The Billionaire's Vinegar

by Benjamin Wallace

  Troy, who had spotted the fake at the Mouton tasting a week earlier, examined the cork from the magnum of 1900 Pichon Lalande and saw that it was strikingly like the Mouton cork he believed to be bogus, with a vintage obviously sanded off and replaced with an uncharacteristically faint “1900.” The wine itself tasted thirty years old. “It was outrageously young,” Molyneux-Berry recalled. Another Englishman, John Avery, an old old-wine hand whose family had been in the wine business in Bristol since the eighteenth century, stood up and said, simply, “These two bottles are not real.” Seasoned collector Ed Lazarus was puzzled by the “vanilla-chocolate-mint aroma,” later writing of the two bottles, “I had never experienced anything remotely similar in an older Bordeaux, or in fact anywhere else, except perhaps at a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop.”

  A similar outcry happened that year at a commercial tasting in Beverly Hills organized by Desai, a fifty-eight-vintage vertical of Margaux that included the 1771 and 1791 vintages. The latter had been supplied by Rodenstock, gratis, when he saw Desai in Germany; Rodenstock said both were from his Venezuelan haul. Carrying them back to the States, Desai sweated through customs, fearful of being hit with a massive antiques duty. The customs agent disappeared for a while; when he returned, he said he’d called a dozen wine stores, asking how much a “typical” 1771 and 1791 Margaux were worth. They all laughed at him. He ended up charging Desai less than a dollar, basing his calculation on the amount of liquid in the bottles rather than their age.

  At the tasting, Desai remarked that the older wines smelled like an old Hindu temple. “Because there are a lot of droppings from bats in those temples,” Desai recalled. “That’s all I meant, but it was quoted several times and was taken as if I meant it was really spiritual and mysterious.” A number of tasters found the bottles surprisingly youthful.

  Controversy flared up in 1989 at yet another Desai event, a vertical of Figeac, a St. Emilion property which abuts the more famous Cheval Blanc and is unusual in making a right-bank wine dominated by cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc rather than merlot. At the tasting, which took place in Paris, a magnum of 1905 brought by Rodenstock struck many participants as atypical, being strangely youthful, full-hued, and uncharacteristic in flavor. Edmund Penning-Rowsell, the dean of English wine writers, yelled out that it was “a complete fraud.” Rodenstock, put on the spot, declared that he had bought the magnum at Butterfield & Butterfield the year before, but the San Francisco auction house subsequently reported that it hadn’t sold a 1905 Figeac in the last four years. At that point Rodenstock said he had made a mistake: he had actually bought it in 1987 at Christie’s Chicago, and he produced a receipt from the sale. The wine had been advertised as a bottle, but Rodenstock said this was an error and it had turned out to be a magnum. Desai was convinced by the documentation, and thought, in any case, that it would have been ridiculous to fake a 1905, an off-vintage. He noted that Rodenstock had given him the bottle at no cost.

  Around the same time, an assemblage of Pétrus from the best vintages of the 1920s and 1930s, all in large formats such as Jéroboams and double magnums, came on the market, at a per-bottle price in excess of $20,000. Ed Lazarus, asked by a prospective buyer to authenticate them, was immediately suspicious. Despite decades of experience with old and rare wines, he had never encountered large-format, pre–World War II Pétrus. Neither had Dennis Foley, the San Francisco auctioneer. Harry Waugh, the eightysomething eminence grise of wine who had been one of the first English merchants to import Pétrus, said he never even heard of such bottles existing and was skeptical that any did. Christian Moueix, the proprietor of Pétrus, echoed this opinion. And the unnamed seller, according to Rarities, the short-lived newsletter that served as the Group’s unofficial house organ, refused to allow on-site inspection of the bottles, declaring it “out of the question!”

  Whether or not Rodenstock was the seller of that particular batch, he, too, became known for his large-format Pétrus bottlings. When questioned about them, the German said he’d bought the wine from an English cellar. This assertion was itself later challenged as improbable, since England wasn’t a traditional market for Pomerols, although Wine Spectator reporter James Suckling, a regular at Rodenstock’s tastings, vaguely reported the existence of old merchants’ catalogs showing that Bordeaux, including Pétrus, was being offered in large formats even in the 1920s and 1930s. Rodenstock argued that all the skeptics were motivated by jealousy, that they lacked sufficient experience with pre-phylloxera wines to know how they should taste, and that in the past wines were much less uniform, coming from barrels, not bottles.

  He was particularly annoyed by the argument that his old Pétrus big bottles must be fake because Pétrus hadn’t made any large-format bottlings before the Second World War. He chalked such “stupid assertion[s]” up to “would-be connoisseurs…Such a nonsense is unfortunately also spread by the château owners although they have no more documents in their archives. Wine has always been filled into big bottles and every other declaration is pure nonsense!…It’s ridiculous that despite such pieces of evidence some idiots still pretend that wine hasn’t been filled into big bottles in former times.”

  Ralf Frenzel, on the subject of big bottles, struck a metaphysical note. On the day when he had opened the 1787 Mouton at Mouton, while everyone else was eating lunch upstairs, Frenzel went into the cellar with Raoul Blondin, and watched as the cellarmaster poured two bottles of Mouton 1926 into one magnum bottle, thereby creating a magnum of 1926 Mouton. “So the question is,” Frenzel said later, “what is a real magnum?”

  Rodenstock’s bottles continued to draw questions. At a December 1989 Latour vertical at the restaurants Patina and Michael’s, in Los Angeles, three pre-phylloxera vintages struck several knowledgeable collectors as suspect. Four experienced tasters thought some older vintages were fake, while Harry Waugh was ambivalent and the bottles were defended by Belgian collector Frans de Cock, a major customer of Rodenstock’s who was a laminate-flooring tycoon. (With the very largest collections, a loosely inverse correlation often obtains between the size of the collection and the glamour of the collector’s profession.)

  The tasting notes of Givton, a Canadian, are illustrative. Of the 1865, he wrote, “Round, fruity, not unlike a younger Ausone rather than an old Latour. Some tobacco. Nice finish but artificially sweet. Unusual.” About the 1870 he was more blunt: “Impressive dark color. Coffee or chocolate liqueur, and fresh wine on the nose. A fake.” Likewise the 1874: “Toasty, fresh Cabernet Franc nose mixed with crème de cacao liqueur. Didn’t taste at all like Latour or any other claret. Described by someone as ‘young Mondavi cabernet and coffee or chocolate liqueur.’ Obviously a doctored wine.” Another taster likened it to “a Rolex bought in Hong Kong.” Alan Hare, chairman of the château, told the room: “This is fake.” Geoffrey Troy, de facto cork inspector, examined the 1865 stopper and found that it, too, seemed to have received identical treatment to the earlier Pichon and Mouton corks that he deemed fake. He assumed this bottle came from the same source.

  Crème de cacao…coffee liqueur…Baskin-Robbins! This was a departure from the old relabeling or revintaging or topping up of real wine. The known universe of the fake had expanded to include bottles filled with liquids not derived from grapes. While the Los Angeles collectors continued to hold private tastings among themselves, and Desai kept organizing smaller commercial tastings, the grander events came to an end. The string of incidents with suspicious bottles had demoralized them and shaken the soundness of the rare-wine market. In nearly every case the wines could be traced back to Rodenstock, though his name was rarely mentioned in published complaints about the problem. Instead, observers made defamation-proof comments such as noting that the corks in all the questionable wines were similar to one another, and different from the standard corks to be expected in each wine. “What are we to conclude from all this?” wrote Ed Lazarus in Rarities. “Sadly, that a person or people have been engaged in the creation and marketing of fraudulen
t bottles of what purports to be unadulterated rare old wine, and further, that there is big money to be made from such activity.”

  Lazarus went on to say that the best bet for guaranteeing an authentic old bottle was to make sure that it was either a never-recorked specimen from an English or Scottish castle, a bottle straight from the cellar of a Bordeaux château, or a bottle with some other transparent, unimpeachable provenance. Meanwhile, several leading châteaux, including Latour and the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC), enacted stricter recorking policies. The DRC stopped recorking altogether. Lafite, Margaux, Mouton, and Pétrus determined they would only recork bottles with the original corks and capsules, and in which the wine was authentic and unspoiled.

  Troy, more cynically, laid out a recipe for how to fake old bottles of wine:

  1. Find an empty bottle of an old vintage of Bordeaux. It should preferably be pre-Phylloxera as these vintages are worth a great deal of money and relatively few people know what they should taste like. The bottle should have an original label in good condition, if possible, because this adds greatly to the value of rare old wines.

  2. Fill the bottle with a carefully made combination of young Bordeaux, Rhône, Beaujolais, Crème de Cacao, etc. Use your imagination to make a good blend!

  3. Remove the cork from a bottle of young wine of the same château as the empty bottle you plan to recork. Do not use a conventional corkscrew, as that will ruin the cork, however an Ah-So cork puller that has the two prongs that slide down the side of the cork would work fine. It is very unlikely to damage the cork.

  4. Carefully sand the vintage date off the cork.

  5. Brand the correct “new” date on the cork to match the label of the old bottle being recorked.

  6. Recork and recapsule.

  “Now you have a beautiful bottle of rare old claret,” Troy concluded, “and you can make your haul as soon as an unsuspecting collector can be found who will purchase your fake bottle!”

  AS RODENSTOCK’S CREDIBILITY was being widely debated in the rare-wine scene, Broadbent defended the German, saying that the tasting notes Givton had adduced as evidence of fraud were consistent with his own notes on bottles that had not come from Rodenstock. In essence, Broadbent argued that since no two old bottles are the same, just about anything is possible. While he conceded the paucity of affirmative evidence of prewar large-format Pétrus bottlings—no Pétrus bottles of any size, in fact, had appeared at Christie’s before 1940—the auctioneer said that he had shown the large-format labels to a British Library expert on paper and print, who had deemed them authentic. And he said that he had found some prewar large-format Pétrus he had drunk, courtesy of Rodenstock, to be believably old. He allowed that “one or two” bottles at Rodenstock’s annual event tasted “too good to be true,” but noted that even wines with impeccable provenance (such as the Glamis Castle 1870 Lafite) could seem so young and fresh as to induce skepticism. He likened the evidence against Rodenstock’s bottles to that in favor of airplane parts believed to come from Amelia Earhart’s plane; there might not be proof that they were the real thing, but there wasn’t proof that they weren’t, either.

  “Is Rodenstock a poseur, a cheat?” Broadbent asked rhetorically in a letter to Rarities. “Deceitful or just ingenuous? Plausible certainly, a little worrying perhaps. But to suggest that every marvelous tasting old bottle, or strange and ‘off’ bottle, is the result of his manipulation is distinctly unfair and, I believe, wide of the mark. But I wish he would be less secretive. It merely adds to everyone’s suspicions.”

  A divide was opening around Rodenstock’s bottles. Depending on where you stood, it was either a substantial factual disagreement or a philosophical schism. The L. A. contingent, for the most part, deemed atypical bottles to be suspect, prima facie. Rodenstock and Broadbent argued that such bottles were illustrative of the very diversity they found thrilling in old wines. In this view, almost any flavor, no matter how weird, could be explained away as an artifact of some unknown circumstance in a wine’s maturation (storage conditions, say, or bottle variation—a truism about mature wines is that there are no great wines, only great bottles).

  Insiders’ skepticism seeped into the wider wine world’s consciousness, as the leading wine magazines began to sneak occasional snide asides into their copy. In December 1987, Decanter reported a record price paid for a Jéroboam of Pétrus 1961 ($14,000), attributing it partly to the wine’s “rarity following a burglary at the château. Christie’s say they know of no other Jéroboam, so this was probably a unique chance for a wealthy buyer (unless Mr. Hardy Rodenstock of West Germany happens to have a cache). As far as is known, Thomas Jefferson did not buy this wine.”

  Two years later the Wine Spectator published an April Fool’s account of a $5.7-million bid for a “red wine believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar.” The spoof went on to say that “[t]he ancient clay amphora, which bears the initials ‘J.C.,’ was found in a bombed-out cellar in Beirut, Lebanon, by well-known West German collector Hardy Rodenstock.” Moreover, Michael Broadbent had “verified the amphora as genuine” and stated that “[i]t may well be [drinkable]…. Only last year I tried a 2,100-year-old red wine from Crete. Although the color was somewhat faded and the flavors had dried out a bit, it still retained a delicate bouquet of pine resin, ancient Roman sandals, and Minoan bull droppings.” Rodenstock had been raising eyebrows for some time, but open mockery of the venerable Broadbent was something new.

  The effects of the creeping cynicism on the rare-wine market were more serious, as auction houses experienced a softening of demand for old wines. At a June 28, 1990, sale at Christie’s London, only a few of the dozen nineteenth-century Bordeaux on offer sold.

  The doubts caused rifts in Rodenstock’s inner circle, even before Walter Eigensatz became disillusioned. In 1987, Mario Scheuermann, the Hamburg journalist who had known Rodenstock since the late 1970s and had been to every one of his big tastings, attended the first Masters of Food & Wine event in Carmel, California. There, everyone asked him about rumors that Rodenstock’s bottles were fakes. Upon his return to Hamburg, Scheuermann called Rodenstock and told him what people were saying. Rodenstock reacted angrily. Scheuermann responded that he was just the messenger, but Rodenstock wasn’t pacified. He stopped speaking to Scheuermann. And once Eigensatz began openly expressing doubts about his bottles, Rodenstock several times threatened to sue his former friend.

  Rodenstock increasingly alienated people in Bordeaux, with both his dispute with Lur Saluces and another campaign he waged against Christian Moueix, the young head of Pétrus who had publicly doubted Rodenstock’s big Pétrus bottles from the 1920s. This time his target was Moueix’s use of filtration, a controversial modern technique for clarifying wine before bottling. Rodenstock presented himself as a defender of tradition, and Bordeaux winemakers such as Lur Saluces and Moueix as destroyers of it.

  Rodenstock’s personal elusiveness was now writ larger. He moved among his many homes, communicating mainly by fax, as he continued to solicit new clients. In 1989, when Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer who was Dodi Al-Fayed’s uncle, was briefly imprisoned in Berne, Switzerland, Rodenstock told people he had sent him a bottle of Pétrus and that, after his release, Khashoggi had placed a large order with him.

  There was a sense of innocence lost among the German collectors. “In the beginning, we were all friends, interested in what each next wine would reveal, be like,” Frenzel said later. “There was a wonderful sense of camaraderie. The problem was, when the newspapers wrote stories, then came jealousy and competition. The tastings became bigger, there were more journalists, who were more and more competitive with each other. There were more people who weren’t into wine but were there for their image and the glamour. And then the women started coming to the tastings in 1989 or 1990, which made it worse. They brought out the worst qualities in their husbands: ‘Oh, you have a big watch, mine’s bigger.’” Frenzel thought it was the appearance of the big profile of Rodenstock
in Wine Spectator, with its cover photograph of him chomping on a cigar, that turned many of his friends against him.

  What had earlier been a sense of playful competition was now more acrimonious. Collectors who contributed rare bottles that showed badly resented Rodenstock’s bottles, which always seemed to come out smelling like roses, and spread rumors that the bottles must be rigged. “It’s the kindergarten syndrome,” Scheuermann said. “The five children in the sandbox won’t let the sixth in.” But none of the rifts was as public and bitter, or had farther-reaching repercussions, as that with the man known as Herr Pétrus.

  HANS-PETER FRERICKS lived in a southern suburb of Munich, not far from where Rodenstock had moved after leaving the tiny Westerwald town of Bad Marienberg in 1985. Frericks had gotten rich selling bicycle and car accessories, such as windshield wipers, in supermarkets. When the German government passed a law in 1988 requiring that every car contain four pairs of PVC “anti-AIDS” gloves in their glove compartments for first-aid purposes, Frericks made a killing. He had anticipated the legislation and filled a warehouse with the gloves.

  Despite his vaunted enthusiasm for Pétrus, some of his fellow German collectors viewed him as more of a status drinker than a serious wine person. Bearded and shiny-domed, Frericks was wont to get loud and drunk, and he once posed for a magazine photographer in a restaurant kitchen wearing an apron with nothing underneath, buttocks exposed. By the end of the 1980s, his interest in wine was waning, and in 1989, Frericks decided to dispose of a substantial portion of his cellar. He asked Sotheby’s to handle the sale. The head of the auction house’s wine department, at the time, was David Molyneux-Berry, whose habitual look incorporated a bow tie, glasses, Vandyke beard, and ponytail. He had been with the department since its founding in 1970, and had recently become director. Broadbent, competitive as ever, later recalled Molyneux-Berry as “something and nothing, really…When I knew him when we were both at Harvey’s, it was just David Berry. He became Molyneux-Berry when he went to Sotheby’s.”