The debut Heublein auction, which occasioned Broadbent’s first trip across the Atlantic, took place at the Continental Plaza Hotel in Chicago in May of 1969. Broadbent’s over-the-top Englishness played well in America, and he hammed it up, wearing a tailcoat with a red carnation in the lapel. When opening sample bottles for the slack-jawed North American rubes, he stagily took his time with the mechanics of wine service: skimming the capsule, drawing the cork, and decanting the liquid contents. The knockdown totals (the sum of an auction’s winning bids) climbed quickly, from $56,000 the first year to $106,000 the second to $231,000 the third. These were huge sums for a single auction, compared with London results. The power and scale of the American market was obvious.
Peter Morrell, a twenty-six-year-old wine retailer in New York who felt that he needed experience with pre-phylloxera Bordeaux, made news around the world in 1970 when he bid £220 (at the time about $500) for a double magnum of 1865 Lafite originally from the Rosebery cellar. When he was interviewed for television, the reporter was incredulous at how much he had paid, and quipped to viewers that even if it was vinegar, Morrell would have “the world’s most expensive salad dressing.” A record wine bid was newsworthy. Five hundred dollars for a bottle was still shocking.
The whole thing was a flack’s dream—for Heublein, for Christie’s, and for those shrewd retailers and restaurateurs who had discerned a media loophole: making a record bid for a bottle of wine guaranteed press coverage, and it was much cheaper and more impressive than a quarter-page ad. The trend really took off at the third Heublein auction, when Broadbent sold an 1846 Lafite for $5,000, a new record by a long shot. Soon the numbers went much higher, way beyond the records Christie’s was setting in London. A Memphis restaurant owner paid $31,000 for an 1822 Lafite. A Dallas wine merchant topped that with a $38,000 bid for a Jéroboam of 1870 Mouton.
Broadbent sewed up the American market. In addition to the Christie’s sales in London, which drew lots of American bidders, and Heublein, which was the dominant U.S. auction and which Broadbent ran through 1982, he also was brought in to run the annual Napa Valley charity auction, which began in 1981. The first year, the temperature reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and up on the dais, Broadbent cooled his feet, unseen by the auctiongoers, in a bucket of ice water. In 1981, in Chicago, Christie’s started running its own auctions in the United States.
The wine-collecting boom was limited to a tiny slice of Americans, but there was already a palpable unease, manifest as snobbery, among British wine veterans who could see their primacy being usurped. “As a group,” Decanter noted in 1986, “American doctors seem to have the world’s greatest interest in great Bordeaux.” The record-chasing was offered up as further evidence of American puerility. And while the California wine industry was nudging American awareness of its product forward, as of 1980 a national poll found that 23 percent of wine drunk in the United States was on the rocks.
The high end of the market, however, was coming to be dominated by Americans, and the high end of the high end had given itself a name: “the Group.” They owned huge collections of wine. Marvin Overton III, a Texas neurosurgeon who sometimes wore a bolo tie combined with a fur coat, had 10,000 bottles in his cellar. Lloyd Flatt, an eye-patch-wearing Tennessean of shadowy occupation, owned two townhomes in New Orleans; one housed him, the other his 30,000-bottle wine collection. Tawfiq Khoury, a San Diego shopping-mall developer, owned 65,000 bottles, thought to be the largest private collection of wine in America at the time. As wine became detached from its traditional role as a table beverage—as it became a fetish or a trophy or an investment—it became more common to find private collections of wine that far exceeded their owners’ abilities to drink them.
“Wine became the soloist,” Broadbent said later.
The Group pioneered a new type of event known as a mega-tasting, which could take either of two forms: horizontal (many wines from one vintage) and vertical (many vintages of one wine). Broadbent dated the very first horizontal tasting to 1968, when a Dutch physician named John Taams brought together several wines of the 1961 vintage, but it was in the late 1970s, in the hands of these new American supercollectors, that the format gained traction. Overton hosted a forty-seven-vintage vertical tasting of Latour in Fort Worth in 1976, and followed that up three years later with a thirty-six-vintage vertical of Lafite going back to 1799. Broadbent presided, alongside Baron Elie de Rothschild.
“If it hadn’t been for my time in the U.S., I wouldn’t be so involved in this hobby,” Wolfgang Grünewald, a German-born businessman whose 32,000-bottle collection is among the world’s largest, and who before retiring to Switzerland owned a Los Angeles steel company and was a partner in the Melrose Avenue restaurant Patina, said later. “Americans have a curiosity, for special and rare things, that I haven’t met elsewhere.”
Not everyone in the wine world was thrilled by these events. The most common criticism was that great wines that, in isolation, would be once-in-a-lifetime experiences, were lost amid the hypercritical, side-by-side comparisons of a mega-tasting (what one commentator termed “the crushing proximity of the giants”). What should have been pleasurable was reduced to an arid and world-weary intellectual exercise. At big tastings, great wines were spat out rather than drunk, and when served without food, they were stripped of their natural context.
The events favored “big” wines—those with lots of fruit and concentration. In such a clinical setting, these were the wines that tended to show best. And after twenty or thirty or forty wines, palate fatigue set in for most tasters, and only the biggest wines would make a taster sit up and notice. There could be dental side effects as welclass="underline" an Australian study of wine judges’ teeth found instances of severe damage and recommended not brushing one’s teeth on the morning of a tasting, in order to leave protective plaque in place.
A low-grade dishonesty often permeated the Group’s events, diplomatic euphemism taking the place of candor when a bottle brought by a fellow guest wasn’t quite up to snuff. Outside of the Group, events weren’t cheap; most of the mega-tastings cost thousands of dollars to attend. Some participants couldn’t help feeling a bit queasy over the sheer decadence and extravagance. “I feel a genuine sadness about vertical tastings that has always left me feeling as if I needed a soul-cleansing afterwards,” wrote the Los Angeles wine journalist Dan Berger.
THE MEGA-TASTINGS ALSO, of course, depleted the rarities unearthed and sold by Broadbent. Edmund Penning-Rowsell, a whiskery socialist and claret scholar who covered wine auctions for the Financial Times, observed that as early as 1973 there had been a lull in the discovery of English cellars. But in 1976 there was a resurgence of finds, most in Paris and Bordeaux and a few in the United Kingdom, such as Woodperry House in Oxfordshire. The next year, Penning-Rowsell was able to write of an “extraordinary recrudescence” of rare bottles in the auction room.