On Our Bookshelves: The Billionaire’s Vinegar

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BOOK: The Billionaire’s Vinegar–The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2008

REVIEW:

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If you are looking for an interesting story about an elaborate con job involving eccentrics, oenophiles, private investigators, billionaires, historians, lawyers, auctioneers, physicists, and wretched excess–The Billionaire’s Vinegar is for you.

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This is the story of how a 1787 bottle of Château Lafite Bordeaux, supposedly lost and then discovered in a cellar in Paris, and reputed to have been owned by Thomas Jefferson when he had lived in France as the U.S. ambassador to Louis XVI, sold at auction for $156,000 to Christopher Forbes. It is also the story of the rise (and fall) of Hardy Rodenstock, the wine collector and trader with a supposed uncanny ability to locate old and rare wines. And it is the story of how the truth was finally exposed due the determination of the extremely litigious Bill Koch, and the damage the scandal did to Michael Broadbent, the auctioneer and wine expert at Christie’s. But mostly it’s the story of people with more money than sense behaving badly. I don’t usually use the term “decadence.” Social degeneration generally being in the eye of the beholder, I’m cautious about making that type of judgement. But here, reading about Rodenstock’s wine tasting events, held over several orgiastic days in lavish and extravagant settings, “decadent” is an extremely appropriate word, as are some even older and harsher ones, like “greed” and “gluttony.” No one comes across very well in this book, with the exception of the historian at Monticello, Cinder (Goodwin) Stanton, who opined, quite reasonably, that the wine was unlikely to have been Thomas Jefferson’s, and whose expertise on the matter was completely disregarded for twenty years.

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The story doesn’t even end when the book does–subsequent to its publication in 2008, the publisher, Random House, was sued by Michael Broadbent for libel and defamation of character. (In a settlement, the book was withdrawn from publication in the UK, although it is still being sold, unchanged, in the rest of the world.) And the film rights have been purchased, so there may be something more to look forward to.

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Settle in with a nice (and not obscenely expensive) glass of wine and enjoy the history, the mystery, and just a little bit of schadenfreude.

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I asked the author if he would answer a couple of questions and he graciously agreed.

In a perfect world, what would be the next book you write?

Benjamin Wallace: I just published a story in New York magazine about an epic treasure hunt, which I would love to expand into a book. It was a ten-year search for $1 million in gold and gems hidden in the Rocky Mountains by an eccentric former art dealer named Forrest Fenn, thousands of people became obsessed and went out looking for it, and at least five people died in the process.

I read that–really fascinating story! I would love to read that book if you write it. What book (besides your own) would you recommend to our readers?

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