A month after breaking the bottle, Sokolin removed the frozen wine from his freezer and defrosted it. No decanting, no ceremony. He just drank it from a glass. A strange thing had happened in the last month. “It was good, but it wasn’t wine,” Sokolin recalled. “It was grape juice.” The freezing had removed the alcohol, and with it the impurities. At least that was Sokolin’s take.
Sokolin says he asked Hardy Rodenstock for a replacement bottle, and Rodenstock replied that it would cost $800,000. “You’re crazy,” Sokolin told him. The insurance company Frank Crystal & Co. eventually made out a check to “Whitwhams and William Sokolin” in the amount of $197,625 and dated June 7, 1989. The money would go to Tim Littler, who had intended to reclaim the bottle in June, since he had an interested buyer in Japan.
Soon after, Littler and Michael Broadbent were chatting at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, when a man approached, ringing a small bell. Littler and Broadbent were old friends, and Whitwhams handled Christie’s shipping and customs clearance in Japan. Broadbent was doing an auction there. “Mr. Littler,” the bell-ringer said, “you have a fax.” It reported that the insurance check had arrived.
“I guess we’ve lost the record,” Broadbent said.
CHAPTER 11
THE DIVINER OF WINES
IN THE LATE 1980s, HARDY RODENSTOCK TOLD HIS friend Georg Riedel that he wished to create his own line of mouth-blown wineglasses. Riedel was the tenth generation in a remarkable glassmaking dynasty. It had begun in the Bohemian forest three centuries before and, after World War II, relocated to the Alpine Austrian village of Kufstein. Georg’s father, Claus, had a simple, brilliant insight: the shape of a glass—the size of the bowl, its curvature, the diameter of the rim—affects how a wine smells and tastes. Claus produced a glass for each of the classic wine regions, including Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, in the Rhône Valley. They were beautiful and functional. The grand cru Burgundy glass was enormous, with a flaring lip. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City acquired one for its permanent collection.
If Claus was the creative pathfinder, it was Georg who would make the glasses into a coveted commodity and transform his father’s breakthrough idea into conventional wisdom. In the 1970s, with the emergence of New World regions such as California and Australia, the wine world began to move away from speaking of wine in terms of place (a glass of Bordeaux) and toward speaking in terms of grape varietal (a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon). Georg set out to market varietal-specific glasses: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon…Several of the glasses were identical to those designed by his father, and had simply been relabeled, but Georg also oversaw the design of a number of increasingly specialized glasses. The thirty-three different glasses that would eventually constitute the high-end line included one expressly for Chardonnays from Burgundy’s Montrachet appellation, one for Rheingau Rieslings, and one for white wines from the Loire Valley.
Georg Riedel was custom-tailored both in his suits and in his soul. He wore pocket squares that matched his ties, and, still in his forties, had already planned the wine to be drunk at his funeral, setting aside sixty bottles of a late-harvest Austrian Riesling, a 1979 Trockenbeerenauslese from Freie Weingärtner. Riedel’s relationship with Hardy Rodenstock dated to 1982, when Riedel supplied the glassware for Rodenstock’s third tasting at Fuente. In return, he was invited to the event, and since then Riedel had attended and supplied the crystal—several thousand pieces of stemware—for every Rodenstock tasting.
He and Rodenstock grew close. It was through Rodenstock that Riedel learned about old wine and tasted the vintages that he considered to be his peak wine experiences. He first tasted the legendary 1870 Lafite at a Rodenstock tasting; he tasted the 1811 Yquem, the best wine that ever passed his lips, three or four times, all at Rodenstock tastings; and it was through Rodenstock that he tasted the “most perfect” wine he had ever enjoyed, the 1921 Mouton in Jéroboam. In his everyday drinking, too, Riedel favored mature wines—he wouldn’t touch a Bordeaux younger than ten years—and he became a regular customer of Rodenstock’s.
When Thomas Jefferson was alive, glasses were typically smaller and didn’t curve in at the top. Not until the twentieth century were significant changes made to the shape of wineglasses. A line called Les Impitoyables—The Pitiless—appeared in the United States in the 1980s, and consisted of four outsized, rather severe-looking mouth-blown crystal tulips. But Les Impitoyables was sometimes faulted for its glass-half-empty approach; as their name suggested, the glasses highlighted a wine’s flaws as much as its virtues. Riedel, ten years later, was the revolutionary glassware that caught on.
A tireless pitchman, Georg Riedel put himself wherever wine was being bought and drunk, at auctions and fairs and tastings and trade shows. He did this very simply. One nose at a time, he demonstrated the glasses side by side with the competition. By and large, his test subjects, people who were already very interested in wine, approached the demonstration with skepticism and came away true believers.
Riedel made a big push into the United States after the dollar started bleeding value in 1985; suddenly the demand for Riedel’s luxury gift items (bowls, vases, figurines) dried up. He needed to reposition the company, and wineglasses were the way. His first breakthrough in the American market was with the Mondavis, the pioneering California wine family, in January 1990. Like everyone else, the Mondavis initially reacted as if Riedel were peddling snake oil. But after being treated to his stock show-and-tell, they were converted; they got rid of all their old glasses, placed a large order for Riedels, and, like all good converts, began to spread the word themselves. Riedel did demonstrations for important wine writers, making a special trip to Maryland to demonstrate them for Robert Parker, who lived in the small town of Monkton. Parker was blown away. “Do I have to rewrite all my notes?” he wondered aloud to Riedel. In June 1991, Parker sang the glasses’ praises in his newsletter.
Riedel soon scaled up his efforts. At Marvin Shanken’s 1997 Wine Experience in New York, he made a presentation to one thousand noses at once. Riedel had a set speech: the glass was a loudspeaker for the wine; it transmitted the passion sealed in a bottle. Riedel took to saying: “Mondavi made wine, Parker wrote about it, we brought the glasses.”
Riedel glasses were an idea for their time. Wine connoisseurship was in a phase of accelerating precision. In the two centuries since Thomas Jefferson’s imprecise language for communicating about wine, attempts to describe the evanescent sensations provoked by tasting had been fitful. The romantic era of wine appreciation, which lasted well into the twentieth century, yielded such curlicues as this 1932 description, by H. Warner Allen, of the Latour 1869: “The palate recognised a heroic wine, such a drink as might refresh the warring archangels, and the perfection of its beauty called up the noble phrase ‘terrible as an army with banners.’”
In the latter half of the twentieth century, the idea of tasting notes had taken hold, and their descriptions had become increasingly sensory. The untrained nose might think it absurd to detect a grocery list of smells in a glass of wine, but it had an empirical basis—a wine could contain some of the same phenolic compounds as did said groceries—which was why different tasters often came up with the same adjectives. The apotheosis of this hyperdelineated linguistic movement came in 1990, with the invention of the “Wine Aroma Wheel” by a chemist at the University of California at Davis named Ann C. Noble. The wheel attempted to come up with a standard nomenclature. Pineapple, melon, and banana were examples of “tropical fruit” flavors, which, along with citrus, berry, tree fruit, and dried fruit, made up the “fruity” family of aromas. “Wet dog,” “burnt match,” and “skunk” were examples of “sulfur flavors,” which, along with “pungent” and “petroleum” flavors, formed the “chemical” family. In all, the wheel delineated nearly a hundred scents.
Some of the new precision was grounded in science. Much of it just looked as if it was. Attempts to rank various wines dated back to antiquity. The Cl
assification of 1855 had been, in its way, an effort to differentiate among the Bordeaux hoards. Modern systems ranged from Michael Broadbent’s zero-to-five stars to the twenty-point systems of U.C. Davis, Decanter, and English critics Clive Coates and Jancis Robinson. But the reigning paradigm, starting in the early 1980s, was the 100-point scale pioneered by Robert Parker and copied by other influential tasting authorities, including Wine Spectator. The very fineness of the scoring system’s gradations cast doubt on its validity. Critics argued that it was absurd to suggest that there was a meaningful distinction between an 86 and an 87, or between a 92 and a 93. The endless verticals and horizontals were empirical studies of a sort. Was such-and-such vintage—the 1945, the 1961—still up to snuff? Was Pétrus really the best Pomerol? Which of the two Rothschild rivals—Lafite and Mouton—would prevail in a multi-vintage showdown? Was Latour truly the longest-lived of the first growths? Did the ’29 Pétrus taste different in different-size bottles? These were studies without scientific controls.
Another area of wine appreciation that had become more nuanced was the pairing of food and wine. A few rules of thumb (red wine with meat, white with fish) and a handful of traditional combinations—Sauternes and foie gras, Port with Stilton, Chablis alongside oysters—had given way to a much more complex picture. There were, after all, some fish (salmon) that went well with some reds (pinot noir). You could find people who swore by idiosyncratic combinations like “Margaux and chocolate,” and denounced pairing them with anything else. Rodenstock went so far as to suggest that when one was serving Yquem, its temperature should depend on what it was accompanying (43–46 degrees Fahrenheit with foie gras, 46–50 degrees with desserts, 50–53 degrees with Roquefort or Stilton). Many of the pairings did, at any rate, taste pretty good.
Until the late 1980s, the Riedel glass suggested for Sauternes was the one designed for mature white Bordeaux. Rodenstock believed Sauternes required its own glass. He made some sketches and gave them to Riedel, who turned them into designs and gave them back to Rodenstock, who made a couple of changes. Prototypes were made. The bowl of the glass tapered almost to a point at its base, and swelled elegantly to a bulge near its top. The shape tempered the dessert wine’s sweetness and emphasized its minerality, transforming intensity into finesse. The narrow mouth of the glass concentrated the wine’s inimitable nose, showcasing the sweet, yeasty aroma redolent of baked raisin bread. For Rodenstock, having his own line of Riedel glasses, the HR-1 Series, was the ultimate status symbol.
RODENSTOCK’S FAME HAD spread since the auction of the Forbes bottle. The publicity from that one sale had made him known internationally in wine circles, enabling him to launch a robust career dealing wine. He had made a tidy sum just by selling off several more of the Jefferson bottles. In 1986, in partnership with an innkeeper in Austria’s Wachau wine region, he had begun to organize annual commercial tastings, where he provided the wine and guests paid sums into the thousands of dollars to attend. His wine business now extended to the Far East, where he also owned a Taiwanese company that packaged condoms in hazelnut shells and marketed them as gag gifts. At the end of his tastings, Rodenstock would give the nuts away.
His knack for unearthing sensational wine rarities had not ended with the Jefferson bottles. The publicity from the Forbes sale, he said, had led to his being approached about old bottles found in Russia. The czars in St. Petersburg had been well-documented procurers of Yquem, and Rodenstock soon acquired four bottles purportedly dating to between 1740 and 1760. At his 1986 tasting, he had produced an Yquem he said he had obtained in Leningrad. Bulky and adorned with enamel flowers, the bottle was undated but bore the name Sauvage, the family that owned Yquem before it became a Lur Saluces property. “The rarest of all these rarities,” Jancis Robinson later described the bottle, extolling “these glasses of unctuous history.”
Rodenstock spoke of a confederate, in the employ of Lufthansa, who smuggled Yquems out of Russia for him. He told friends that he had found another trove, for which he had paid a million dollars cash, in Caracas, Venezuela. “[F]or ancient wines,” Edmund Penning-Rowsell wrote in 1989, “[Rodenstock] appears to have similar powers of discovery to water diviners, in their more pedestrian calling.”
Rodenstock had become wealthier, his tastings more lavish every year. They were now located in the chic ski resort of Arlberg, in western Austria, lasted an entire weekend, and included nearly seventy guests, many of them European celebrities. Rodenstock, who had never ended up marrying Heinz-Gert Woschek’s daughter Patricia, had traded up to richer, more socially prominent girlfriends. In addition to wine, he now collected porcelain and watches, and always wore something unusual on his wrist. He was also a tax exile, officially a resident in Somerset Maugham’s “sunny place for shady people”—the haven of Monte Carlo—and kept additional homes in Munich and at Lacanau, a seaside resort outside of Bordeaux. (A few years later, he would add homes on the Spanish island of Marbella and in the Austrian ski village of Kitzbühel.) Though the few people who saw the homes noted that none was very large, the addresses helped him to gain entrée to a circle of people who were flashy, well-heeled, and generally dismissive of outsiders—or at least to look as though he had.
Up to now, Rodenstock had shied away from publicity focused personally on him, but with his business growing, he decided to grant a handful of carefully chosen journalists the kind of access necessary to write big features that would spread his name among prospective customers. In December 1988, Wine Spectator put him on its cover, a glass of Yquem in one hand, a No. 2 Davidoff cigar in the other, with the words “Money Doesn’t Matter: The World’s Most Extravagant Wine Collector.”
The picture that emerged in the articles, clearly supplied to the journalists by Rodenstock, included several previously unreported details. Among them: Rodenstock credited his organizational abilities to his father, who he said had been the regional railway director in Essen. Before working in the music business, Rodenstock had been an academic lecturer in surveying and mathematics, “the youngest such person in North-Rhine Westphalia,” and had written “a series of scientific reports and books on geodesy.” He had left academia, he revealed to a friendly Austrian journalist, because “he was urged to join a political party if he wanted to achieve greater academic honor. That didn’t suit the independent-minded young man at all.”
The articles were not exactly hard-hitting. One of them noted that Rodenstock was a Sagittarius, referred to him simply as “Hardy,” and described him as “an artist of life.” He said he regularly received blank checks from American collectors begging for a spot at one of his tastings, but that he turned them down because wine wasn’t about money for him. Rodenstock described himself as “a battle drinker,” and said that when he tasted a great wine it was like “all hell is breaking loose on my palate.”
IN THE FOUR years since Rodenstock’s discovery of the Jefferson bottles, mega-tasting mania had escalated. Every week, it seemed, there was another attempt by a collector to outdo everyone else. Hans-Peter Frericks, Herr Pétrus, held a thirty-two-vintage vertical of his namesake wine at the Residenz, a centuries-old palace in Munich. There were magnums and Jéroboams, and the tasting was followed by dinner at the Egyptian Art Museum. “There was a mummy on one side and 1.8 kilos of caviar on the other,” Otto Jung said later. “It was totally decadent.” Outside the party, protesters picketed the use of a government building for an elite affair. Lloyd Flatt arrived at Rodenstock’s tasting at Arlberg in a chauffeured Range Rover, fresh from having had a liver transplant. Arne Berger, a Hamburg collector, held several “100 Point” tastings, featuring only wines that had been anointed with perfect scores by Robert Parker.
The game was starting to exceed the means of people like Mario Scheuermann, the journalist. For one “best bottle” tasting, to which everyone attending had to contribute the best bottle from his cellar, a guest seeking an invitation had to write a letter to the organizing committee and impress them with the bottle he’d bring. An
d he had to be able to bring two bottles of it, or one magnum, to ensure that everyone would get a decent pour. Scheuermann proposed bringing Haut-Brion ’61. This was a first growth in a vintage widely considered to be one of the greatest of the century. It traded at auction for nearly $300 a bottle. Scheuermann only squeaked in. His was the cheapest, and youngest, bottle at the tasting. Everyone else had brought legends like ’45 Mouton, ’47 Cheval Blanc, and ’28 Latour. The tastings had become “a society game,” says Jung. He became uncomfortable accepting all this very expensive wine when he was no longer contributing. The 1989 Rodenstock tasting would be the last he would attend.
The tone of these events was also becoming more serious. So much money was at stake now, and so much ego, that some longtime members of the scene felt there was a hubris to it all, a hollow and cancerous competitiveness. The collectors would revel in the fact that, often, they owned or had tasted more vintages than the people who made the wine. A veteran Rhône collector in Hamburg, a law professor, surprised Gérard Jaboulet, a major Rhône producer, with a breakfast vertical (the Germans seemed to take pleasure in scheduling these events for 9:00 a.m.) of Jaboulet’s flagship wine, La Chapelle, including every vintage from 1945 to 1961. Several of these vintages Jaboulet himself hadn’t tasted. “Jaboulet was shocked,” Scheuermann recalled. “This was just because this poor guy had never had these vintages.”
Rodenstock’s own tastings had progressed steadily. Each year the wines were rarer, the selection better, the condition better, the bottles bigger. Nothing, however, was as grand as the Rodenstock tasting in 1989.
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