The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace Read Free Book Online

and he designed a pair of dumbwaiters, flanking the fireplace, that brought bottles directly up from the wine cellar to the dining room. His sizable library included volumes treating of the most up-to-date science on winemaking. Because of trade disruptions during the War of 1812, he suffered from the depletion of his cellar, writing that “wine from long habit has become an indispensable for my health, which is now suffering by its disuse.”
    After Jefferson, another prominent American champion of wine would not appear for a long time. By the turn of the twentieth century, Gilded Age families like the Du Ponts and the Morgans owned substantial quantities of wine, and some of the new apartment buildings then going up in Manhattan were constructed with private cellars in the basement for each tenant. But in general, Americans didn’t drink wine. The temperance movement, together with distractions like Prohibition, didn’t help.
    In the late 1930s and the 1940s, despite Repeal, Americans were slow to rediscover a taste for wine. Postwar prosperity, and cheap air fares to Europe, began to change this, pushing American consumption of wine to twice what it had been before the war. It was the 1959 vintage in Bordeaux, however, that tipped the balance of power in the wine-buying market from England to America. Dubbed the “vintage of the century” by the French, the 1959s received widespread press coverage—including in
Time, Newsweek,
and an influential article by Art Buchwald—and American interest. By the time Broadbent founded the Christie’s wine department in 1966, the choosiest American collectors had pent-up demand, which they unleashed both in Christie’s sale rooms in London and at an annual auction Broadbent soon launched in the United States, under the aegis of the Heublein drinks conglomerate.
    The debut Heublein auction, which occasioned Broadbent’s first trip across the Atlantic, took place at the Continental Plaza Hotel in Chicago in May of 1969. Broadbent’s over-the-top Englishness played well in America, and he hammed it up, wearing a tailcoat with a red carnation in the lapel. When opening sample bottles for the slack-jawed North American rubes, he stagily took his time with the mechanics of wine service: skimming the capsule, drawing the cork, and decanting the liquid contents. The knockdown totals (the sum of an auction’s winning bids) climbed quickly, from $56,000 the first year to $106,000 the second to $231,000 the third. These were huge sums for a single auction, compared with London results. The power and scale of the American market was obvious.
    Peter Morrell, a twenty-six-year-old wine retailer in New York who felt that he needed experience with pre-phylloxera Bordeaux, made news around the world in 1970 when he bid £220 (at the time about $500) for a double magnum of 1865 Lafite originally from the Rosebery cellar. When he was interviewed for television, the reporter was incredulous at how much he had paid, and quipped to viewers that even if it was vinegar, Morrell would have “the world’s most expensive salad dressing.” A record wine bid was newsworthy. Five hundred dollars for a bottle was still shocking.
    The whole thing was a flack’s dream—for Heublein, for Christie’s, and for those shrewd retailers and restaurateurs who had discerned a media loophole: making a record bid for a bottle of wine guaranteed press coverage, and it was much cheaper and more impressive than a quarter-page ad. The trend really took off at the third Heublein auction, when Broadbent sold an 1846 Lafite for $5,000, a new record by a long shot. Soon the numbers went much higher, way beyond the records Christie’s was setting in London. A Memphis restaurant owner paid $31,000 for an 1822 Lafite. A Dallas wine merchant topped that with a $38,000 bid for a Jéroboam of 1870 Mouton.
    Broadbent sewed up the American market. In addition to the Christie’s sales in London, which drew lots of American