Provincial tastes – Telegraph-Journal
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Provincial tastes
Telegraph-Journal, Canada - 22 hours ago Just in time for Thanksgiving dinners comes a fine cranberry wine, the product of the award-winning Magnetic Hill winery in Moncton. … |
 The Times |
Made in Heaven
The Times, South Africa - Oct 2, 2008 Fine wine is no less a cultural artifact than a Koons bunny sculpture or Popeye painting, and Greenberg’s kitsch argument applies to wine. … |
WSU Researching Secrets Of Fine Wine – OPB News
 OPB News |
WSU Researching Secrets Of Fine Wine
OPB News, OR - Oct 3, 2008 BY ANNA KING It’s crush time in wine country around the Northwest. That’s when wine grapes are harvested and trucked into wineries to be pressed. … |
The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine
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.
Customer Review: caveat emptor
as good as an Ian Rankin mystery! If you have ever bought or sold anything at auction, this is
required reading. It’s a great story…runs from Jefferson to the nuclear age without missing a beat!
Fraud? it’s there. Greed? it’s there. Ego? it’s there. Revenge? it’s there.
LIke a fine wine, it is very good upon entry, improves in the middle and finishes
long and memorable!
Customer Review: A Fool and His Money
“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Most people experience this by the time they reach the age of ten. Whether it’s a minor annoyance like discovering that sea monkeys are just brine shrimp or a soul-crushing defeat like when the little girl down the street said she wanted to give you a kiss but ended up throwing rocks at you instead, almost everyone at some point in their childhood has this notion hammered home. Reading “The Billionaire’s Vinegar,” one comes away with the distinct impression that this was a lesson sorely missing from wine collectors’ young lives.
Benjamin Wallace’s books is ostensibly about a supposed 200 year old cache of wine that was purportedly owned by Thomas Jefferson. Yes, that Thomas Jefferson, of the Founding Fathers’ Thomas Jeffersons. How did everyone know these ancient bottles belonged to old TJ himself? Why, they had his initials engraved on them, of course! And the fact that they also had dates like “1784″ and “1787″ on them made everyone know that they weren’t owned by Theodore Jablowski (Harvard, class of 1982). Like a lot of old things, this cache of wine become highly sought after by individuals with too much money and way too much interest in centuries old fermented grape juice. It is in the exploration of this cast of characters where “The Billionaire’s Vinegar” shines.
The world of high end wine collecting is populated by figures with so-much-better-than-you names like Broadbent, Rodenstock, and Shanken. Americans with names like Forbes and Koch didn’t stand a chance getting involved with such people. According to Wallace, the good old days of wine collecting came to an end when the vulgar Americans entered the scene. Prior to that, apparently, the hobby was filled with proper European gentlemen playing in their wine cellars older than the New World, engaging in vertical and horizontal (what, no diagonal?) tastings, and generally living in an utopia. But once the Americans — all new money and no taste — got wind that wine was cool, well, the temptation became too great. Serpents entered this Eden with dollar signs in their eyes, and Paradise was lost. Wallace spends most of “The Billionaire’s Vinegar” on one of these alleged serpents: the discoverer of the Jefferson bottles, Hardy Rodenstock, nee Meinhard Görke. Chapter after chapter outlines how Rodenstock’s too-good-to-be-true finds were gobbled up by everyone from Malcolm Forbes (yes, daddy of that guy who ran for President so many years back) to industrialist Bill Koch (“pronounced like the soda”; yeah, I’d never heard of him, either). In the end, Forbes winds up storing his Jefferson bottle vertically under hot lights, causing the cork to take a swim in the elixir below it; Koch eventually gets the “if it sounds too good to be true” lesson and ends up spending five times what he paid for his Jefferson bottle engaging ex-FBI guys and nuclear physicists to make the German pay. We Americans may be uncouth, but we sure know how to party.
Interspersed amongst these chapters of Rodenstock’s alleged malfeasances are scenes of haughty oenophiles (wine connoisseurs — get yer mind out of the gutter) engaging in days-long tastings of wines that they say are awesome or gnarly or whatever oenophiles say to describe quality hooch. Sadly, Wallace makes the persuasive argument that a number of these wines are fake. Even worse, so many of these wine lovers have, over the years, tended to turn a blind eye to this rampant forgery. One scene near the end of the book describes how a panel of experts came together in the mid-1990s to develop a set of recommended best practices that the wine producers could have used to curtail forgers. Nothing came of it. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil: maybe this would make a more appropriate theme for this book.
In the end, “The Billionaire’s Vinegar” is less about the wine hobby than it is about the individuals that populate it and the self-delusional and even self-destructive tactics they use to play in it. As a reader, you’ll alternately want to slap these people and feel sorry for them. You’ll marvel at how Michael Broadbent ties his career to the shady Rodenstock, all the while cheering Bill Koch to uncover the the truth behind his collection. “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” A valuable lesson that “The Billionaire’s Vinegar” shows you’re never too old to learn.
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