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The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine

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Author: Benjamin Wallace
Publisher: Crown
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$24.95~~
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Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

37 reviews
Sales Rank: 1176

Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3

ISBN: 0307338770
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.2223
EAN: 9780307338778
ASIN: 0307338770

Publication Date: May 13, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

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Editorial Reviews:

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 Ch�teau 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 Reviews: Read 32 more reviews...

3 out of 5 stars

Uncork a Crazy Tale... October 3, 2008
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.

3 out of 5 stars

More vinegar than wine September 30, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

It's a good tale, but not particularly well told. There is only enough material here for a lengthy magazine article, not a book. The narrative drags and is filled with irrelevant distractions which are totally skippable. Maybe worth borrowing from the library--wouldn't recommend rushing out to buy a copy.

5 out of 5 stars

caveat emptor September 16, 2008
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!

4 out of 5 stars

A Fool and His Money September 11, 2008
"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 G�rke. 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.

2 out of 5 stars

Inconclusive, unsatisfying, overrated. September 8, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

The book is written in a fluent and accessible style, and is, at times, a true page turner.

However, the book ends with a fizzle and left me unsatisfied. Moreover, I have doubts about the objectivity of the book. Why would a purported master-forger use a basement in a rental house of which he was being evicted to produce counterfeit bottles? It seems unlikely that he would be so sloppy in covering his tracks.

I would not recommend this book.

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