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

The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine | Benjamin Wallace | A Page Turner

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The Billionaire's ...

	The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine Benjamin Wallace Crown, 2008 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 39 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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 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.

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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 Page Turner

I love history, antiques and wine. This book was the trifecta as far as I am concerned. It was a fascinating journey through the auction world with just enough historically based fiction blended in to make a great read. Unfortunately, while I can draw my own conclusions about whether the bottle is a fake or not, I would really like to know the true ending. The ending has me frustrated, but I still recommend this book. You will learn interesting facts about old wine while trying to solve a real mystery.

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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.

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. 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.

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Too Much Unfinished Business

Wallace is a good and thorough writer. But the story is by no means over, and there are too many loose ends needing to be resolved.
I'm not sure if I would recommend this book to my friends because the characters are mostly wealthy, frivolous, status-seeking and pretentious. Imagine paying over $150,000 for a bottle of presumably undrinkable wine, that may have belonged to Thomas Jefferson! And thinking that that bottle is a part of history. Please.
I was shocked that Jeffersonian scholars at Monticello would be willing to research whether or not particular wine bottles could have been purchased by him. And that sophisticated scientific labs would try to determine the age of various wines gratis.
I think a great glass of wine is a treat. But there comes a point where one's priorities have to be examined. The millions of dollars you will see spent at wine auctions in the States and abroad could be so much better spent feeding the hungry, than buying trophies of arguable taste.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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