The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine
by Benjamin Wallace
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Book Summary Information
Author: Benjamin WallaceEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-05-13
ISBN: 0307338770
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Crown
Book Reviews of The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine
Book Review: A Fool and His Money
Summary: 4 Stars
"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 book 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 Görke. 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.
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