No one was suggesting that Broadbent had had criminal intent, but only that he had put on salesman’s blinders. And again the Hitler diaries came rushing back with their striking parallels. One of the reputations that suffered most in that earlier scandal had been that of the Oxbridge historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who authenticated the diaries. Trevor-Roper’s misguided authentication, however, evaporated in a matter of days. Broadbent continued to insist that the Jefferson bottles were legitimate for more than twenty years, through many Rodenstock bottle sales, innumerable tastings of Rodenstock wines, and multiple editions of his increasingly Rodenstock-reliant book.
“I think he felt vulnerable,” Jancis Robinson said later. “This has been a very important part of what he has done, but I think even today he has been convinced that he has enough evidence.”
And Broadbent wasn’t giving up the fight. Twenty years before, the New York Post had reported that the real buyer of the 1784 Jefferson Yquem purchased by the “teetotaler” named Iyad Shiblaq was Dodi Al-Fayed. Broadbent knew otherwise. Following the 1986 auction, he and his wife had dined with Shiblaq at the Jordanian’s gambling club in London. Shiblaq himself had been the purchaser of the bottle.
Now Broadbent tracked him down and persuaded him to lend his bottle to Broadbent so he could have his own experts examine the engraving. Afterward, Broadbent declared that Christie’s had commissioned the new examination and that “we can confirm that the engraving is exactly correct, French and of the period,” but a Christie’s spokesman disavowed knowledge of the reappraisal, and Broadbent wouldn’t allow independent inspection of the experts’ report. In a chatty fax to Rodenstock in November, Broadbent revealed that the new appraisal had been done by Hugo Morley-Fletcher, the former head of Christie’s ceramics and glass department, who had done the original appraisal of the 1787 Lafite back in 1985; he was now a consultant who served as an expert on the TV program Antiques Roadshow UK. Koch’s team remained confident that the Shiblaq bottle was as fake as all the others.
In January, Broadbent underwent major heart surgery. Afterward, he cut down on his public appearances. When he attended an event honoring a Bordeaux winemaker in London, Jancis Robinson thought he looked “very frail.” In early May he retired from Christie’s board of directors, though he remained a senior consultant to the wine department.
THE RARE-WINE POOL was indelibly tainted. “Whoever’s doing this,” Bipin Desai had said of fakes, the month before Koch filed his suit, “they have to be caught. They’re spoiling the old wine market—slowly, steadily destroying it like a cancer.” Estimates of the number of fakes in circulation were usually given as 5 percent of the market, but ran much higher for certain cult bottles. Suddenly the flashier offerings of some merchants began to seem almost ridiculous. There was the provenanceless 1784 Lafite advertised in the catalog for Christie’s September auction in New York, which the auction house yanked from the sale at the last minute. There was the 1787 Yquem sold earlier in the year by the Antique Wine Company in London to a private American collector for $90,000. Rumors were rife that some collectors were knowingly unloading fakes from their cellars at auction.
Koch’s lawyers now sent letters to Christie’s, Zachys, Farr Vintners, Royal Wine Merchants (the company of Jeff Sokolin and Daniel Oliveros), a Washington State importer named Bordeaux Wine Locators, which had been the consignor of many of the questionable bottles Koch had bought at auction, and collector Eric Greenberg, among others, warning them not to destroy any documents. Koch’s attorneys were getting ready to serve a raft of subpoenas. “That’s the day a lot of assholes are going to pucker,” said Brad Goldstein, who seemed invigorated by the whole affair.
Goldstein snidely referred to Greenberg, who had been invited by Steven Spielberg to join the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and then been given its Ambassadors for Humanity award, as “Mr. Shoah.” Goldstein was practically salivating at the prospect of deposing Rodenstock: “It will be a show trial.” The aggressive newsmagazine Stern was “like the Gestapo,” Goldstein said approvingly. A German journalist who seemed to be falling prey to Rodenstock’s misdirection, on the other hand, was wasting his time “separating fly shit from pepper.”
A lot of stones were about to be overturned. Numerous wine-world icons—Shanken and Wine Spectator, Parker and The Wine Advocate, Rodenstock, Robinson, Broadbent and Christie’s, Farr Vintners, Riedel—had been touched by the affair. Scores of tasting notes would need to be reconsidered, if not discarded. Jancis Robinson hopefully suggested that the whole thing could be “cathartic” for the business. She had always considered the Jefferson bottles “an intriguing and suspicious mystery,” she said later, but when she now asked Rodenstock exactly how many of the bottles had been in his original find, and he answered “about thirty,” she was struck by his vagueness about such valuable objects.
Robinson found herself becoming more cautious. When she was asked to conduct a tasting in March at the Palais Coburg in Vienna, which would feature a ’34 Romanée-Conti, she asked for a complete list of where the hosts had obtained the wines. “It was probably looking a gift horse in the mouth, and I felt bad doing it,” she said later, “but I didn’t know them.”
The same month, the Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI’s art fraud unit had opened an investigation into counterfeit wine, and that a grand jury in New York was hearing evidence. Subpoenas had been sent to Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Zachys.
In Bordeaux, where for years most châteaux had done little to stanch the problem, some owners were jubilant, or at least ready to face the problem head-on. “We are very pleased,” said Christian Moueix of Château Pétrus, “that this has finally become a scandal.” When Robinson traveled to Bordeaux in April for the annual en primeur barrel tastings, the first thing that Château Margaux owner Corinne Mentzelopoulos said to her was “Now, what are we going to do about this fake business?”
If any person or business was going to benefit from the mess, it was Sotheby’s, and more than one observer saw a subtle Sotheby’s revenge plot playing out. Christie’s had long been aligned with Rodenstock, and not only through Broadbent. When Christopher Burr, who briefly headed Christie’s wine department after Broadbent, helped put together a tasting in Paris in 2001, he later wrote that it had been a challenge “assembling the best of these wines from unquestionable provenance, no mean task, but fortune and some visionary wine men helped, such as Hardy Rodenstock—a legendary wine collector.” It was entirely possible that the bottles were all real, but if Rodenstock’s name stood for one thing, it was questionable, not unquestionable, provenance.
Serena Sutcliffe, meanwhile, had spent the last fifteen years positioning the Sotheby’s wine department as the discriminating auctioneers, the house that didn’t sell Rodenstock’s bottles and that was vocal about the rising problem of counterfeit wine. While still lagging behind Christie’s wine department overall, Sotheby’s had pulled ahead of it in the important North American market. Koch, having used Christie’s when he sold part of his collection in 1999, had since seemed to subtly shift his allegiance to its rival. In early 2006 he was scheduled to host a wine event with Sotheby’s North American wine director, and it was a former Sotheby’s wine head, David Molyneux-Berry, whom Koch hired to vet his cellar as part of the investigation. It was also Sotheby’s that tipped off Russell Frye to the problems of his cellar and put him in touch with Molyneux-Berry, through whom he joined forces with Koch. As if to cosmically rub the turn of fortunes in Broadbent’s face, five weeks before Koch filed suit, France, in recognition of her promotion of its wines, made Serena Sutcliffe the first member of the British wine trade to be awarded the Légion d’honneur.
“Sotheby’s must be gleeful!” Broadbent remarked bitterly after Koch’s suit was filed.
IN JUNE 2007, nearly a year after Koch sued, Rodenstock found a way, at least temporarily, to wriggle free. He had hired a German lawyer at a New York firm to defend him and endured months of pretrial motions
and preliminary discovery. On June 1, Rodenstock’s lawyers received a stack of discovery documents from Koch, including the e-mail correspondence between Koch’s office and Andreas Klein, Rodenstock’s former Munich neighbor and landlord. Later that same day, Rodenstock sent a fax directly to the judge overseeing Koch v. Rodenstock and pled his case. Koch, he said, was “a psychopath.”
“You will surely understand that I don’t want to have dealings with such a person,” Rodenstock wrote, adding that “the quarrel with him has come up to a more than primitive level I don’t want to bear any longer.”
Later, Rodenstock informed the court that he had spent more than $150,000 in legal fees and was not able “to continue to participate in the proceeding.” His lawyer petitioned the court to withdraw as Rodenstock’s counsel, and Magistrate Judge Debra Freeman scheduled a teleconference with Rodenstock’s and Koch’s lawyers and Rodenstock himself. Rodenstock, however, refused to take part, saying through his lawyer that he “cannot accept the friendly offer of a telephone conference, for which he thanks the court.”
The court was not moved by his gratitude. “Contrary to Mr. Rodenstock’s prior understanding,” Judge Freeman wrote in a June 22 order, “the Court is not extending him a ‘friendly offer’ to participate in a conference. Rather, the Court is ordering Mr. Rodenstock to appear on July 5, in person or by telephone, and he is cautioned that his failure to appear may result in the imposition of sanctions against him.”
Rodenstock asked for and was granted a week’s reprieve, and in the meantime his Munich lawyer sent a letter to Andreas Klein—and to Klein’s mother-in-law and former employer (from whose e-mail server Klein had written to Koch)—threatening a libel suit. The New York case conference finally took place on July 11, in a courthouse in lower Manhattan, only one block from City Hall, where Rodenstock had married Helga Lehner in October 1991 (on that occasion, he had given his father’s name as “Alfred Görke Rodenstock”). It was a strangely disembodied affair. Both Koch and Rodenstock dialed into the courtroom’s speakerphone, with an interpreter hired by Rodenstock’s New York lawyer standing by to translate Rodenstock’s testimony. Rodenstock said that because he had no residence in the United States, and hadn’t sold bottles to Koch directly, he had been “sued in an illegal way” and was not subject to the New York court’s jurisdiction. He no longer intended to pay for counsel, or even to take part in the suit. In short, and after several warnings from the judge, he stated his intent to default. He would fight Koch in The Hague, if necessary, Rodenstock said. Judge Freeman asked if Rodenstock wished to say anything else. “Thank you very much for everything and for the phone conference,” Rodenstock said.
Rodenstock’s default meant that Koch would receive a U.S. court judgment in his favor. His challenge then would be to collect from Rodenstock, which would mean navigating the uncertain terrain of international conventions and German civil procedure. “He’s fucked” was Brad Goldstein’s legalese. “I think we can attach liens under The Hague and in Germany.” Koch was also contemplating filing a second suit against Rodenstock, this one dealing not with the Jefferson bottles but with all the other fakes in his cellar that Koch had been able to link to Rodenstock.
Even if Koch was able to collect the $500,000 he now claimed he had paid for the Jefferson bottles—a questionable figure, given that a Farr Vintners invoice showed Koch to have paid just £116,000 (about $200,000) for three of the four bottles—it was a fraction of what he had spent on the investigation and lawsuit. But Goldstein continued to insist that it had never been about the money for Koch. “If the court says this guy’s a fraudster,” Goldstein said, “it’s a victory.”
It didn’t end the appetite to buy or sell Jefferson bottles. The Antique Wine Company, which had sold the 1787 Yquem the year before, persisted in offering implausible rarities. In the spring, the firm rolled out “The Great Antique Chateau Lafite-Rothschild Collection,” forty-eight vintages including a 1787. Antique Wine Company managing director Stephen Williams made much ado about having subjected the wine to “molecular” and “chemical” analysis, even though such tests could prove only that the wine’s age predated the nuclear era. In late July, the firm offered “Chateau d’Yquem—the greatest ever cellar.” This collection was not marketed publicly, on the firm’s website, but announced in a message sent to a private e-mail list. In addition to numerous early-nineteenth-century vintages, the Yquems included four eighteenth-century vintages. One of them was a 1787 Jefferson bottle, priced at $156,100. Although the Antique Wine Company billed the collection as being of “impeccable provenance,” when pressed as to the Jefferson bottle’s origin, a representative said, “This bottle was found in a private cellar in the United States. We do not have full information on how it got there or its previous ownership. It appears to be one of several bottles sold by Hardy Rodenstock, the discredited German wine dealer.”
THE JEFFERSON BOTTLES were the example of how people turned suggestible when it came to wine. It was precisely the fact that drinkers brought their own interpretations to wine that led subjects in a University of Bordeaux study to mistake white wine for red, and that led impressionable consumers to decide they liked a wine because Parker did, to buy first growths because they were first, and to detect notes of sweet Cuban tobacco only after someone else had.
The bottles were never about what was in them. The people who bought them weren’t the geeks who got off on comparing the respective degrees of deadness of a 1787 and a 1791. Kip Forbes didn’t pay $156,000 for a taste experience worth $156,000. All those who bought the bottles did so after significant doubts had been aired. And all later learned about the serious challenge posed by the Frericks case: Forbes was notified by Broadbent; Koch had contacted Rodenstock; Shanken’s magazine had run an article about the case. Nor was Rodenstock, evasive and defensive when challenged, ever particularly convincing.
But each buyer had wanted his own piece of frozen history. It was enough that Thomas Jefferson’s initials were right there on the bottles, that the bottles said Lafite and Margaux and Branne-Mouton and Yquem, and that Michael Broadbent had stamped them with his approval. A standard of plausible confirmability had been met. “Let me tell you something,” Bill Sokolin said. “As far as I was concerned, that bottle was real because I believed it. And,” Sokolin added, “because I tasted it, and it was garbage. It was garbage. So I said, ‘Jesus, maybe it’s real.’”
As with all successful cons, the marks and the grifter had been collaborators. One sold the illusion that the others were desperate to buy. But the marks had grown up. Now Asia and Russia were the preferred playing fields for Rodenstock and other purveyors of dubious bottles. It was the once-gullible Americans bringing a European manipulator to justice, a rare comeuppance for two centuries of Old World snobbery.
No one would have shaken his head so sadly at the affair as the author of the Declaration of Independence, whom Koch misidentified, when eulogizing “the mystique” of the bottles, as a framer of the Constitution. In the last years of his life, Jefferson was reduced to drinking lesser wines. He abandoned his earlier habits of ordering straight from the châteaux, instead employing an agent in Nice and asking for simple wines of that region, even expressing a willingness to buy an imitation-Bordeaux merchant’s blend. Thomas Jefferson was drinking cheap table wine, and very happily so.
NOTES
All quotations not cited here or in the text are drawn from interviews I conducted or incidents I observed. In these notes, I use several abbreviations: Papers, for The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Julian Boyd, et al. (Princeton: 1950–); WS for Wine Spectator; VWGJ for the Vinifera Wine Growers Journal; MAZ for Münchner Abendszeitung; NYT for the New York Times; TJ for Thomas Jefferson; and JMB for J. Michael Broadbent. Currency conversions are based, in each instance, on contemporaneous exchange rates.
1. LOT 337
For the bid steps and saleroom dialogue in chapters 1 and 6, I relied on a report, “A Piece of History,” published in The New
Yorker’s Talk of the Town section on January 20, 1986.
more than twice as big “Wine,” Financial Times, August 17, 1985.
more than 160,000 copies Simon Loftus, Anatomy of the Wine Trade (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 154.
When he arrived at a wine gathering Jancis Robinson, Tasting Pleasure (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 170.
“black as Egypt’s night” JMB, The New Great Vintage Wine Book (New York: Knopf, 1991), 63.
reminded him of Sophia Loren Robinson, Tasting Pleasure, 183.
“schoolgirls’ uniforms” Ibid.
oldest authenticated vintage red wine “Oldest Bordeaux? Yes; Jefferson’s? Maybe,” NYT, October 30, 1985.
a historical researcher in America Ibid.
the snow horse of Robinson, Tasting Pleasure, 146.
he opened the bidding at £10,000 This is according to the contemporaneous New Yorker account; Broadbent recalls opening the bidding somewhere between £3,000 and £5,000.
Only after Kip Forbes bid £50,000 “Passion vs. Reason in Wine Collecting,” WS, February 28, 1998.
The previous record “Record Wine Prices,” WS, May 31, 1988.
2. INCOGNITO
an order for 250 bottles of Lafite Letter from TJ to Pichard, February 22, 1788, Papers XII, 617–8; translation in John Hailman’s definitive Thomas Jefferson on Wine (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 148.
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