With the familiar sources drying up, some of this new torrent seemed quite fantastical in origin, but then, exotic discoveries were a staple of wine history. In 1925, the old-line Piccadilly wine merchants Berry Brothers had unearthed a cache of early-nineteenth-century Tokaji vintages that had been walled up by the Princely House of Bretzenheim in anticipation of the revolution of 1848. Now, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, similar hidden troves came to light. Ten Broeck Mansion, the home of a Revolutionary war general in Albany, New York, yielded a forgotten stash of nineteenth-century bottles that were auctioned at Heublein starting in 1978. Some bottles at the 1980 Heublein auction, including an 1836 Sercial Madeira, had been salvaged by divers from a ship that sank off the coast of Savannah in 1840.
By 1985, even as occasional odd finds continued to trickle in, it was clear that the heyday of claret archaeology was over. Since old cellars were a Christie’s franchise, their virtual disappearance enabled Sotheby’s wine department to begin to close the competitive gap. The watershed 1982 Bordeaux vintage had sent prices, along with American interest in wine, to new heights. Then, in February of 1985, the dollar hit a historical peak. The Reagan boom was cresting, and the American appetite for old wine was insatiable. For Christie’s, there was money to be made, and competition to face down. Broadbent was more aggressive than ever. He wasn’t about to let anyone else bring his winning streak to an end.
CHAPTER 4
MONSIEUR YQUEM
IN APRIL OF 1985, HARDY RODENSTOCK, WHO HAD recently moved into the lakeside home of a Munich construction heiress, told some German wine friends he’d just received a phone call about an astonishing discovery in Paris. He took the next plane, he wrote later, “and took a look at the cellar, bottles and everything.” A hidden cellar had been breached when a house built in the mid–eighteenth century was being torn down. It contained about a hundred bottles. Two dozen were engraved with the initials “Th.J.” They included bottles of Lafite, Margaux, Yquem, and Branne-Mouton, as Mouton-Rothschild had been called in Jefferson’s day, from the 1784 and 1787 vintages. Rodenstock said he paid 20,000 French francs for the lot, which at the time worked out to $2,227. The discovery was serendipitous for a number of reasons: While in 1985 Mouton was one of the most coveted wines in the world, in Jefferson’s day it was middle-of-the-pack and neither sought after nor collected; and Rodenstock had found the bottles just two years before the bicentennial of Jefferson’s visit to Bordeaux. When his friends pressed him for more details, Rodenstock clammed up.
The circle of collectors that had formed around Rodenstock by the time of the Jefferson bottles’ discovery was drawn together by wine, and they learned little about each other that did not pertain to it. To the world, Hardy Rodenstock presented a stolid moon of a face, barely interrupted by small, opaque eyes and the faintest suggestion of a mouth. He was physically unprepossessing. What you remembered about him were not the stippled-in details but the big-brush outlines. He wore his brown hair in a boyish shag that downplayed his forty-four years. He dressed flashily, favoring shiny double-breasted suits with big lapels, starched colored shirts with contrasting white collars and cuffs, sharply creased slacks, and modishly tinted plastic eyeglasses. Despite “dressing like a banker,” as an auctioneer recalled, he never seemed to have any money. He had a worldly mien, a quiet self-assurance that could come across as humility or aloofness. As he shook your hand, he would click his heels together.
How Rodenstock became interested in wine was a story that changed depending on who was asking him and when. There were three stories. The one he told least often, and which was given the least credence, was that he had started drinking wine as a child, with his grandfather. The one he told most often involved a Damascene conversion. After the funeral of a friend’s father in 1976, the son of the deceased served four of the most legendary wines in history out of the family cellar: 1961 Château Palmer, 1945 Mouton-Rothschild, 1947 Cheval Blanc, and 1921 Château d’Yquem. Palmer, a wine that was officially a third growth and unofficially considered to be just below the first growths in quality, was regarded, in the 1961 vintage, as sublime. Rodenstock said that tasting the four wines was a life-altering experience, and that he became instantly obsessed.
The third story—and the one that those in the German wine scene who had known Rodenstock longest believed to be the truth—was neither as simple as the first nor as mythic as the second. Rodenstock made his living managing Schlager acts—a style of easy-listening German pop music—and according to this version, he had booked some of his clients for a festival in Wiesbaden and gotten stiffed. The promoter had no money, and offered to pay him in cases of wine, his only currency. Rodenstock protested angrily that he drank beer and schnapps, but ended up driving a van to collect the wine. He forgot about it for a while, then during the winter he retrieved some of the bottles from his basement. They were white Burgundies, and he liked them. He bought more wine and soon did, indeed, become obsessed.
At first Rodenstock would invite music-business friends to drink with him, but as his interests turned increasingly toward the old and rare, he found their nuances were lost on those people. Many wine neophytes have a mentor who guides them through the intricacies of wine when they are just starting out. Self-taught, Rodenstock had no desire for a tutor, but he was eager to find likeminded appreciators with whom to share his experiences. He read Essen und Trinken, the first modern gastronomy magazine in Germany, and signed up for its tours of wine regions. Through these he met the wine journalist Heinz-Gert Woschek, and other readers, and was directly exposed to the châteaux for the first time. He found he had a particular interest in Bordeaux, and he arranged other visits privately.
When Woschek launched Germany’s first wine magazine, Woscheks Wein Report (soon renamed Alles über Wein), in 1981, Rodenstock began writing long articles that gave him further entrée to the châteaux and their owners. He became a regular buyer at wine auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in London, and at Cave Nicolas, a merchant in Paris. He was a hobbyist who 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.