In Vino Non Veritas: The Billionaire's Vinegar

If this is our blog trip to Virginia, we are sorely DWI.

Wallace's book chronicles a twenty-plus year scam of auctioning bogus bottles of rare wine, the only connection with Virginia being that several of them were purported to have been ordered by Thomas Jefferson before he left Paris for Monticello at the beginning of the French Revolution. The suspect wine adulterater is Hardy Rodenstock, nee Meinhard Gorke, who from the 1980's through just two years ago when a default judgment was rendered against him in a case brought by Bill Koch for fraud, led a high life of a French chateau and vintage snob.

Although there are brief historical references to Jefferson and the Monticello Foundation, the book is basically set in Germany and England, where Rodenstock throws his over the top wine tastings and where Christie's auction house is complicit in the sale of old bottles sorely lacking provenance.

I found the story very reminiscent of charlatan John Brinkley The last few paragraphs of the story emphasize the willing suspension of belief when someone wants something bad enough: "As with all successful cons, the marks and the grifter had been collaborators. One sold the illusion that the others were desperate to buy." With wine rather than goat gonads, the commodity seems so much more tempting. But the bidders are not buying something to drink, not even making an investment ... they are buying an image, paying outrageous dues to enter into a most select club, where their names become as famous as the vineyard that produces the coveted nectar.

In another sense, the book was like a longer version of Wine Spectator magazine, dispensing insights and nuances into viniculture. I will never taste the Bordeaux that is written about; in fact, I am probably a drinker of plonk. But the book does seduce you to blow your allowance on a bottle of Chateaux d'Yquem if only to see if Rodenstock's description of it is honest or just another part of his salesmanship: "... in a bottle of d'Yquem, the entire act of making love occurs, lust for life and depravity, melancholy and lightheartedness, poison and antidote."

Satisfying another one of my penchants, Vinegar contained six degrees of separation surprises: with Bill Buckley showing up endorsing a particular connoisseur and the Ten Broeck Mansion appearing as a source of an old cellar full of prime collectible vintages.

If Vinegar is a pit stop on our blog road trip, and we ended up in the French wine aisle of the store rather than the one showcasing scuppernong, we had a chance to drink heartily and think on Jefferson as one of the first to tip America's preference from beer to wine.