddities like eighteenth-century Milk Punch, extract of absinthe, 1830 Tokay, and Sandeman’s 1911 Coronation Vintage Port, as well as several nineteenth-century bottles of a strange, flat Champagne called Sillery that was once popular with the British upper class. Most coveted was the collection of pre-Phylloxera Bordeaux, 164 of the best wines in the best vintages, in the most desirable bottle sizes.

In Bordeaux, big bottles could range from magnum (the equivalent of two bottles) to Marie-Jeanne (three bottles) to double magnum (four bottles) to Jéroboam (six bottles) to Impériale (eight bottles). In Burgundy and Champagne, older Jéroboams were called Rehoboams, an Impériale was called a Methuselah, and even bigger bottles existed, including a Salmanazar (twelve bottles), a Balthazar (sixteen bottles), and a Nebuchadnezzar (twenty bottles). Collectors loved these—for their rarity, for their drama, and for the fact that wine aged more slowly in them. In the Rosebery sale, the Lafites alone included nineteen magnums of 1858, a magnum of 1864, two Jéroboams of 1865, and forty-four magnums and seventy bottles of 1874. The sale, in a single stroke, established Christie’s wine department as a seller of rarities, ushered in a new age of wine collecting, and positioned Michael Broadbent as its public face.

T
RADITIONALLY, WINE HAD
left France for foreign markets in sixty-three-gallon casks known as hogsheads. British gentlemen would store these casks and drink their way through one before ordering another of its kind. Sir Robert Walpole, the eighteenth-century prime minister, had a cellar full of them; he particularly liked Margaux and Lafite.

It was during the quarter-century preceding Thomas Jefferson’s visit to Bordeaux—the same period when the cylindrical, cork-stoppered, easily stacked glass bottle became common and opened the way to long-term storage and maturation of claret—that the English adopted the custom of laying down bottles to drink years later. English gentlemen subdivided their cellars into bins, each big enough for three hundred bottles (the equivalent of a hogshead). They labeled the bins with château name and vintage, and filled them with bottles that were motley in appearance. These were unlabeled bottles filled from casks by a gentleman, or more likely his butler. (After 1850, they would be joined by labeled bottles filled by middlemen such as Bordeaux or London merchants, and, less frequently—until the 1920s—labeled bottles filled at the châteaux themselves.)

Inevitably, cellaring of wine trickled down to the middle classes. The practice was popular enough by the 1760s that the same Pall Mall bookseller who had published Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary
came out with a book for recording wine purchases.
The Cellar-Book, or Butler’s Assistant, in keeping a Regular Account of his Liquors
sold well enough to generate several editions.

Exactly which wines the English laid down stayed remarkably constant. The passion they and the Scottish nobility shared for first-growth claret approached an addiction. Lafite, in particular, enjoyed a special status both in Bordeaux, where in all the early classifications it was ranked first among firsts, and in Britain, where it was the preferred wine of the peerage. Below these four was a broader, increasingly articulated hierarchy of growths. In 1787, Jefferson mentioned three tiers, around 1800 a fourth tier was named, and around 1820 a fifth.

This unofficial five-tier stratification of Bordeaux’s wines would be codified thirty-five years later. With the Paris Universal Exposition approaching, Napoleon III charged the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce with drawing up a list of the best. The chamber turned this over to the region’s brokers, who, to avoid the indelicacy of picking favorites, instead drew up a list merely of the most expensive wines, and arranged them by price. The resulting Classification of 1855 formalized a numerical ranking of sixty-one of the most sought-after reds. Below the four first growths were fifteen second growths, fourteen third growths, ten fourth growths, and eighteen fifth growths. All of the wines came from the so-called left bank, west of the Garonne River. The predominantly merlot-based right-bank wines, which would become revered in the second half of the twentieth century, weren’t even mentioned.

At the same time, a separate classification of Sauternes confirmed Château d’Yquem’s unchallenged position as the king of sweet white wines. A large part of Yquem’s reputation had to do with its extremely low yield: seventy gallons to an acre, compared with more than four hundred for a leading red wine. Put another way, a single vine can produce an entire bottle of dry red wine; it produces just one glass of Yquem. The wines of Sauternes relied on the phenomenon of “noble rot,” or botrytis, a fungal infection that, under precisely the right weather conditions, withered the Semillon grape to create an unctuous wine of unparalleled richness. The glory of Yquem was affirmed four years later when Russian Grand Duke Constantine, the czar’s brother, placed an order for four barrels of the 1847 vintage of Yquem, paying 20,000 gold francs, four times the going rate. The purchase spread Yquem’s fame and sent its market value soaring.

For Bordeaux, 1858 to 1878 was a belle epoque, blessed with favorable weather and a succession of excellent vintages. The advent of railways and steamships opened virgin markets. Gold rushes minted new millionaires. The 1860 trade treaty between Britain and France negotiated by Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone, himself a claret man, reduced the tax on Bordeaux wine by 95 percent and led, over the next fifteen years, to an eightfold growth in British claret imports. Bordeaux’s own wine production, over the same period, grew two and a half times, from 50 to more than 132 million gallons. The boom, which came to an end only with the arrival of phylloxera, funded the building of scores of grand châteaux, adding to the region’s mercantile luster.

And so in the eighteenth century had begun a long migration, an annual diaspora of Bordeaux’s most precious wines to the scattered cellars of claret lovers. Most of the wine sold fast and was drunk just as quickly. In 1788, wine from the 1784 vintage was already a rarity; Haut-Brion had only four hogsheads remaining, and demand for the vintage had pushed the price up to three livres per bottle. As early as 1829, a writer skeptical of advertisements for bottles from the famous 1811 “comet vintage” noted that, given its high quality and a relatively small crop, “it admits of a doubt whether even in the cellars of the richest individuals, any quantity to speak of now remains of the wine.”

Nonetheless, vintages that were scouringly tannic when young could take decades to become drinkable, and wealthy claret drinkers held on to unusually abundant and ageable vintages. Subterranean deposits of fine Bordeaux began to accrete, like some patchy geological formation, into a far-flung stratum of old wine.

Some was kept by the châteaux. Starting in 1798, Lafite began compiling a
vinothèque,
or wine library, with examples of each of the château’s vintages. A few bottles of 1797, the first contribution to the vinothèque, remain at Lafite, and are the oldest bottles in its cobwebbed cellar. The oldest bottle in Margaux’s vinothèque, by contrast, is an 1848. Some of the wine went to the cellars of the premier restaurants in France. And much of the wine was exported.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the largest markets for claret were in flux. During the 1850s, the United States was the best customer. From 1860 to 1890, Argentina, flush with beef and wheat money, claimed that role. But most of the wine going to the Americas was lesser stuff, not the expensive first growths that merited cellaring for decades. Those remained the province of the British. Over the century following the 1855 Classification, untold tons of the top growths found their way across the Channel into the cellars of private houses, wine merchants, and ancient colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Very often it was Lafite.

It was not uncommon for deposits to these cellars to outpace withdrawals. Original purchasers died, leaving stocks of wine that their children or grandchildren might have less interest in. By the middle of the twentieth century, England and Scotland had come to be riddled with underground repositories of precious old vintages. They were just waiting for someone to come along and notice.

M
ICHAEL
B
ROADBENT WAS
born into a Yorkshire mill-owning family, and was twenty-two before he tasted a top wine. On a summer evening in 1950, a doctor who was a friend of the family served him 1937 Yquem with nectarines. At the time, Broadbent was an indifferent architecture student at the University of London. Two years later he was drifting when his mother spotted a newspaper ad for a “wine trainee” with a merchant named Tommy Layton.

His first year in that sadly paid job, Broadbent pawned his stamp collection to make ends meet. That autumn, at Layton’s suggestion, he began taking notes on every wine he tasted. He never stopped. Over the next fourteen years he rose to national sales manager of Harvey’s of Bristol, a prominent merchant. Then, in 1966, Broadbent heard that Christie’s was going to start selling wine. Sending off an energetic letter to the auction house—he announced the salary he would require—he persuaded them to let him found the new department.