The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace Page A

bought wine, but whose commerce with it was otherwise limited to the occasional one- or two-bottle trade with a fellow collector. Though he wasn’t wealthy, old wine was still relatively cheap. He lived with one of his clients, a moderately successful singer named Tina York, who was the younger sister of a well-known
Schlager
singer named Mary Roos, and her two Yorkies, in a remote area east of the Rhine called the Westerwald. It was a normal house, except that the cellar overflowed with bottles.
    One of the places Rodenstock sought out wine fellowship in those early years was Fuente, a twenty-seven-seat restaurant in the town of Mulheim, near Düsseldorf. Well situated to serve the moneyed trenchermen who ran the big industrial companies headquartered in the region, it occupied an old house with a sign showing a horse being watered. Fuente was a star of the new German gastronomy, and served French nouvelle cuisine. Its lamb filet in pastry and its crayfish salad had drawn praise, and a star, from Michelin’s inspectors. The restaurant had opened in 1976, just when Rodenstock was developing a taste for wine in nearby Essen, and by 1978 he was a regular customer. Rolf-Dieter (Otto) Jung, the young owner with a Dundreary mustache and a cigarette always smoldering in a long holder, had built its wine list into one of the best in the country, with 350 labels and an inventory worth some $150,000. Rodenstock was looking for someone to talk to about wine, and would come in alone with a bottle or two to share with Jung.
             
    G ERMANY, LIKE A MERICA, had only a modest tradition of enthusiasm for fine Bordeaux. At the end of the nineteenth century, one Hamburg restaurant had made a point of keeping at least one bottle of each of the sixty-two classed growths in its cellar. But the country remained essentially a beer-and-schnapps kind of place until the early 1970s, when its Western half began to experience a gastronomic awakening. As the decade progressed, wine lovers in a few centers like Hamburg and Wiesbaden started to find each other.
    Some were restaurant owners; some were journalists; some were private collectors. They organized tastings and traded invitations, sometimes with members of the American Group. The transatlantic alliance quickly fell apart because “the Americans were unsophisticated and not generous,” said one participant. “They served some horrible bottles, and didn’t reciprocate in kind.” A German collector who was a half-Jewish Holocaust survivor was also put off when a member of the Group, at the Los Angeles restaurant Scandia, described fellow member Tawfiq Khoury, a Palestinian, as a “sand nigger.”
    The most zealous of the Germans were distinguished by an obsession with a particular kind of wine, and they nicknamed each other accordingly. Uwe Könecke, who owned a small-truck dealership, became “Magnum Uwe” because of his preference for large-format bottles. A Swiss German named Walter Eigensatz, who with his wife owned several spas, was known as “Mr. Cheval Blanc.” A Munich businessman by the name of Hans-Peter Frericks was dubbed “Herr Pétrus.” Hardy Rodenstock was “Monsieur Yquem.”
    There was something defiantly timeless about Yquem. Its syrupy concentration derived not only from noble rot but also from a meticulous, and expensive, production process. It went beyond the dramatically low yield. Each harvest, the château would send pickers through the vineyard an average of five times, and up to eleven, selecting only those grapes ready to be picked. The château hewed to rigorously high standards and, some years, released no wine at all. The result was a Sauternes that fetched astronomical prices and inspired cultish fervor, in no one so much as Rodenstock.
    The wine scene in which Rodenstock began to move consisted largely of people who had amassed impressive collections, not just of young vintages but of old ones as well. They started to host tastings focused