Over the years, Monticello enjoyed considerable success in recovering Jefferson relics, or at least locating them. The provenances were often straightforward. The Jefferson table lent by the Maryland Historical Society for the Forbes exhibit had passed down through five generations of Jefferson’s descendants before being purchased by a woman who willed it to the society. Many of the pieces that descended through Jefferson’s heirs found their way back to Monticello either as gifts or purchases. By 1958, more than fifteen pieces of the original silver owned by Jefferson had been reclaimed; when Monticello could not get the original, it sometimes had reproductions made.
There remained a number of relics that Monticello had located but had not been able to obtain, and many more that Monticello knew about but couldn’t locate. Monticello had never been able to find, for instance, a slew of paintings from Jefferson’s art collection that had been referenced in Jefferson’s documents. Every so often one would turn up, usually in as serendipitous a fashion as Rodenstock’s wine bottles. In 1912 a Jefferson-owned portrait of Thomas Paine turned up in a box of objects at a Massachusetts auction; the owner had no idea of its venerable history, which wouldn’t be recognized until the 1950s.
When it came to Jefferson’s wine, no bottles had ever been found. America’s early presidents had no entertaining budget, and Jefferson, in his first year of office, spent $2,800 of his $25,000 salary on wine. This kind of extravagance increased his already sizable debts, and he could no longer afford to keep deep stocks of wine. When Jefferson died, the 586 bottles left in his cellar held only wines from southern France and some Scuppernong.
In the 1960s, Monticello set about re-creating the wine cellar as it must have looked originally. It had been empty since Jefferson’s death. In February 1966 the curator of Monticello traveled to London seeking empty eighteenth-century bottles. He was able to find about twenty, and sailed back to New York with the plan of making molds to produce additional facsimiles. The closest Monticello came to laying hands on an actual artifact of Jefferson’s wine drinking was the discovery, in the course of archaeological digs begun at Monticello in the late 1970s, of most of a Madeira decanter and a shard of glass bearing the seal of Lafite.
IN 1985, CINDER Goodwin had her work cut out for her. Wine cherishes celebrities, and there are celebrities, certainly, who cherish wine. Nonetheless, celebrities loom much larger in the history of wine than wine does in their personal histories. While Thomas Jefferson was the foremost connoisseur of the eighteenth century, the fact received almost no mention in his biographies. The Monticello library’s file on Jefferson and wine was only an inch and a half thick.
But having spent much of the past five years doing the footnotes for the Memorandum Books, Goodwin had read countless Jefferson letters and was by now an old hand with Jefferson documents. Starting as a young man, Jefferson had kept several different diaries (one about his garden, one about his farm, one about his travels), every letter he received, a copy of each of the 16,000-odd letters he wrote in his lifetime, a correspondence log noting each letter sent and received, and the Memorandum Books. These last contained a daily record of every expenditure and every receipt of Jefferson’s from the age of twenty-four. There were bills for the oats for Jefferson’s horse in Paris. He also kept reams of miscellaneous accounts, which included customs records that accompanied the wine shipments he received in Paris. Jefferson larded his correspondence, to a tedious degree, with the minutiae of his wine orders, from shifting exchange rates to intricate freight-forwarding logistics. At his death, several tens of thousands of pages in his handwriting were in circulation.
“He didn’t have a wastebasket,” Goodwin said later.
It was more than this thoroughness that made her confident. Jefferson’s wine orders showed up in four different parts of the Jefferson record: the Memorandum Books, the miscellaneous accounts, the letters, and the letter log. Not in one or the other of them; most orders could be found in all four. Jefferson not only wrote everything down; he wrote it down several times in several places. Of course, Jefferson was human, and maybe a particular letter had been misplaced, or an entry hadn’t been made; but some trace of the entry or letter would invariably show up elsewhere. “He was a hero of meticulousness,” in Goodwin’s words. Jefferson himself stated that he would swear on his deathbed to the reliability of the Memorandum Books, which he said had excluded only a single transaction in fifteen years.
This thorough, meticulous, and multiply redundant record had survived nearly intact. If the bottles found in Paris had indeed belonged to Jefferson, there was every reason to expect that supporting documentary evidence could be found. Goodwin called the Princeton letters project and spoke with Monticello’s curators, who confirmed that none of the wine bottles exhumed by archaeologists at Monticello had been engraved. Then she began scouring the written record.
Goodwin found that for the 1784 vintage, Jefferson had recorded the purchase of only two of the four wines found by Rodenstock: the Margaux and Yquem, which he had received in 1787 and 1788, respectively. In his 1788 letter to the owner of Lafite, Jefferson had ordered the 1784 vintage, but he was informed that none was available. As for 1787, the vintage of the Lafite that the Forbes family had just bought, there was no evidence that Jefferson had ever ordered, or even wanted to order, a 1787 Lafite or, for that matter, a 1787 anything. Nor was there any indication that he had received them without ordering them. In 1790, after his return to America, he did place one order for Yquem in which he didn’t specify vintage (he asked to be sent whichever was drinking best), but he had it shipped directly from Bordeaux to America, and he recorded that he received the shipment. And there was no record of his having ever ordered Branne-Mouton in any vintage.
On December 12, 1985, a week after the record-setting auction, Goodwin issued her report. She couldn’t just come out and say she thought Broadbent and Rodenstock didn’t know what they were talking about, so she began by flattering them: “When we learned that [Hardy Rodenstock and Michael Broadbent] were men of unquestioned knowledge and integrity, we began to reassess the possibilities of authenticity.” Then she methodically proceeded to establish that they didn’t know what they were talking about.
While Goodwin’s report focused on the record-setting 1787 Lafite, she made the point that the bottles must fall or stand as a group. They had been found together and engraved similarly, which must have happened after they left their respective châteaux. Given that Jefferson, from 1787 on, ordered his wine directly from châteaux, deliberately bypassing merchants, this meant either that one of his intermediaries in Bordeaux had done the engraving, or that they had been engraved after reaching Jefferson in Paris.
“He seems to have made the connection between the bottles and Jefferson by a study of the records,” Goodwin wrote of Rodenstock, “but it is precisely those records which make such a connection less and less likely.”
Broadbent, in his Christie’s-catalog provenance for the 1787 Lafite, had pointed to Jefferson’s 1790 order, which included a request that the bottles be etiquettés, or labeled, as support for the engraving. Goodwin pointed out that to engrave the entire shipment (1,020 bottles) would have been costly and would certainly have merited mention in Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, yet no such expense appeared there. Goodwin also homed in on the particular style of initials used. Jefferson had requested that the wine be marked “T.I.” In other circumstances he had used a cursive “TJ” to identify certain possessions, and “Th:J,” with a colon, to sign some correspondence. The form of the initials on the Rodenstock bottles was “Th.J.,” which Jefferson had never used or specified.
Goodwin further noted that Jefferson had requested that the marking take place at the vineyard, which didn’t explain how wines from four different vineyards seemed to have been engraved by the same hand. And she cited some letters that seemed to indicate that, by etiquetté, Jefferson had meant that the cases, not the bottles, be labeled. Most damningly, it seemed, the 1790 order had co
nsisted only of Yquem and a lesser-known Bordeaux named Rausan. Not only had the shipment for Jefferson arrived successfully in America; even if the unspecified Yquem was 1787, the shipment had not included Lafite, Margaux, or Branne-Mouton.
Trying to anticipate some of the objections that might be raised, Goodwin dealt with the possibility that Jefferson had received some bottles as a gift or as part of a trade. In order for a verbal, undocumented transaction of this sort to have taken place, it would need to have been before his departure from Paris in September 1789, which was, in those days of three or four years between harvest and shipping, early for the 1787 vintage.
Goodwin also allowed that there was a slim possibility that evidence of further orders would turn up (in 1985, Jefferson’s letters had only been published through 1791, and access to the unpublished letters was limited), but given the redundancy of Jefferson’s recordkeeping, and her access to both his letter log and his Memorandum Books, she thought it highly unlikely. She also acknowledged that a lack of documentary evidence did not definitively prove that the bottles weren’t Jefferson’s. Monticello had numerous relics it had deemed authentic without having a paper trail to back them up; in those cases, however, provenance had been supported by the objects’ uninterrupted passage through several generations of Jefferson’s descendants.
How the particular combination of châteaux and vintages announced by Rodenstock—some of which Jefferson had ordered and received in Paris, some of which he had ordered and expressly not received in Paris, some of which he had ordered and received in America, and some of which he seemed never to have ordered, but which, if he had ordered, would in any case have been after his return to America—had all ended up in Paris, and been engraved by the same hand, was beyond Goodwin, but in her report she hazarded a guess.
“Were there not Thomases, Theodores, or Theophiles, and Jacksons, Joneses, and Juliens who also had a taste for fine Bordeaux wine, and who would have been resident in Paris in 1790 or after, when the 1787 vintage would have been in bottles? I think it is a question of someone other than Jefferson, and perhaps there is an equally fascinating story there.” After making another perfunctory reference to the “honorable characters of Mr. Rodenstock and Mr. Broadbent,” she concluded that she could not “make the same leap of faith they have.”
WHEN GOODWIN’S REPORT came out, Broadbent and Rodenstock reacted not with gratitude that this servant of accuracy and historical truth had demolished their case for a Jefferson link, but with rage. Even the most detail-oriented person couldn’t be expected to “note every vintage and source of every bottle he ever purchased or received,” as one Broadbent/Rodenstock partisan wrote, especially someone as busy as Jefferson after his return to the United States.
Goodwin had made a convincing case, but Broadbent seized on three weaknesses in it. First, there was, as it turned out, a record of Jefferson having requested engraving of bottles. Shortly before leaving Paris in September of 1789, he had written to John Jay, America’s foreign secretary in New York, describing a shipment of wine to him and George Washington with diamond-engraved initials on each bottle. Second, Goodwin’s insistence about the form of the initials was a flimsy argument; there was no reason to assume that someone engraving the bottles for Jefferson would follow his exact and idiosyncratic mode of punctuation. Third, Goodwin had said that the only wine in the cache that Jefferson had recorded ordering was 1784 Yquem; she failed to connect Jefferson’s order of 1784 Margaux with the Rodenstock find. (She hadn’t caught this only because the early U.S. media reports about the cache hadn’t indicated that it included 1784 Margaux.)
These points made only glancing dents in Cinder Goodwin’s case, but they sufficed to give Rodenstock and Broadbent a basis to attack the entire report. “Cindy Goodwin,” as Broadbent called her, had been “led astray and raised doubts almost solely because of the initials on the bottle,” as had the New York Times’s Howard Goldberg, whose probing questions Broadbent found distasteful. Goldberg was guilty, Broadbent wrote, of “the sort of investigative journalism we are all only too used to: like a terrier shaking a rabbit.” Rodenstock also supplied the VWGA Journal with a copy of what appeared to be a facsimile of an eighteenth-century page of Château d’Yquem’s ledger showing an explicit order by Jefferson for the 1787 vintage.
In a December 28 letter to Dan Jordan, Monticello’s new director, Rodenstock complained angrily that his integrity had been impugned by Goodwin. “[O]ne should courteously keep back one’s dubious and unfounded remarks,” Rodenstock wrote, “and one shouldn’t make oneself important in front of the press.” The controversy played out on the letters pages of Decanter. An elderly, impish Sussex winemaker named Arthur Woods, who frequently wrote letters to the editor dogging Broadbent, posed the rhetorical question, “Is it possible that Mr. Christopher Forbes, who bought the bottle, has not so much purchased a wine almost certainly undrinkable, or a genuine bottle of the period, worth perhaps £100, as a set of initials whose authenticity is likely to be vigorously challenged by those of a heretical bent?” He concluded by asking, “Did I hear somebody murmur ‘Piltdown Man’? Perish the thought.”
In Bordeaux, owners of the first-growth châteaux rallied behind Broadbent. Baron Eric de Rothschild, from Lafite, told Wine Spectator, “I don’t question its authenticity.” Comte Alexandre de Lur Saluces came next, attesting in Decanter to the authenticity of the Yquems that Rodenstock had found. Lur Saluces mentioned the letter in which Jefferson asked for bottles to be “labelled,” the original of which was in Yquem’s voluminous archives, and mentioned the 1784 order and “an order corresponding to 1787 as well” (Jefferson’s 1790 order in which he didn’t specify a vintage). It was the same evidence already weighed by Goodwin, but Lur Saluces put a different spin on it.
“I see no reason to doubt the authenticity of these bottles,” Lur Saluces continued. “Indeed, as far as the 1787 is concerned, we have been astonished at Yquem to discover an aroma that is familiar. After the tasting, the cellar master himself confirmed to me, that simply on the nose he had been able to recognize Yquem.” Lur Saluces called Rodenstock “my friend.” Broadbent himself wrote a letter to the editor that appeared in the July 1986 issue, in which he made the point: “I cannot imagine anyone in the late eighteenth century going to the trouble of engraving ‘Th.J,’ the name of the wine and the vintage, in the extraordinarily faint hope that in two hundred years’ time some susceptible collector would acquire it and some muggins of an American would pay an exorbitant price for it…. All I can repeatis that the bottle and its contents are amazingly right.”
Since neither side could prove anything, the dispute boiled down to where the burden of persuasion lay. Goodwin, a historian, made the case that it was very unlikely that the bottles were Jefferson’s. Surely it was statistically implausible that the only Jefferson bottles ever found intact would be the exact ones excluded from his extraordinarily thorough records (even if those records weren’t perfect, as evidenced by the unaccounted-for glass Lafite seal found in the dirt at Monticello). She contended that it was up to Broadbent and Rodenstock to convince the world otherwise. Meanwhile, Broadbent insisted that too many coincidences were involved for the bottles not to be Jefferson’s. His argument rested on several assumptions, not least of which was that no one had deliberately set out to fake the bottles.
FORTUNATELY FOR BROADBENT—and for Christie’s—Monticello didn’t come out with its report until a week after the auction had taken place. By then, the record price had vaulted the bottle high into the mediasphere, chronicled from Stockholm to Omaha to Melbourne. CBS News called it “the most famous bottle of wine in the world.” Most reports—whether in Newsweek, the AP, or the Times of London—stated unequivocally that it was Jefferson’s wine.
Journalists loved tallying the prorated cost of the wine: $19,500 a glass, $4,000 a sip, $795 “for each year of the life” of the wine. Citroën ran an ad making fun of the bottle’s price compared with the mere £4,165 cost of its “Van Ro
uge.” In a cartoon that ran in a British newspaper, a paunchy, red-nosed airplane passenger passed a bottle around to his friends while turning to a seat neighbor who appeared to be having a heart attack: “I’ve just opened your duty-free, mate—I’ll get you another bottle when she comes round!” Some muggins of an American, reveling in all the publicity, had the best of these framed and added to the gallery of press clippings that winds around the hallways of the Forbes magazine executive offices on lower Fifth Avenue.
There was a fair amount of moralizing about the purchase. Hand-wringing pundits spoke of Jefferson “[turning] over in his grave” because of the extravagance, or because of the Forbeses’ stated intention of putting the bottle in a museum. Wine experts proffered sniffy opinions on whether the Lafite would be drinkable. Bordeaux château owners eagerly hoped the price would have a trickle-down effect on the market for their own wines. Broadbent was soon calling it “[u]ndoubtedly the major event of the wine season, of any season, anywhere.”
Coming at the height of a decade increasingly viewed as one of materialistic excess, the bid would eventually take on symbolic heft. As “the most expensive wine” (by a factor of more than four), the bottle entered The Guinness Book of World Records. By the end of the decade, Life magazine, in its rundown of the 1980s, would include the purchase in a handful of year-defining events of 1985, alongside the resurrection of Coke Classic and the fad for Transformers, the Japanese toy.
In all the hubbub, any serious scholarly doubts about the bottle were forgotten, and two questions went unanswered. Years later, in interviews, Rodenstock would claim that Christie’s had known about the cache and he had simply beaten them to it. But Steven Spurrier, the well-connected Englishman who owned a wine shop in Paris and served as Christie’s agent in that city, had not heard so much as a whisper about the bottles’ discovery. It seemed odd that whoever first found the bottles wouldn’t have shopped them to the highest bidder, rather than automatically selling them to Rodenstock. Stranger still was the question of where, exactly, the bottles could have been found. In his last four years in France, Jefferson had lived at an address not in the Marais but on the Champs-Élysées, and the house had long ago been razed, replaced by a high-rise. Perhaps the bottles were a gift intended for Jefferson—a mixed case from an aristocratic Parisian friend that was never delivered because of the French Revolution. But even a week after Forbes had made news around the world, no one had stepped forward to claim he’d been the Parisian driver of the backhoe that had broken through to the hidden cache that turned out to hold the most expensive bottle of wine in history.
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