Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar came in the mail yesterday and I picked it up yesterday evening thinking to just page through it and maybe read the first little bit of it. Six hours later, after a quick trip to the grocery store for a bottle of wine, I was paging through to the book’s finish like some crazed kid trying desperately to win a contest. At that point I’d carried the book with me into the kitchen as I got a glass of wine and fixed a sandwich and as I’d gone outside for a cigarette—I could not put the book down, to an almost comical degree. It was like a blankie or something.
There are a couple simple reasons for this whole state of things. First, this is a story that might be the esperanto of detective stories: in 1985, a man claimed to’ve found a cache of bottles of wine purportedly owned by Thomas Jefferson. The bottles had been hidden behind a wall in some cellar in Paris and during a recent construction project, they’d been discovered.
One of the bottles was auctioned to Kip Forbes, another to a man named Bill Koch, another to a man named Marvin Shanken. One of the bottles was broken by a man who you’ve got to imagine feels like one of the biggest idiots of all time and his name is Bill Sokolin. All of these bottles had one thing in common: they were found by a man named Hardy Rodenstock, a German with a background in pop music and would later have the sort of relationship to wine sales and collecting that likely only a handful of people in the world can quite understand.
Know this: I know almost nothing and am only passingly curious about either Thomas Jefferson or wine. I feel like I should know about each, and to that end I try to know a little bit, but beside the tiny bit I know, I don’t much care. This is where Benjamin Wallace and his brilliance both come in and wreak such tremendous fun.
The title gives away parts of the speculation: wine, of course, turns into vinegar eventually, and so wouldn’t you suppose that wine that’s almost 200 years old would be…well, more valuable as historical artifact than enjoyable adult beverage? When the Jefferson Bottles (they bear proper noun status) were found, they were some of the oldest bottles of wine ever found, and so the field of knowledge, regarding how wines that old should taste, was basically nonexistent—and, to the degree that it did exist, it was dominated by only a handful of players, coincidentally all of whom had connections to Mr. Rodenstock, the German mentioned earlier who, holy cow, was the one who found the Jefferson Bottles to begin with (but then never ever ever divulged the specifics of where he found the bottles).
The Billionaire’s Vinegar is as fascinating as it is because there is not, in the end, a nice clean finish (not intended to be a double entendre re: wine)—I fear I’m giving something away by that, but I don’t think I really am. The story of the Jefferson Bottles and their provenance and the folks who bought them and their cultural legacy make up a whole phenomenon of almost perfect cause and effect. In simplest terms: a bottle of wine, as artifact, has an number of manipulatable variables. A bottle may be old but the cork may not be. Both bottle and cork may be old but the wine inside may not be. Bottle, cork, and wine all each may be old, but they may not correlate, in which case the whole thing’s fuzzy. (To some degrees, old cars have this sort of cache: an old Mustang, for instance, with all original, perfectly preserved parts, must (I’m totally guessing) go for more than one which’s been all updated and fancified, right?) Now, into that heady mix toss in the fact that the history of fancy, auction-house brokered bottles of wines was, in 1985 (when the first Jefferson Bottle went up for auction), at its zenith, with the dollar the strongest it would get against the pound—though it was also, wine auctioning, a relatively new field, less than 20 years old. Just imagine.
Remember, too, that wine is not baseball: we live in a Robert Parker world of 100 point scores, but he’s simply a master at giving consumers what we want: something close to objectivity. Fine wine appreciation has been and will likely continue to be a realm populated by very wealthy people who think little of describing a bottle of wine having notes of a “schoolgirl’s uniform,” (no joke). If someone were to give you a taste of a $10 bottle of wine, and then a $100 bottle of wine, are you sure you could taste the difference? How about between a $100 bottle of wine and a $1000 bottle of wine? You see where this is going?
Wallace does a great job of presenting tons of information without getting in his own way by editorializing: there’s hardly any Wallace in this book, to be honest (in the best way, I mean: in the nonfiction way that allows the reader the broadest, unfettered access to the story). What’s there instead is a story that’s more interesting and fun than many recent nonfiction books I’ve read, populated with characters as weird and neurotic and brazen as anyone could likely expect. It’s a hell of a thing, The Billionaire’s Vinegar: Either read it now or listen to your friends talking about it the rest of the summer without you.
