Vinegar and vanity

The Billionaire’s Vinegar is a cautionary tale for all those who have the money to throw away on wine they wouldn’t ever be able to drink.

Sheer vanity drives people to spend humongous sums of money on ultraexpensive tipple. I, for one, have never been able to figure out why a member of the Forbes family forked out $158,000 for a Château Lafite (it’s one of Bordeaux’s top five wine labels) that dated back to 1787 and was allegedly from the cellar of one of America’s foremost wine enthusiasts (he’s also the man whose mug appears on dollar bills), Thomas Jefferson. The wine must have become vinegar and the bottle caked with layers of dust. You can’t open a bottle with such a past to sample its contents. All you can do with it is show off, which is not what wine is made for. Unfortunately, the man who bought the bottle—Kip Forbes, under instructions from his father, Malcolm—did not get to savour the pleasure of owning the world’s most expensive bottle of wine. It was a fake.

That became known much later. It made history because Malcolm Forbes decided to place it in a highlighted corner of his extensive cellars, as any superior wine deserves to be, but the heat of the light made the cork disintegrate. The story would have ended there, as a joke to be enjoyed with a nightcap. But the faker, a former German and a pop-band manager named Hardy Rodenstock, was emboldened by this sale—presided over by Christie’s, no less—to put more wines of dubious provenance on sale. One of them landed in the hands of a litigious Florida billionaire, William I. Koch, who blew the lid off the scandal. This story, chronicled grippingly in The Billionaire’s Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace, is like a guided tour of a world of pretences and characters straight out of Fawlty Towers.

The book also exposes, sadly for our tribe, the absence of even a drop of common sense among wine pundits. One of them, Michael Broadbent, had certified the genuineness of the bottle of wine without even checking with the museum at Monticello, Jefferson’s home in Virginia, about its authenticity. The truth about vintage wine is that, like pirated CDs, a lot of counterfeits are circulating in the market. Many of these fakes are now produced in Asia. Frederic Engerer, the boss of Château Latour, once told me how he had been approached by a couple of Chinese officials with a unique business plan. “You give us your labels and we’ll make your wine for you,” they proposed to him, as if they were talking about a cola.

It took them some time to understand that it’s the unique terroir (a combination of a specific soil type and climatic pattern) that gives a wine its unique characteristics. Fake antiques are harder to spot. The Billionaire’s Vinegar, which has been optioned to be turned into a movie, details how Koch has spent a huge fortune on investigators and laboratory tests to demonstrate fraud. New technology has reduced the chances of fakes, but the old question will keep coming back: Why do you need to spend a fortune on a wine that’s as good as vinegar?

Sourish Bhattacharyya is Executive Editor, Mail Today