Product DescriptionIt 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.
What Others Say
Uncork a Crazy Tale...
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. ... Read More
More vinegar than wine
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.
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!
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, ... Read More
Inconclusive, unsatisfying, overrated.
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 The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine.
