Product Description

It was the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold.

In 1985, at a heated auction by Christie’s of London, a 1787 bottle of Château Lafite Bordeaux—one of a cache of bottles unearthed in a bricked-up Paris cellar and supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson—went for $156,000 to a member of the Forbes family. The discoverer of the bottle was pop-band manager turned wine collector Hardy Rodenstock, who had a knack for finding extremely old and exquisite wines. But rumors about the bottle soon arose. Why wouldn’t Rodenstock reveal the exact location where it had been found? Was it part of a smuggled Nazi hoard? Or did his reticence conceal an even darker secret?

It would take more than two decades for those questions to be answered and involve a gallery of intriguing players—among them Michael Broadbent, the bicycle-riding British auctioneer who speaks of wines as if they are women and staked his reputation on the record-setting sale; Serena Sutcliffe, Broadbent’s elegant archrival, whose palate is covered by a hefty insurance policy; and Bill Koch, the extravagant Florida tycoon bent on exposing the truth about Rodenstock.

Pursuing the story from Monticello to London to Zurich to Munich and beyond, Benjamin Wallace also offers a mesmerizing history of wine, complete with vivid accounts of subterranean European laboratories where old vintages are dated and of Jefferson’s colorful, wine-soaked days in France, where he literally drank up the culture.

Suspenseful, witty, and thrillingly strange, The Billionaire’s Vinegar is the vintage tale of what could be the most elaborate con since the Hitler diaries. It is also the debut of an exceptionally powerful new voice in narrative non-fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1888 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-13
• Released on: 2008-05-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The titular bottle, from a cache of allegedly fine, allegedly French wine, allegedly owned by Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s, set a record price when auctioned in 1985. The subsequent brouhaha over the cache's authenticity takes wine journalist Wallace on a piquant journey into the mirage-like world of rare wines. At its center are Hardy Rodenstock, an enigmatic German collector with a suspicious knack for unearthing implausibly old and drinkable wines, and Michael Broadbent, a Christie's wine expert, who auctioned Rodenstock's lucrative finds. The argument over the Jefferson bottles and other rarities aged for decades, flummoxed a wine establishment desperate to keep the cork in a controversy that might deflate the market for antique vintages. (In the author's telling, a 2006 lawsuit almost settles the issue.) Wallace sips the story slowly, taking leisurely digressions into techniques for faking wine and detecting same with everything from Monticello scholarship to nuclear physics. He paints a colorful backdrop of eccentric oenophiles, decadent tastings and overripe flavor rhetoric (Broadbent describes one wine as redolent of chocolate and schoolgirls' uniforms). Investigating wines so old and rare they could taste like anything, he playfully questions the very foundations of connoisseurship. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Benjamin Wallace’s magazine background helps him keep the many narrative threads in The Billionaire’s Vinegar tight and engaging. In addition, Wallace exhibits a sharp eye for detail and character: Hardy Rodenstock, in particular,comes across as deliciously deceptive. Exploring what Jefferson’s European tour of 1787 must have been like will likely interest even readers without a taste for wine, though connoisseurs will savor the author’s descriptions of the clubby (and sometimes comically extravagant) society of high-dollar wine collectors. Wallace raises questions about the wine’s authenticity that will linger on the palate, despite a perhaps unsatisfying ending. Or, as collector Ed Lazarus wrote of his experience with the discovered cache, “I had never experienced anything remotely similar in an older Bordeaux, or in fact anywhere else, except perhaps at a Baskin-Robbins.”
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Review
“Part detective story, part wine history, this is one juicy tale….as delicious as a true vintage Lafite.”
—Business Week

“Splendid...A delicious mystery that winds through musty European cellars, Jefferson-era France and Monticello, engravers' shops, a nuclear physics lab, rival auction houses and legendary multi-day tastings conducted by the shadowy German who had discovered the Jefferson collection...Ripe for Hollywood.”
—USA Today

“This is a gripping story, expertly handled by Benjamin Wallace who writes with wit and verve, drawing the reader into a subculture strewn with eccentrics and monomaniacs...Full of detail that will delight wine lovers. It will also appeal to anyone who merely savours a great tale, well told.”
—The Economist

"A page-turner…What makes Wallace's book worth reading is the way he fleshes out the tale with entertaining digressions into Jefferson's wine adventures, how to fake wines (who knew a shotgun blast could make a bottle look old?) and dead-on portraits of several major wine personalities who intersected unhappily with the wines.”
—Bloomberg

"Wallace’s depiction of rabid oenophiles staging almost decadent events to swill rare wine, knowingly depleting the reserves, are as much fun as the mystery."
—The New York Daily News

“A riveting wine history, wine mystery, and more.”
—Dana Cowin, editor in chief of Food & Wine

"For anyone with at least a curiosity about precious old wines and the love of a good story, this well-crafted piece of journalism may prove as intriguing and enjoyable as a fine old Bordeaux.”
—Seattle Times

"The season's wine reading cannot get off to a better start than with The Billionaire’s Vinegar,  ...

Customer Reviews

A Page Turner
I love history, antiques and wine. This book was the trifecta as far as I am concerned. It was a fascinating journey through the auction world with just enough historically based fiction blended in to make a great read. Unfortunately, while I can draw my own conclusions about whether the bottle is a fake or not, I would really like to know the true ending. The ending has me frustrated, but I still recommend this book. You will learn interesting facts about old wine while trying to solve a real mystery.

Too Much Unfinished Business
Wallace is a good and thorough writer. But the story is by no means over, and there are too many loose ends needing to be resolved.
I'm not sure if I would recommend this book to my friends because the characters are mostly wealthy, frivolous, status-seeking and pretentious. Imagine paying over $150,000 for a bottle of presumably undrinkable wine, that may have belonged to Thomas Jefferson! And thinking that that bottle is a part of history. Please.
I was shocked that Jeffersonian scholars at Monticello would be willing to research whether or not particular wine bottles could have been purchased by him. And that sophisticated scientific labs would try to determine the age of various wines gratis.
I think a great glass of wine is a treat. But there comes a point where one's priorities have to be examined. The millions of dollars you will see spent at wine auctions in the States and abroad could be so much better spent feeding the hungry, than buying trophies of arguable taste.

Uncork a Crazy Tale...
A multi-decade chronicle of the intrigue surrounding some old grape juice. An eminence grise of the wine industry's career develops. A maverick merchant's reputation slides from sagacious to charlatan. A neutron physicist moonlights in the wine trade. A fossil fuels billionaire unleashes the hounds (aka lawyers) to get even. A well turned tale that takes time to develop many of its characters--the merchants, critics, collectors, and blowhards that helped develop the pursuit of the grape.

The central plot here is really fairly fuzzy, and I greatly enjoyed the digressions into such things as the life of Thomas Jefferson and radioactive dating. However, one thing that left me unsatisfied were all the fascinating characters merely broached. Robert Parker? Jancis Robinson? Compte Alexandre Lur Saluces? All played pivotal roles, yet were barely described.

I was also left wanting more context on the great growths and their migration to Great Britain. This is the historical context that laid the foundation for the value of these wines. Surely in the book's meandering focus more context would have added a layer of richness. It seemed the author was worried about turning this into a history book. It's too bad, because without the added depth, the book feels a bit like a long magazine article. Although a smartly written article, that I thoroughly enjoyed.