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

dental side effects as well: an Australian study of wine judges’ teeth found instances of severe damage and recommended not brushing one’s teeth on the morning of a tasting, in order to leave protective plaque in place.
    A low-grade dishonesty often permeated the Group’s events, diplomatic euphemism taking the place of candor when a bottle brought by a fellow guest wasn’t quite up to snuff. Outside of the Group, events weren’t cheap; most of the mega-tastings cost thousands of dollars to attend. Some participants couldn’t help feeling a bit queasy over the sheer decadence and extravagance. “I feel a genuine sadness about vertical tastings that has always left me feeling as if I needed a soul-cleansing afterwards,” wrote the Los Angeles wine journalist Dan Berger.
             
    T HE MEGA-TASTINGS ALSO, of course, depleted the rarities unearthed and sold by Broadbent. Edmund Penning-Rowsell, a whiskery socialist and claret scholar who covered wine auctions for the
Financial Times,
observed that as early as 1973 there had been a lull in the discovery of English cellars. But in 1976 there was a resurgence of finds, most in Paris and Bordeaux and a few in the United Kingdom, such as Woodperry House in Oxfordshire. The next year, Penning-Rowsell was able to write of an “extraordinary recrudescence” of rare bottles in the auction room.
    With the familiar sources drying up, some of this new torrent seemed quite fantastical in origin, but then, exotic discoveries were a staple of wine history. In 1925, the old-line Piccadilly wine merchants Berry Brothers had unearthed a cache of early-nineteenth-century Tokaji vintages that had been walled up by the Princely House of Bretzenheim in anticipation of the revolution of 1848. Now, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, similar hidden troves came to light. Ten Broeck Mansion, the home of a Revolutionary war general in Albany, New York, yielded a forgotten stash of nineteenth-century bottles that were auctioned at Heublein starting in 1978. Some bottles at the 1980 Heublein auction, including an 1836 Sercial Madeira, had been salvaged by divers from a ship that sank off the coast of Savannah in 1840.
    By 1985, even as occasional odd finds continued to trickle in, it was clear that the heyday of claret archaeology was over. Since old cellars were a Christie’s franchise, their virtual disappearance enabled Sotheby’s wine department to begin to close the competitive gap. The watershed 1982 Bordeaux vintage had sent prices, along with American interest in wine, to new heights. Then, in February of 1985, the dollar hit a historical peak. The Reagan boom was cresting, and the American appetite for old wine was insatiable. For Christie’s, there was money to be made, and competition to face down. Broadbent was more aggressive than ever. He wasn’t about to let anyone else bring his winning streak to an end.

C HAPTER 4

    M ONSIEUR Y QUEM
    I N A PRIL OF 1985, H ARDY R ODENSTOCK, WHO HAD recently moved into the lakeside home of a Munich construction heiress, told some German wine friends he’d just received a phone call about an astonishing discovery in Paris. He took the next plane, he wrote later, “and took a look at the cellar, bottles and everything.” A hidden cellar had been breached when a house built in the mid–eighteenth century was being torn down. It contained about a hundred bottles. Two dozen were engraved with the initials “Th.J.” They included bottles of Lafite, Margaux, Yquem, and Branne-Mouton, as Mouton-Rothschild had been called in Jefferson’s day, from the 1784 and 1787 vintages. Rodenstock said he paid 20,000 French francs for the lot, which at the time worked out to $2,227. The discovery was serendipitous for a number of reasons: While in 1985 Mouton was one of the most coveted wines in the world, in Jefferson’s day it was middle-of-the-pack and neither sought after nor collected; and Rodenstock had found the bottles just two years