Book Review - 'The Billionaire's Vinegar' by Benjamin Wallace
Written By: Kasey Carpenter on Thu, Jul 10th 2008
Not since Don & Petie Kladstrup gave us Wine & War in 2001 has there been such an entertaining and thought-provoking book on the subject of wine. So much so that Will Smith's production company, Overbrook, has already secured the rights to the movie adaptation. The book was only released this year. That in and of itself is compelling.
But it is only when you crack the spine and enjoy the contents that you begin to see the genius at work in Wallace's description of the genius at work in Hardy Rodenstock, albeit of a less altruistic nature.
This is a classic, if not epic, tale of fraud and the age old mantra of "buyer beware" - a way of thinking that only recently has begun to take hold in those who buy, and more slowly, those who sell, wines that command insane numbers in the marketplace.
A great author once said you have two tools with which to win your reader, and he described them as the Heart Method & the Head Method. The heart method, as you would imagine, appeals to the heart of the reader, which Wallace does beautifully, assigning each player in the story a role that they themselves chose. Rodenstock the procurer of almost unimaginable wines, Forbes, Koch, Shanken and the gang as the buyers who were singularly driven to obtain the unobtainable, and Broadbent, the duped expert who willingly sealed these wines as legit, wanting desperately to believe they were so, not just for reputation, but wine in general. Wallace's deep commitment to research and unearthing quotes and interviews from people long removed and newsletters as scarce as Rarities, only cements his mastery of the Head Method, the method with which an author uses his command of the subject to convince his reader to embrace and pursue his narrative.
Orbiting around the star bottle in question, a rather homely misshapen bottle of 1787 "Lafitte" (as Lafite was often spelled in those days) are numerous other suspicious bottles provided by the same source, Hardy, which stab at the very heart of many a legitimate wine writer's works. Most of the written word on nineteenth century Bordeaux was penned while sipping from bottles provided by none other than Hardy Rodenstock himself. Parker, Robinson, Broadbent and others now question not whether what they tasted was good - it was - but whether it was what the label indicated it should be.
The story takes you from the excitement of record bidding in auction houses, to Bordeaux in the time of Jefferson, Broadbent's trailblazing in to Scottish cellars, and back to the present for the latest methods of detecting fraudulent bottles including radioactive dating and "trace element" testing.
And just as mysterious as the sources for his amazing wines is the story of Rodenstock himself, which seemed to evolve as the situated merited it, an interesting fact when considering Hardy's own "provenance."
Anyone who is mildly interested in wine will get a thrill out of this book, a non-fiction work written in an almost cliffhanger style that forces a continuous read. But those of us who value wine's place in society and are perhaps disconcerted, if not appalled by the ever-growing presence of fraud in the marketplace will devour this book in the manner of a great glass. Thoughtful savoring but done by bedtime. A must have for every wine library.
Buy "The Billionaire's Vinegar" at Amazon.com
