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

by Benjamin Wallace

Book Overview

The rivetingly strange story of the world's most expensive bottle of wine, and the even stranger characters whose lives have intersected with it. The New York Times bestseller, updated with a new... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307338770
• ISBN13: 9780307338778
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
• Length: 319 Pages
• Weight: 1.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.8" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Insightful

The author really brings to life the history and depth of the deception that occurred. Brilliantly written, gripping, and entertaining. For those who love wine and want to not just learn about grape facts, this book is a winner.

Good conveyance of an interesting story

The book goes into great detail and is very informative, the author definitely went to great lengths to achieve factual accuracy. Some sentences contain enough info that would require fact checking that you wonder how many research minutes went into creating them. The story itself is interesting.

Billionaires Vinegar

Thoroughly enjoyed the book, well written and a fun 'did he or didnt he do it' mystery. As a wine neophite though, I would have liked explanations or a glossary on viticultural terms used in the book.

We need a new TV series: CSI Bordeaux

As a wine writer for more than 30 years who knows some of the players mentioned in the book, I enjoyed the way Benjamin Wallace cleverly wove together history, the world of wine and France in particular and the hoax so many bought into. Not only does he chronicle an incredible array of details into understandable context with dexterity, he weaves in a steady thread of humor (Harry Waugh, the English wine merchant and writer, was once asked how often he confused Bordeaux with Burgundy. "Not since lunch," he replied."). The confusion and complicity of some of the world's best-known wine critics and auctioneers comes to light as the hoax unfolds. Some reputations are ruined because of seeming complicity. One parallel that might have been pursued further: the brilliance of Bill Koch, the billionaire who exposed the fraud, and Thomas Jefferson, whose name was attached to the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold. Both were meticulous in their work and record-keeping. The fact that no records existed at Monticello of the so-called Jefferson bottles should have put the Rodenstock collection into question immediately. Then, with carbon dating and other modern technology, the Koch team exposed the fraud. A tale well told.

Wine fakes, an increasing and serious business

Fakes are common: From LVMH ladies' bags to wine. And we are just at the beginning. If Petrus is making 30,000 bottles a year there may be 300,000 on the market. I have met counterfeits twice: Some years ago Le Pin and quite recently Romanné-Conti. So stay alert And widen your knowledge about this particular industry by reading the excellent book 'The Billionaire's Vinegar. Just as exciting as a novel by Agatha Christie and full of knowledge and facts not easily available for us commoners. And the book is real!!!!!

The Grifter and His Ultrarich Marks

It's not right to fool people, especially to make money from them. It's still fun, however, to learn about how suckers have gotten swindled, if the suckers aren't you or someone close to you. It's especially fun if the suckers are successful tycoons who are used to having the world and its denizens bow to their wills. It's fun, too, if the suckers are partaking in some particular form of snobbery, like the prestige that comes from buying hugely expensive bottles of wine. When a bottle went in 1985 for $156,000, the world swooned at the presumptuousness, and the press went wild calculating just how many hundreds of dollars each little sip would cost. Twenty years later, the fun is that the bottle was a phony, and the buyers of that particular bottle and of who knows how many others had been taken in by a very smart wine expert who eventually got caught. This is a fun story, told with verve and detail in _The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine_ (Crown) by Benjamin Wallace. Wallace has researched different facets of wine history, so there is a good deal of science and social history in his book, and he has the eye for detail of a good mystery writer (it isn't surprising that this nonfiction book has recently been optioned to be turned into a movie). You don't have to be interested in wine to find this story of human foibles funny and instructive. The bottle in question was auctioned by Christie's in 1985. It was a 1787 Château Lafite Bordeaux, and was presented as having been part of the cellar of the wine enthusiast Thomas Jefferson. It was engraved "1787 Lafitte" (the way they spelled it then) and had the initials "Th.J." Christie's was the most prestigious of auctioneers in the department of fine and historic wines, and it vouched for the authenticity of the bottle. The wine had been found and placed on the market by a German wine dealer named Hardy Rodenstock, who had previously been a pop-band manager. Rodenstock refused to say who sold the wine to him, nor how many other bottles there were. But he was doing a great business in very rare, very old wines, and customers were in those days eager to buy his finds, whether he would reveal their provenance or not. Neither Christie's nor potential buyers took the simple step of checking with the museum staff at Monticello, Jefferson's home, to see if there were any record of such a purchase by him. Jefferson was meticulous, even obsessive, about documenting his purchases of wine and everything else, so there should have been a record. There was none. Rodenstock's silence on where his fine old wines were coming from should not have taken two decades to foster suspicion in some of those who were buying from him, but such suspicions eventually started up. Wallace is exactly right about how the con game was played: "As with all successful cons, the marks and the grifter had been collaborators. One sold the illusion that the others were desp

Fascinating Journey through the World of Rare Wine

A volume about collecting rare vintage wine might seem an unusual topic for a real page-turner of a book, but Benjamin Wallace's "The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine" is an enthralling exploration of the hype and mystery surrounding the mania of the 1980s and 1990s about pursuing and buying bottles of rare and expensive (!) vintages of old wine. The starting point of the book is the 1985 auction in which a single bottle of 1787 Lafite Bordeaux, a bottle supposedly once belonging to Thomas Jefferson, sold for over [..] Wallace leads the reader over decades of intrigue and deception, as it becomes seemingly increasingly evident that much of such rare wine (including that bottle of 1787 Lafite) is fraudulent. The portraits of the people involved -- sellers and buyers and auctioneers and technical experts -- are well-drawn. What is perhaps most remarkable is that Wallace appears to have formed and maintained cordial relationships with almost every major player in the story, including the man widely suspected of being the chief wine faker, giving the author an unmatched view of the whole business. Even if your only connection with wine is an occasional glass of grape with dinner, "The Billionaire's Vinegar" is a book almost guaranteed to hold your interest -- and to teach you more about wine than you have ever known.