Old wine, fresh fraud?

By Leslie Gevirtz

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Roman historian Pliny complained of adulterated wine some 2,000 years ago and this spring's tempest in bottles of Brunello di Montalcino shows that some people remain tempted to stretch a good thing.

Combine that with record auction prices, a scarcity of 200-year-old vintages and the Thomas Jefferson name and the result is Benjamin Wallace's "The Billionaire's Vinegar," a tale peopled with famous and infamous characters, plunder and plonk and more than a dash of hoax and history.

"This has been going for centuries, millennia," Wallace said about selling cheap wine at vintage prices.

"This takes place in dark cellars and it's in dark bottles. It's ripe for fraud, especially back when there weren't labels and who knows the difference? Who can really tell? It's like a canvas ready for fraud."

Inspired by a few pages in a memoir by British wine critic Jancis Robinson, Wallace wrote about the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold -- a 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux found in Paris under mysterious circumstances and supposedly owned by Jefferson, author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

The bottle fetched $156,000 in 1985 at a Christie's auction in London.

The plot pits those who believe that the bottle is genuine against those who are seeking to uncover a fraud.

"I was a big fan of narrative nonfiction books like Simon Winchester's 'The Professor and the Madman' ... and I thought wine could really use a book like that because it's sort of an esoteric, complicated subject that would be a lot more palatable if you were learning about it in the context of a good story," Wallace explained.

Before the auction both The New York Times and Cinder Stanton, a historian at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, questioned the bottle's authenticity.

"Cinder is the unsung hero of the whole story with her quiet, meticulous, methodical scholarship," Wallace said.

"She said in 1985 'Look here's the evidence. I've explored the different theories. It's very unlikely that these belonged to Jefferson. End of story.' And that didn't seem to make a difference. Christie's went ahead with the auction," he added.

One of the sons of publishing billionaire Malcolm Forbes placed the winning bid. Rather than keeping the precious bottle in a darkened cellar with controlled temperatures, Forbes displayed it at the gallery of his Fifth Avenue headquarters in New York under hot lights. It wasn't long before the cork dried and air attacked the contents.

Soon after, more bottles from a missing shipment of 125 bottles that Jefferson had ordered began to surface at auctions including four that U.S. billionaire Bill Koch bought. The heir to an oil fortune, Koch has since sued the auction houses and the man who found the bottles, Hardy Rodenstock.

Wallace said what was amazing to him was that so little was known about Rodenstock.

"But that was the culture of wine writing. It was not a culture of skeptical, objective journalism. It was a culture of going to tastings for free and writing nice write-ups. It was, you know, if you wanted to go to these tastings, you could not bite the hand that poured your drink."