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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The
Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of
Wine by Benjamin Wallace |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Authenticity Benjamin
Wallace’s new book, The
Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of
Wine, is an entertaining page-turner, whether a reader is interested in
rare wine or not. Wallace recent decades of activity in the purchase and sale
of extremely rare, often very old wines. Prices have skyrocketed and fakes
can be challenging to detect, since few people know much about wines that are
presented as coming from Thomas Jefferson’s purchases. Most of the book
involves the crisp presentation of an array of characters that are
interesting in themselves, and the extent to which they go in their pursuits kept
my interest finely tuned. Here’s an excerpt, from Chapter 15,
“Awash in Fakes,” pp. 200-202: Reports of fakery, since
the episode with the fabricated Warhol Mouton labels, had been sporadic prior
to the early 1990s. When there were incidents, they often involved the 1982
vintage, which had drawn speculators and seen price increases unlike any
other modern vintage. Near the end of 1985, French police arrested several
people in the right-bank city of Libourne and seized some seventy cases of
regional plonk masquerading as 1981 and 1982 Petrus. In 1990, five cases of
1986 DRC Montrachet, sold by the Wine Merchant of Beverly Hills to a Japanese
collector, turned out to be cheap Pouilly-Fume, gussied up with fake labels. As wine prices, especially those of luxury
labels, soared in the early nineties, incidents began cropping up much more
regularly. In 1995, at a dinner in Hong Kong, a merchant from England's
Corney & Barrow was served a fake magnum of 1982 Le Pin. In 1996 an
attempt to sell fake 1982 Le Pin was uncovered in the UK; the forger had
simply relabeled and altered the corks of some 1987 Le Pin, which sold for £1,300
($2,000) less per bottle. In the late 1990s a London customer became
suspicious of a bottle of 1982 Petrus he had bought from a New York wine
merchant for $ 2,000. He took it to chateau owner Christian Moueix, who
examined it in the presence of Wine
Spectator's James Suckling. The bottle seemed legitimate
until the capsule was removed and the cork drawn; the cork had two small
indentations on its sides, indicating that it had previously been removed. It also lacked a vintage mark; the old one had
apparently been sanded off. Moueix and Suckling tasted the wine, which was
obviously not a 1982; they speculated it was Petrus, but a lesser and much
cheaper vintage, such as 1980 or 1984. In March of 1998, Langton's, an
auction house in Australia, discovered some phony 1990 Penfold's Grange, the
most famous red wine Down Under. Older fakes were a less common occurrence, in part
because older wines constituted only a sliver of the market. But they were
worth much more money than young wines, and easier to pull off. In 1985 two
American businessmen bought a magnum of 1865 Lafite, supposedly from the
legendary Rosebery cellar, for $12,000. When they opened it, at a
$1,500-a-head fundraising dinner in San Francisco, several people present who
had previously tasted 1865 Rosebery Lafites deemed it fake. Marvin Overton
III thought it was 1911 Lafite. Robert Mondavi said the cork looked five or
ten years old. One of the two businessmen who had acquired the bottle thought
it tasted like a faded rose. Then came the string of incidents involving
questionable, Rodenstock-sourced bottles at megatastings in the late 1980s.
And among the wines offered for sale by Christie's in Chicago, as part of the
sale of Lloyd Flatt's cellar in 1990, was a bottle of 1947 Romanee-Conti that
turned out to be a bottle of 1964 Echezaux with a dummied-up label. An
Imperiale of 1947 Cheval Blanc, auctioned at Christie's in 1997, sold for $112,500
despite doubts by both the chateau and a
leading Swiss collector that such a bottle was ever made at the chateau;
nonetheless, the chateau had given the bottle its imprimatur by providing a
new label. Near the end of 1997, a bunch of low-priced, fake 1900 Taylor
Fladgate and 1908 Sandeman vintage Port appeared on the London market. Also suspicious was the prevalence of certain old
vintages that had only been produced in limited quantities in the first
place. The high number of cases of 1945 and
1947 Mouton
sold at Christie's and Sotheby's in the previous twenty-five years raised
eyebrows, given the relatively small production of those vintages. A German
restaurant was reported to have served two cases a year of 1959 Petrus for
six years at tasting events; this was a wine that estate owner Christian
Moueix had tasted only twice, and of which Petrus itself owned only one
bottle. By the late 1990s,
Serena Sutcliffe was convinced that there were a lot of fake 1947s on the
market. The
Billionaire’s Vinegar reads like a novel at times, and proceeds even
faster when accompanied by a fine red wine. Steve
Hopkins, September 20, 2008 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Billionaire's Vinegar.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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