From 2007: praddenkeefe investigates the mystery behind one wine collector’s flair for tracking down rare vintages—including, it was alleged, invaluable bottles from the private collection of Thomas Jefferson. NewYorkerArchive
The Christie’s catalogue suggested that the wine had belonged to Thomas Jefferson and that its value was “inestimable.”The most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at auction was offered at Christie’s in London, on December 5, 1985. The bottle was handblown dark-green glass and capped with a nubby seal of thick black wax. It had no label, but etched into the glass in a spindly hand was the year 1787, the word “Lafitte,” and the letters “Th.J.
At two-thirty that December afternoon, Broadbent opened the bidding, at ten thousand pounds. Less than two minutes later, his gavel fell. The winning bidder was Christopher Forbes, the son of Malcolm Forbes and a vice-president of the magazine. The final price was a hundred and five thousand pounds—about a hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars. “It’s more fun than the opera glasses Lincoln was holding when he was shot,” Forbes declared, adding, “And we have those, too.
“My father was a collector of sorts,” Koch said. “I guess I got it from him. He had a small collection of Impressionist art. He collected shotguns. Then he collected ranches.” We sat down in Koch’s “cowboy room,” surrounded by Charles Marion Russell paintings, Frederic Remington bronzes of men on horseback, antique cowboy hats, bowie knives, and dozens of guns, displayed in glass-topped cases: Jesse James’s gun, Jesse James’s killer’s gun, Sitting Bull’s pistol, General Custer’s rifle.
The extraordinary inflation of rare-wine prices—of which the Jefferson bottles are the most conspicuous example—has led in recent years to an explosion of counterfeits in the wine trade. In 2000, Italian authorities confiscated twenty thousand bottles of phony Sassicaia, a sought-after Tuscan red; Chinese counterfeiters have begun peddling fake Lafite.
Starting in 1980, Rodenstock began holding lavish annual wine tastings, weekend-long affairs attended by wine critics, retailers, and various German dignitaries and celebrities. He opened scores of old and rare wines, all provided at his own expense, and served in custom-made “Rodenstock” glasses that were supplied by his friend the glassmaker Georg Riedel.
Michael Broadbent regularly attended Rodenstock events. In his book “Vintage Wine: Fifty Years of Tasting Three Centuries of Wines,” Broadbent acknowledges that it was through Rodenstock’s “immense generosity” that he was able to taste many of the rarest entries. Much of his section on eighteenth-century wines consists of notes from Rodenstock tastings.
As Elroy and his team—a former Scotland Yard inspector in England, a former MI5 agent in Germany, and several wine experts in Europe and the United States—began their investigation, in 2005, they learned from the staff at Monticello that doubts about the authenticity of the Jefferson wines date back to the auction of the original bottle. Broadbent had approached Monticello in the fall of 1985, to inquire about references to wine in some of Jefferson’s letters.
It wasn’t only the researchers at Monticello who raised doubts about the wine. Before Christie’s auctioned the bottle to Forbes, Rodenstock had offered a bottle of the Th.J. Lafitte to a German collector named Hans-Peter Frericks, for around ten thousand Deutsche marks. After Forbes spent forty times that sum, Frericks decided to auction his own bottle and approached Broadbent. But Rodenstock intervened, saying that he had sold the bottle to Frericks on the condition that Frericks not resell it.
Rodenstock was known for his discerning nose and his ability to identify wines in blind tastings. Elroy wondered whether he might possess the skills of a mixer, the type of expert that vineyards employ to achieve a precise blend of grapes.
Studies suggest that the experience of smelling and tasting wine is extremely susceptible to interference from the cognitive parts of the brain. Several years ago, Frédéric Brochet, a Ph.D. student in oenology at the University of Bordeaux, did a study in which he served fifty-seven participants a midrange red Bordeaux from a bottle with a label indicating that it was a modest.
Skeptical of both parties’ tests, Elroy sought out Philippe Hubert, a French physicist who had devised a method of testing the age of wine without opening the bottle. Hubert uses low-frequency gamma rays to detect the presence of the radioactive isotope cesium 137. Unlike carbon 14, cesium 137 is not naturally occurring; it is a direct result of nuclear fallout. A wine bottled before the advent of atmospheric nuclear testing contains no cesium 137, so the test yields no results for older wines.
“I can’t tell you how disappointing it was,” Elroy told me. “I’ve got the historical evidence, but if we’re going to do this criminally there’s got to be more than that. I’ve got to have some kind of scientific or other evidence, or it’s not going to be prosecutable.” Erlacher and Albrecht inspected the bottles, examining the ridges of the engraving under a powerful magnifying glass. Letters engraved by a copper wheel tend to vary in thickness, like the strokes of a fountain pen. But the lettering on the bottles was strangely uniform, and it slanted in a way that a copper-wheel engraving would not. The initials could not have been made in the eighteenth century, Erlacher concluded.
Koch’s lawyers flew to London in October to interview Michael Broadbent, who was by then seventy-nine years old but still active on the international wine circuit. Broadbent said he had asked Rodenstock “over and over again” to divulge the address where the bottles were found. But he continued to maintain that the Jefferson bottles were real.
No one knows how many bottles of wine—real or fake—Hardy Rodenstock has sold over the years. His deals were often in cash. Protective of both his suppliers and his buyers, he did not volunteer information about particular sales. Jim Elroy thinks that, at ten thousand dollars a bottle or more, Rodenstock could have sold ten bottles a month and made more than a million dollars a year.
In some cases, the bottle, the label, and the capsule all appeared genuine, but the rarity of the wine alone was ground for suspicion. Koch owns two magnums of Lafleur from 1947, for instance. “Forty-seven is the great Lafleur,” Molyneux-Berry said. But, he continued, he has heard that in 1947 the vineyard bottled only five magnums. “What’s the chance of him having two out of five?” he asked. Edgerton maintains an online database that tracks auction sales and prices.
Last spring, Jim Elroy took Koch’s magnum to Bordeaux to have it inspected at the winery. The Petrus staff ultimately concluded that the cork was the wrong length, and that the cap and the label appeared to have been artificially aged. Petrus confirmed that they had doubts about the authenticity of the bottle. And the cellar master, in his interview with Elroy, said that he had never heard of a magnum of 1921 Petrus and did not believe that any were bottled at the vineyard.
Rodenstock would not agree to be interviewed for this piece, but in a series of faxes, most of them in German, he maintained his innocence and fiercely objected to Bill Koch’s portrayal of him, denouncing Koch’s “concoctions and shenanigans.” He acknowledged that his legal name is Meinhard Goerke, but insisted that many people change their names, pointing to Larry King as an example.
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