The Billionaire's Vinegar

by Benjamin Wallace

  For all his anger, Koch also seemed energized by the pursuit, and he and Goldstein were convinced they were living a real-life caper film. “This is National Treasure,” Goldstein kept saying. In the car back to the Oxbow office, they amused themselves by speculating who might play them on the big screen. Koch had skirted the edges of the entertainment business. In the early nineties he had made a ham-fisted play to buy MGM; he called the film studio “Metro-Golden-Mayer” in a press release he claims was unauthorized, misidentified then-owner Crédit Lyonnais as “French Lyonnais,” antagonized industry powerbroker Michael Ovitz, and was laughed out of Hollywood. More recently, he had wed Bridget Rooney, of the Pittsburgh Steelers–owning Rooneys, who was the mother of actor Kevin Costner’s son. Now someone suggested Michael Caine could play Koch, and everybody laughed.

  MUCH REMAINED FOR Koch’s team to do before filing a lawsuit. Some was legal preparation. Koch had bought the bottles more than fifteen years earlier, and they needed to determine whether the statute of limitations for fraud had run out. Koch’s lawyers advised him that the statutory clock only started ticking once a victim became aware of a potential fraud. Even though Koch had paid a Munich lawyer a few thousand dollars in April of 1993 to look into the Frericks-Rodenstock dispute, Koch now said he didn’t remember doing so. After Rodenstock and the Munich lawyer disputed this, and records disproved Koch, he said that the lawyer had reassured him of the bottles’ authenticity, and that he first heard of Monticello’s doubts during the run up to the Boston MFA show in 2005. Koch said he had never read the New York Times or Wine Spectator articles that publicized Monticello’s skepticism years earlier.

  Koch and his lawyers still needed to decide whom to sue (Rodenstock, Christie’s, Broadbent, Farr Vintners?), where (Germany? England? America?), and whether to seek out other plaintiffs. Koch initially sought allies in his cause, and Kip Forbes seemed amenable. The Forbes family had already decided to sell their bottle through the books and manuscripts department at Christie’s in May 2006 as part of a dispersal sale of their historical American documents collection. But they withdrew the bottle from the sale, citing restrictive New York laws governing the sale of alcohol. The other reason was that Kip had been contacted by Koch, and he wanted in.

  To build a strong case against Rodenstock, Koch knew that it was necessary to amass overwhelming evidence, and the investigation proceeded along several parallel tracks. One was to methodically create a paper trail linking Koch’s bottles to Rodenstock. In early January, Koch himself faxed Rodenstock from a family-owned apartment in New York, asking the German to affirm that he was the source of Koch’s Jefferson bottles and that he believed they had belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Faxing Rodenstock from New York was deliberate. Koch’s lawyers viewed it as a favorable venue for their lawsuit, and communications routed through New York would help to justify it as the proper jurisdiction.

  A week later, Rodenstock bit, responding with a fax sent to the New York number. Rodenstock said he had already answered the questions posed by Stanley Los, reiterating his and Broadbent’s case for a Jefferson attribution and the story of the carbon-dating test he had commissioned. He ended with a cheery postscript: “I have heard that you have bought many fantastic wines at the spectacular Zachys auction. Congratulations!”

  All this was the groundwork necessary for Koch to make his case about the Jefferson bottles. But what mattered to him, ultimately, was not just the Jefferson bottles, but the integrity of his entire collection. Accordingly, in March 2006, Elroy was dispatched to Château Pétrus in Pomerol. His mission: to authenticate two Rodenstock-sourced magnums of 1921 Pétrus. Koch had bought one of them at the “spectacular” Zachys auction for $33,150 and said he knew it came from Rodenstock because the consignor, a San Francisco tech entrepreneur named Eric Greenberg, had told him so. (Greenberg, who was reputed to have 70,000 bottles in his cellar, would later deny this.) Now, with a lawyer present, Pétrus officials found eight faults with the bottles. They called the Rodenstock-Greenberg-Zachys bottle “a very impressive fake made by a master forger of wine…the cork was too long and the metal cap and label on the wine appear to have been artificially aged.”

  Elroy had brought his glass experts with him on this trip, and the men, along with Philippe Hubert, visited Château d’Yquem to inspect the two Jefferson bottles, one full and one empty, in its possession. As with Koch’s four Jefferson bottles, the experts determined that the engravings on these two had also been made with a modern power tool. Later they would reach the same conclusion about the Forbes bottle.

  Elroy then let Hubert take a gamma-ray reading from the Pétrus magnums. The wine inside showed no trace of cesium-137, but the bottle glass itself emitted a post–World War II level of radioactivity.

  On April 10, Koch faxed Rodenstock again. This time he asked for a meeting “over a good glass of wine, at a place of your choosing…. A short exchange of information face-to-face will accomplish more than a number of faxes and telephone calls.” A month later, writing “from the sunny Kitzbühel,” Rodenstock responded. He was testier this time, saying that “the matter is settled. From a legal point of view the purchase and the sale are barred by the statute of limitation.” He denounced “the yellow press” for covering the Frericks dispute—“that farce”—“in a very primitive way.” Legally, he said, it was Farr Vintners with whom Koch should be speaking; he saw no point in a discussion, and in any event “my English is unfortunately also not so good to speak with you about all the things I have already told you in writing.” He claimed that he had “had all of the faxes I have sent you translated from German to English.” For the first time he offered a detail about his supposed Parisian source: “The person from whom I have bought the bottles at the time was about sixty-five years old. I don’t even know if the seller of the bottles is still alive today.”

  After all this, his amiable tone returned: “As said, if you would like to drink some fantastic wines with me in a nice circle of wine friends at a trip to Europe, I will gladly organize a wine tasting in your honor. Is there a wine you always wanted to drink but you don’t have in your wine cellar? I would be glad to fulfil you that wish if I should have this wine in my cellar.”

  KOCH EXPANDED HIS investigation to the contents of his entire cellar, and hired David Molyneux-Berry, the former Sotheby’s wine director who had first deemed the Frericks bottles fake, to vet his collection. The Englishman spent weeks in Koch’s cellars, in Palm Beach and on Cape Cod. The weather was poor, and he worked from nine in the morning to six in the evening without surfacing for sun or air.

  Simultaneously, another collector joined Koch’s cause. A Boston entrepreneur named Russell Frye had recently sold his cellar through Sotheby’s for nearly $8 million, the auction house’s second-largest wine sale ever. But Sotheby’s had rejected a lot of Frye’s older bottles as fraudulent, and had put him in touch with Molyneux-Berry and Koch.

  Molyneux-Berry examined hundreds of Koch’s bottles, taking one at a time and comparing it with others. Because Koch’s collection was so encompassing, Molyneux-Berry often had the luxury of comparing the same wine in the same vintage in multiple bottlings, even fifteen or twenty bottles of the same kind. All might look right except, say, three, which would look wrong in exactly the same way. It could take up to an hour to examine each bottle, but Koch insisted that Molyneux-Berry take the time necessary to assess the cellar.

  “One, he’s very rich,” Molyneux-Berry said during a break from his work. “Two, he’s absolutely pissed off at being defrauded.”

  Molyneux-Berry had worked up a list of thirty-two indicators of authenticity. They ranged from the shape of the bottle to the color of the glass, to the label material, to the label’s coloration, to the importer’s “slip” label, to the pontil scars and mold marks and ullage and capsule and cork and color of the wine and sediment. He would tick them off one by one.

  Among the fakes he found was a magnum of Lafite 1945 that was in a bottle of a sort only created
in 1964. A batch of 1950s La Tâche just purchased by Koch at auction had suspiciously high fills. Other bottles bore labels that had clearly been copied. Those were the easy ones. More difficult were instances where the bottle was correct, the label was good, the slip label seemed right, but Molyneux-Berry just had a feeling at first, and on closer scrutiny found some more definitive clue.

  Molyneux-Berry made a point of not wanting to know the source of any bottle before he had made an assessment of its authenticity. He didn’t want to have an unconscious bias. “I don’t want to know the provenance,” he said. “That could color my own opinion. I’m just picking up each bottle, writing down what I think: fake…real…I don’t want to be like a jury told of a prior criminal record.”

  In July, Molyneux-Berry took a break from cataloging, flying to Moscow to judge a sommelier competition before returning to the United States to resume his work in the Koch cellars. Molyneux-Berry had left the paper trail to others in Koch’s organization, and as they narrowed down the channels—not easy, given the compartmentalized information structure of the rare-wine market—news filtered back to him that several of the bottles he had deemed fake had come from Rodenstock.

  Regarding Michael Broadbent, his old rival, Molyneux-Berry was split. He respected Broadbent’s success and his talent. He thought less of the lengths to which Broadbent was willing to go in order to win. “He told me,” Molyneux-Berry recalled, “‘My major weakness is I’m a salesman. I have to cut the deal.’”

  Looking back now on the original Christie’s catalog featuring the bottle bought by the Forbes family, Molyneux-Berry noted that Broadbent hadn’t even mentioned Monticello (Molyneux-Berry had consulted with them first thing upon being offered the Frericks consignment in 1989): “There’s a fear in the way it’s cataloged. I suspect he was sick as a parrot about the authenticity, but he couldn’t resist the opportunity. It was the juiciest carrot he’d ever got.”

  Molyneux-Berry wasn’t losing sleep over Rodenstock’s fate, which he thought might be worse than losing a lawsuit. “One or two of these guys are ferocious,” he said, referring to Rodenstock’s Hong Kong customers. “They will chop his head off, not ask for their money back. If we find a torso that looks like Hardy Rodenstock’s, we’ll know they’ve gotten their revenge.”

  FOR NOW, AN intact Rodenstock was still making the society scene. In early 2006 he appeared with Prince Albert of Monaco at an event where Rodenstock made a donation to one of the prince’s charities. In May, Rodenstock attended Riedel’s 250th-anniversary celebration in Kufstein. But there were indications that he was getting nervous. In August he reached out to Walter Eigensatz, Mr. Cheval Blanc, who hadn’t spoken to him in years. Rodenstock called him and asked after his health, speaking of the good wines they had shared and suggesting they get together sometime. Eigensatz was measured in his response, leaving Rodenstock with the stark warning that he should “be careful.” It was clear to Eigensatz that Rodenstock was trying to make nice with his enemies. “A year ago he was telling people he hoped I’d die,” Eigensatz said a month later.

  Michael Broadbent, pedaling blithely into the gloaming, seemed only mildly concerned by what was happening. “He was reluctant to tell me where he got them,” Broadbent told a guest in late 2005, speaking in Room Number 7 of the London headquarters of Christie’s. The room, its walls lined with red fabric, was one of a suite of tiny, windowless compartments on the ground floor that were reserved for specialists to meet with clients. Broadbent and the visitor were seated at a small square table. The former head of the wine department wore a dark pin-striped suit. Gold cuff links peeked out from the sleeves.

  Broadbent’s tasting notes now exceeded 85,000, and he had only two blank red notebooks left. The manufacturer had changed the color to black, but Broadbent didn’t expect to have to make the change. “I’ll be dead by then,” he said. For a seventy-eight-year-old man who had devoted his life to alcohol, Broadbent looked fantastic. His face bore none of the exploded capillaries of the vodka-dependent; his liver functioned properly; his waistline remained in check; his mind was still acute.

  “He was reluctant to tell me where he got them,” Broadbent was recalling. “That’s the only big question. And I said to Hardy, I said, ‘Look, if you tell me where you got these, and I’m happy, my Christie’s clients will be happy that I’m satisfied.’” Two decades on, to Broadbent’s unceasing irritation, Rodenstock had still not obliged him.

  Broadbent had recently been fielding all kinds of inquiries about the bottles, including one from a woman who ran the New York charity to which Bill Sokolin had donated his broken Jefferson bottle. She had contacted Broadbent in an effort to ascertain its provenance. Broadbent, in turn, had put the question to Rodenstock. On August 21, Broadbent had received a fax from Rodenstock, who had just attended the Salzburg music festival, where he reported that he had had “a lovely time.”

  Broadbent had begun to get nervous, as the possible repercussions of a full-fledged investigation began to dawn on him. In a handwritten fax to Rodenstock on October 4, he wrote:

  Dear Hardy,

  Jefferson bottles. You and I are bored stiff with this subject. Unhappily, more pressure from the USA. I had a huge file, including Frericks, but neither I nor my secretary can find it. I seriously need all the filing you have on the Bonani/Hall analyses, and anything else relevant. It is important that I produce the evidence, again, for your reputation, Christie’s, and mine is at stake.

  Warm regards as always,

  Michael

  Rodenstock faxed a reply six days later, saying that he had been contacted by Koch’s investigator. Rodenstock promised to send copies of the before-and-after photos he had presented as evidence in the Frericks case, which he falsely claimed “clearly show that the bottle has been tampered with after it has left my cellar. Frericks certainly had fiddled about with the wine himself. The sealing wax is without any doubt no longer identical with the sealing wax the bottle had when Frericks had bought it from me.”

  Now Broadbent’s nervousness seemed to have receded and been replaced by weariness. Talk turned to Sotheby’s, toward which Broadbent’s hostility had hardly abated. “Of course, I hate her,” Broadbent said now of Serena Sutcliffe. “I find her totally pretentious.” He continued, “But the great joy was, Serena is incredibly proud of her lingual abilities. Philippine de Rothschild was having a lunch party in London, and Serena was being over-the-top about something: her father was in the war, and I never had any relations in the war or killed in the war, things like that. She was just being absolutely obnoxious. And Philippine de Rothschild leaned over and said, ‘Serena, I cannot abide the way you speak French.’ And Serena was knocked back.” Broadbent did his best impression of Sutcliffe looking astonished. “And I said, ‘Tell me, what is it about her speech?’ Philippine said, ‘First of all, it’s very pretentious. She’s trying to speak in what she thinks is the French upper-class accent, and she’s using words that went out of favor years ago, and she just misses it.’” Broadbent grinned, clearly enjoying himself.

  “I can tell you endless stories about her pretentiousness, silly mistakes she makes,” he said. “But I won’t. But she is very bright. She’s known as Pushy Galore in America. Some American told me that. She is pushy. I mean, she’s a hand-presser, particularly in Bordeaux, and she charms them all, but some people there can’t stand her, either.” He paused. “But she’s done a great deal and put Sotheby’s on the map. Whereas they were lagging hopelessly before.”

  The conversation grazed other topics, then Broadbent said, “It’s terribly hot in here. Let’s go and have a drink.” King Street was still slick from the morning rain. The world headquarters of Christie’s was situated in the heart of St. James, a neighborhood of bespoke shirtmakers, old-line wine merchants, and private men’s clubs dating to the time of Britain’s seventeenth-century glory.

  Broadbent’s club was Brooks’s, one of the oldest. At the bar upstairs, he ordered a glass of Tio Pepe sherry, one o
f his preferred tipples. That morning, as on many others, he had begun the day with a buck’s fizz, as the British call a cocktail of Champagne and orange juice. Even in his old age, he exuded a winsome boyishness, and his varied enthusiasms could distract him from the topic at hand. He might be mid-conversation at his ninth-floor riverside flat when suddenly he’d leap toward the window to point out some passing boat on the Thames that he’d never seen before. Or he’d be having lunch in a restaurant when he’d stop, mid-sentence, his attention caught by an attractive young woman, and murmur, “Dishy little Indian.”

  Broadbent and his guest repaired to Brooks’s dining room for lunch. Broadbent ordered potted shrimp to start, followed by roasted grouse. “Pink,” he told the waiter, “but not bloody.” He ordered a small carafe of Macon-Lugny, a pleasant white Burgundy, followed by a half-bottle of a delicious blended red from Lebanon called Château Musar. He didn’t need to look at the wine list; he had previously sat on the club’s wine committee.

  “Like me,” Broadbent said, returning to the Jefferson bottles, “Hardy is sick of the subject.” He sipped at his Musar. “Very drinkable, don’t you think?” His note on it would have to wait until later; Brooks’s discouraged the mixing of business and pleasure by forbidding papers in the club. Broadbent was fed up with Richard Marston, Koch’s British investigator, who had called him several times. “If they want anything further from me,” Broadbent said, “Mr. Koch himself can call me.” He pronounced Koch like Bach, with a throaty scrape on the final consonants. Broadbent dismissed the inquiries as “malicious.” Jim Elroy was an “FBI bore.”