Bottle Up and Explode: The Billionaire’s Vinegar

By Breanne Boland July 24, 2008 Issue

The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine (Crown Publishers, 319 pages) combines the best features of all engrossing nonfiction—eccentric characters, uncommon interests, obsession, people with more money than sense, and scoundrels from history.

Vinegar chronicles the logic-defying rise of the rare-wine trade. Oenophiles are nothing new—Thomas Jefferson is the book’s featured pioneer, and odes to prized vintages exist from as far back as the third century BC. But from the mid-1960s on, it acquired a very different flavor. Instead of being the purview of moneyed aristocrats, it became a status game, open to anyone with the interest and a sufficiently large checking account. Auction house Christie’s and Michael Broadbent, their first wine department head, started a worldwide scavenger hunt, where the quarry could be found forgotten in dusty cellars, among the relics at estate sales—and sometimes behind long-bricked-up hiding spots.

Between the ‘60s and the mid-‘80s, the old and rare wine market climbed and climbed, but its climax was in 1985, with the sale of the first of the “Jefferson bottles”—late-1700s wine found in a Paris basement, supposedly left over from Thomas Jefferson’s high-living years in the French city. In the first of many fevered scenes, the auction climbs to ridiculous heights, as fanatic after fanatic tries to get the bottle of 1787 Chateau Lefite, engraved with the initials “Th.J.” A historic relic, or so those involved want to believe, but it wasn’t even certain that it was drinkable.

That’s one of the underscoring conflicts of the book. Wines that old are a gamble with bad odds. Those imbibing may consume history, or they may sip some of the world’s most expensive salad dressing. The wine connoisseurs in this book traffic in the transient, spending thousands on bottles that will vanish with the clink of a few glasses. But the bottles in question may have passed into sediment decades or centuries before, making their plight all the more picaresque. Some collectors drink, some look just to collect the object, but usually no one is both, ensuring frequent disappointment on both sides.

The auctions themselves are chancy enough, but the rising receipts bring forgers out of the woodwork. Some are blatant, making stupid errors and filling recycled bottles with ink, wax, or worse. Some, however, are brilliant—possibly including Hardy Rodenstock, the German man who brought the Jefferson bottles to Christie’s and to the world’s attention. Alas, the entire rare wine industry relied on faith, and when questions began to form about the authenticity of these bottles and others, few were willing to investigate the possibility that much of the wine world had collaborated in mass deception. Carefully crafted reputations were at stake, as were hundreds of lawsuits and tremendous amounts of money.

By the time the book ends, the question of the authenticity of Rodenstock’s rare vintages escapes the cloisters of the wine world and draws historical scholars, FBI agents, and nuclear physicists to ask whether something so perfect, so prized, could possibly have survived so long. It’s a veritable war of egos, as representatives of the many fields clash and the whole matter ends up in court—where the story concludes with motions still being filed. In the eyes of the law, the matter remains unresolved. The open, abrupt ending is the book’s only drawback.

Author Benjamin Wallace interviewed extensively, and he maintains an even distance from his subjects—hardly easy, considering that even beyond the forgeries, the wine world is spotted with rivalries and downright loathing. However, he brings the many, many colorful characters to vivid life, and he makes even the most pedestrian aspects of wine—how a red wine’s color changes with age, the many aspects of flavor notes—riveting and understandable even by those who prefer a pint to a flite. Few of us will ever have private jets or house-sized wine cellars, but most everyone can understand collecting and obsession, and Wallace brings the whole patrician pursuit into the realm of the ordinary.

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