The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace Page B

around rarities, which at first weren’t so hard to find. Old Bordeaux came up fairly often at auction, and they weren’t outrageously expensive. It was easy to find 1928s and 1929s of Latour and Mouton. You almost didn’t need to collect; the stuff was available at the store. One shop in Hamburg carried Burgundy from the 1930s and 1940s for eight dollars a bottle.
    There was a romantic aspect to it all. Rodenstock and his new friends were “drinking history,” as they liked to say, and would commonly wax historical about what Goethe, Schiller, or Napoleon was doing in the year of the vintage they happened to be opening just then. There was a visual allure to the parade of old bottles, which could be delightfully heterogeneous. Because of the historic inconsistency of bottling (sometimes by customers’ butlers, sometimes by merchants, sometimes by châteaux), you could see three Lafites from the same year that all looked different. This was truer of wines older than the 1920s, when Baron Philippe de Rothschild first château-bottled his entire production, the first growths following suit soon thereafter.
    In many ways, the rarities game was
Star Trek
for grown-ups. No women were invited to tastings, and the male collectors’ explanations for this tended to be halfhearted: There was only one bottle of each wine, not enough for spouses; it was wrong to forbid women to wear perfume, yet that would be necessary at a wine tasting. The reality was that the gender mix, or lack thereof, mirrored the wine world in general.
    The boys’ club fostered a competitive atmosphere, and the connoisseurs prided themselves on deciding that an authority such as Broadbent was wrong in his assessment of a particular wine. Nothing pleased them more than to discover a “shadow vintage,” a year that was a great value because its proximity to a more famous vintage had caused it to be overlooked; come up with a brilliant new food-and-wine pairing; or have an inside line on esoterica such as Yquem’s little-known red wine, produced in small quantities for the consumption of its pickers at harvest time. The collectors oneupped each other with individual bottles—if one had a magnum, another had a double magnum—and with the lavishness of their tastings. In 1983, Walter Eigensatz, Mr. Cheval Blanc, hosted a vertical of his favorite wine in Wiesbaden and arranged for two white horses to lead a pre-tasting parade through the streets of the city.
    The collectors would also try to psych each other out. A “Parker 100” tasting in Hamburg, which featured wines that had received a perfect score from the increasingly influential American wine critic Robert Parker, included what the Germans called a “pirate,” a mystery bottle—in this case, a mystery double magnum. Everyone stood around sniffing at their glasses and making guesses. Rodenstock went up to a well-fed, stubble-haired journalist named Mario Scheuermann and said he thought it was an old Pétrus. “Definitely not,” Scheuermann said. “It’s a ’61 La Chappelle.” It could not be, Rodenstock said; the 1961 La Chappelle, a red from the Rhône Valley, did not exist in big bottles. Scheuermann insisted it was, until Rodenstock conceded, “Little boy, maybe you are right.” And Scheuermann was. Mischievously, the host had decanted four regular bottles into the larger bottle. Scheuermann was able to guess this because the ’61 La Chappelle was his favorite wine. He had drunk it fifty times.
    Egos and posturing aside, there was a genuine intellectual thrust to the tastings. The point, at least for the more serious collectors, was to learn more about Bordeaux; it was easier to begin to understand the character of a wine by comparing and analyzing different versions of the same thing than by studying things that were entirely different. “You know wine if you are able to drink good wine. In this way you get a matrix in the brain for tasting wine,” Fuente owner Otto Jung explained