Shanken first became interested in the wine business as an investment banker putting together West Coast vineyard real-estate deals. His cellar was stocked mainly with California cabernets. He didn’t have much auction experience, and he had never been to the wine-auction mecca, the Great Rooms at Christie’s in London. This wasn’t necessarily the best year for him to be making his debut there, either. Wine Spectator was struggling, and Shanken lived from week to week. He didn’t have cash to blow, much less the kind of money he knew it would take to land this bottle.
Shanken had watched as wine prices soared over the last decade, and he had no illusions: this bottle was comparable to the first edition of an old book; it was an esoteric object that would likely draw a free-spending fanatic or two out of the woodwork. The Brits wouldn’t touch it, but a few Americans might have placed advance bids. The bottle could go for as much as ten grand, fifteen even. Exactly where he would get the money, Shanken had no idea, but he was determined to buy the bottle with the great pedigree. Hell, he was prepared to spend up to $30,000, which was just shy of the highest price ever paid for a bottle of wine.
Shanken was so confident he’d be returning to New York on the afternoon of December 5 with the bottle in hand that, rather than using an agent to bid for him, he flew to London so that he could savor the victory right there in the auction room. Arriving around 2:00 p.m., Shanken took a seat in the middle of the room and waited patiently to complete the formality of obtaining the bottle. A few minutes before the afternoon session was to begin, he saw a familiar face. Len Yablon belonged to Beach Point, a country club in Mamaroneck, New York, where Shanken was sometimes a guest. Yablon was a finance guy; he had no connection to the wine business and was not, as far as Shanken knew, a collector.
When Shanken greeted Yablon and asked what he was doing there, Yablon replied, “We came to pick up the bottle.” He introduced the young man next to him as Kip Forbes, son of publisher Malcolm, for whom Yablon worked. Malcolm had asked them to buy the bottle, Yablon explained, and they needed to rush it back to the Forbes Building in Manhattan in time for a cocktail party for advertisers that evening. The party would launch an exhibit in the ground-floor gallery, consisting of original letters written by Thomas Jefferson, a Jefferson table borrowed from another museum, and the bottle, for which a space had already been set aside. “The plane is waiting,” Yablon said.
The plane? Shanken knew that Yablon must mean the Forbeses’ private jet. The man spoke with infuriating assurance, as if their acquisition was a foregone conclusion. Forbes was a major publisher, Shanken an upstart. He knew he couldn’t compete with that kind of money. Dejected, he walked to the rear of the room, taking a seat in a chair against the back wall. Five minutes earlier he had pictured himself as the bottle’s owner. Now he wouldn’t even be bidding; he would only be watching. The plane! Shanken could grimly look forward to returning to New York, empty-handed, in coach.
DECEMBER 5 WAS Kip Forbes’s birthday, but he was spending it with Len Yablon running a routine errand. London was the last stop on a weeklong European tour, a whirlwind annual inventory of the Forbeses’ residences on that side of the Atlantic. Courtesy of the corporate 727, they had checked up first on the Palais de Mendoub in Morocco, then on Château Balleroy in France, and that morning, after arriving at Heathrow, on Old Battersea House, their seventeenth-century, Christopher Wren–designed mansion on the Thames. Normally the routine would include a quick visit to Harrods department store to shop for gifts, then dinner at a restaurant before flying back to the States. But this year Malcolm had put in a special order for a bottle of wine.
At home, when their children were growing up, Malcolm Forbes and his wife drank wine with dinner most nights. After Charles de Gaulle spouted the separatist slogan “Vive le Québec libre!” while visiting Montreal in 1967, Forbes protested by boycotting French wine. A Portuguese rosé, Lancer’s, became a familiar bottle on the dinner table.
Although the astute and self-aggrandizing Forbes made few expenditures unsuited for either a press release or a tax write-off, he had genuine enthusiasm for wine. He enjoyed drinking it. He liked its mystique. He made no bones about being an “appreciator” rather than a serious collector. Though he bought blue chips, it was for short-term drinking, not long-term investment. The family was advised in its wine buying by a sommelier from the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, and whenever the man suggested that a particular wine might be suitable for laying down for future generations, Malcolm would get annoyed. He didn’t intend to wait for his grandchildren. He just wanted to know when it would start to peak.
Malcolm favored Bordeaux. He owned ten bottles of 1890 Lafite, and he especially liked Margaux and, because the château was owned by his New Jersey neighbors the Dillons, Haut-Brion. He bought hundreds of bottles of the 1965 vintage, which was considered particularly horrible, at a cost of five dollars each. For years the Forbes family served that and the 1963, another poor year; most people, ignorant of vintages, were impressed merely by the label. To be fair, even bad vintages of a great wine were worthy of drinking, and such vintages could actually be harder to come by than good ones, because nobody held on to them for very long.
In the mid-eighties, on the occasion of the centennial of France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty to the United States, Danielle Mitterand visited New York Harbor. In the afternoon, after a celebration, the Forbes yacht Highlander picked her up and motored out to sea. There wasn’t a lot of chitchat—Malcolm spoke no French whatsoever, Madame Mitterand only limited English—but when they reached the cramped, glass-doored wine cellar belowdecks by the staterooms, Malcolm said: “Ah, you’ll be happy to see all the wines from Bordeaux.” Madame Mitterand replied, not entirely warmly, “I am from Burgundy.”
Malcolm loved giving people, for their fiftieth anniversary or seventy-fifth birthday, a bottle from their marriage or birth year, always with the injunction, “If you open it, don’t tell us.” Once, knowing that Richard Nixon loved wine, Malcolm invited the former president to the corporate cellar on lower Fifth Avenue, where a T-shirt hanging on the wall reads, “Life is too short to drink cheap wine.” Malcolm and his sons enjoyed dinner with Nixon right there in the cellar’s crisp, 60-degree air. Malcolm wasn’t precious about his wine, and if he had to work late, he thoroughly enjoyed popping open a Margaux to drink with a Big Mac and fries.
All the Forbes children had taken up collecting: Steve was into historic documents, Bob went for toy boats, Tim bought Americana, and Moira amassed comic books. But Kip embraced the mania most fully. It was Kip who became curator of the family’s collections, and it was to Kip that Forbes senior would later dedicate More Than I Dreamed, his memoir of collecting. Kip wrote his senior thesis at Princeton on Victorian art, and had an abiding passion for English paintings of the late nineteenth century. As a young man he seemed to pine for a bygone world of aristocrats. At age twenty-three he married the thirty-eight-year-old German baroness Astrid Mathilde Cornelia von Heyl zu Herrnsheim, and, for a time, took to wearing Edwardian three-piece suits with a pocket watch and chain. In 1976, Kip encouraged his father to buy the Social Register. By the time of the 1985 auction, Kip’s Victorian painting collection had grown to some five hundred paintings, most of which he kept at Old Battersea House.