Of course, many old wines disappointed. You never knew, until you opened it, how a bottle would be. When Broadbent tried an 1875 Margaux, he rhapsodized about its “extraordinary nose like crystallized violets and clean bandages!” At another event, however, he glumly lamented the state of an 1858 Mouton, wincing at its “incredibly awful creosote, tarry smell” before jotting in his notebook the ultimate condemnation: “Not tasted.” One of his favorite stories involved a bottle of 1898 Lafite and the legendary Napa Valley consultant André Tchelistcheff. At one of the Heublein auctions run by Broadbent, the four-foot-eleven Tchelistcheff had sampled the old wine and told the room, in his émigré’s Russian accent, “Tasting old wine is like making love to an old lady.” After a dramatic pause, he had continued, “It is possible.” After another pause: “It can even be enjoyable.” Then, following one last sip: “But it requires a leetle bit of imagination.”
To an extent, the very unpredictability of old wine was part of its allure. Even wines with platinum provenance, and which had been unmoved and lain side by side for decades, could vary dramatically. That element of surprise was thrilling, and fascinating, to some collectors. But it was disappointing, even crushing, to spend thousands of dollars on a bottle of wine that turned out to be long gone. If you couldn’t afford to take that risk, you wouldn’t be very happy collecting old wine.
From a salesman’s standpoint, a never-breached bottle of 1787 had an aura of authenticity that a topped-up bottle did not. But a never-topped-up bottle stood less chance of being drinkable. Broadbent’s challenge was to resolve this conflict, at least in bidders’ minds, emphasizing the authentic oldness while, at the same time, making the best possible case for drinkability.
Given what Rodenstock had told him about the conditions in which he found the Jefferson cache—a perfectly sealed cellar with ideal temperature and humidity—as well as the visibly high fill level in the Lafite, Broadbent dared imagine that this might be a rare wine that met the challenge of the authenticity-drinkability paradox.
AT THE END of October, only a few days after Christie’s announced that it would sell the bottle at its December 5 sale, an article appeared in the New York Times titled “Oldest Bordeaux? Yes; Jefferson’s? Maybe.” The doubts were those of a researcher at Monticello who, in addition to expressing the general belief among Jefferson scholars that no bottles of his wine had survived, questioned the way Jefferson’s initials were punctuated on the bottle and the idea that Jefferson had even had any bottles engraved. The researcher also noted that the particular combination of châteaux and vintages Rodenstock said he had found did not tally with the detailed and thorough record of Jefferson’s wine purchases.
In November, in response to an inquiry by Broadbent about Jefferson’s wine-related writings, the researcher informed him that Jefferson had never specifically mentioned the 1787 vintage. Broadbent dug further into the Jefferson literature and, in an insert that accompanied the catalog on the day of the auction, laid out a more elaborate case for attributing the bottles to Jefferson. “There is an immense amount of circumstantial evidence supporting the ordering of this wine and its identification,” Broadbent wrote, “but, of course, no proof. The arguments supporting this fabulous find are related below.”
Broadbent’s arguments zeroed in on a handful of ambiguous references that punctuated the otherwise compulsive precision of Jefferson’s ample correspondence. To account for the presence in the cache of Branne-Mouton, a wine Jefferson had never mentioned ordering or even drinking, Broadbent pointed to an occasion when the American consul in Bordeaux had told Jefferson he would send “some wine of our own chusing [sic],” without specifying which. Broadbent noted other occasions when Jefferson had asked château owners to send the “best.” He pointed to the shipment of 1784 Haut-Brion that had been misrouted and had never reached Jefferson, and suggested that other such misroutings could explain the presence of the Rodenstock bottles in Paris. Broadbent quoted letters from Jefferson requesting that wine shipments be marked with his initials, and he argued that it was unlikely an engraver would ape Jefferson’s eccentric mode of punctuating. Monticello’s argument to the contrary was, “of course, ridiculous.”
Broadbent concluded by noting, irrelevantly if tantalizingly, that 1787 had been “the year that the United States Constitution was signed… John Wesley wrote his Sermons, Mozart composed Don Giovanni, the ‘Prague’ symphony and Eine kleine Nachtmusik…. Whatever the theories, impossible to substantiate either way, we are confident that we have in this sale more than a little bit of history.”
Nowhere in the auction catalog or this accompanying insert did Broadbent mention a dark rumor circulating about the bottles’ origin, the whispered intimation that they were part of a smuggled Nazi hoard. The National Socialists had been as rapacious in their looting of fine wine as of everything else. Göring, in particular, was passionate about Bordeaux, filling his cellar with more than 10,000 plundered bottles. Albert Speer, architect and munitions boss for the Third Reich, later wrote that the only time he felt intimate with the 275-pound Göring was on the evening when Göring shared a Lafite with him. As for Adolf Hitler, a supposed teetotaler who didn’t care about wine as a drink, he did recognize its potential to confer social status. In May of 1945, when Allied forces liberated the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s mountaintop redoubt in the Bavarian Alps, they found half a million bottles of wine, including Lafite, Mouton-Rothschild, and Yquem.
So the Nazis had their secret stocks of wine. The French did, too. Justifiably worried that the Germans would steal their wine in the early days of the Second World War, people throughout France concealed bottles by walling off sections of their cellars. In 1940, with the Germans closing in on Paris, the venerable restaurant La Tour d’Argent, which had one of the world’s finest lists, culled the 20,000 best bottles from its 100,000-bottle cellar and stashed them in a secret passageway. The Germans took the 80,000 that remained in plain sight, but the hidden stock survived.
Maybe the rumor about Rodenstock’s bottles was unfair—born of anti-German sentiment and nurtured by Rodenstock’s cryptic remarks—but it had surprising longevity. Broadbent, for one, seemed entertained by the Nazi theory. Although it was never clear whether he subscribed to it, he would still be bringing it up in conversation two decades later.
CHAPTER 6
“WE DID WHAT YOU TOLD US”
FUCK THEM. FROM HIS SEAT IN THE BACK ROW OF THE West Room at Christie’s, in London, on December 5, 1985, Marvin Shanken was watching the auction of the 1787 Lafite with growing resentment. He had flown all the way to England for this. His life revolved around wine, and for him this bottle had great meaning; he had planned to share it, to use it as an occasion to celebrate wine. The Forbeses weren’t even in the business. It was just another bauble to them, yet here they were, throwing their weight and money around. Now the bidding was up to £50,000, and Michael Broadbent was about to bring down his auctioneer’s hammer. If Shanken was going to stop Forbes, he would need to act quickly.
THOMAS JEFFERSON FOUNDED the University of Virginia. Marvin Shanken graduated last in his class from the University of Miami. Bearlike and charmingly disheveled, with a shrewd glint in his eye, he was a pleasure-seeker. Forbidden by his wife to smoke cigars in their Manhattan apartment, he bought the adjacent flat, turning it into a smoking lounge. As the owner of Wine Spectator, he had a more than social interest in wine, and having worked on John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign, he also had a passion for American presidential history. When Shanken learned from Broadbent about the Jefferson bottle coming up for auction, he knew he had to have it. He would display it at his annual Wine Experience event so that, he later said, “people could see a piece of history.”