The Billionaire's Vinegar (14 page)

Sounds nuts—?

I think the bottle would make nice duo at FORBES—and the story is the point…

All the best,
Bill Sokolin

The story
was
the point, but Forbes wasn’t interested. Heeding the salesman’s adage that if at first something doesn’t sell, you should ask for more, Sokolin kept hiking the price, first to $394,000. Then, after seeing a rickety footstool sell at auction for $290,000, which Sokolin thought absurd, he repriced the bottle at an entirely arbitrary $519,750.

I
T WAS DURING
this lull that Sokolin attended the Four Seasons event. The sponsors were Chateau & Estate and Château Margaux. By the late 1980s, an annual U.S. roadshow was
de rigueur
for the top growths of Bordeaux. While, on a mass scale, America had come late to wine, its high-end collectors had exercised a disproportionate influence on the market since the late 1960s. As of 1990, a quarter of all Pétrus and half of the production of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, the most esteemed producer in Burgundy, would be going to the U.S. In the spring of 1989, the Margaux team were in New York to promote the 1986 vintage, considered one of their strongest showings since the Mentzelopoulos family had bought the estate more than a decade earlier.

Corinne Mentzelopoulos began the evening by getting up and talking about the special vintages, 1953 and 1961, that Margaux was providing that night, and about the 1986 wine that would be tasted. Then the meal got under way. A few courses had already been served when Sokolin realized he should have brought the bottle with him. What better occasion to show off this extraordinarily rare bottle of Margaux than at a dinner to honor its makers? He said so to his wife Gloria.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

“Nope,” he said. “I’m going to get it.”

Sokolin took a taxi to the prewar building where he lived on the Upper West Side, across a darkened lawn from the Museum of Natural History. Entering his ninth-floor apartment, Sokolin passed an oversized retro poster ad for Mumm’s Champagne and foyer bookcases packed with works about wine and Jefferson. He crossed the blond parquet floor and turned into the dining room, where, instead of wallpaper, the ends of wooden cases that had once contained great wines were arranged in a vinous mosaic. A shelf displayed two reproductions of Jefferson’s wineglasses, a gigantic Lafite bottle opened after Gloria’s mother’s funeral, and an eighteenth-century Madeira decanter Sokolin had opened for the party to launch his book
Liquid Assets
. He retrieved the Jefferson bottle from a freestanding refrigerated wine closet in the corner of the room.

When he arrived back at the Four Seasons, half an hour after he had left, he brought the bottle directly to the Margaux table and said to Madame Mentzelopoulos, “I bet you never saw a bottle this old.” She had, of course, seen this very bottle, during its recorking for Whitwhams. Sokolin left it with the table for thirty minutes. “He was showing it to everyone,” Julian Niccolini, then the maître d’, recalled later. “Everyone was suspicious of this bottle.” Before dessert, Sokolin retrieved it from the Margaux table and took it to show to Rusty Staub.

Sokolin was cradling the bottle in a bag, with his left arm, when it happened. Niccolini saw the whole thing. Just inside the Pool Room, to the left of the door, stood a gueridon, a low, metal-topped trolley used as a service station by waiters. When Sokolin was a few steps into the room, headed toward Staub, he brushed past the gueridon. Wine immediately began to spill onto the carpet.

Minutes later, Sokolin was running from the room, trailing splotches of what looked like blood on the pale stone underfoot. He strode down a long, white marble corridor that led to the Grill Room, past the hostess station, and down the stairs to the lobby, which was scattered with black Barcelona chairs. When Sokolin put the bag and bottle down on a counter as he retrieved his coat, more of the wine leaked out, and three people dipped their fingers in it. One, licking his finger, said the wine was “cooked.” Niccolini thought it tasted like mud.

N
OW IN HIS
overcoat, Sokolin pushed out through the double doors onto an especially charmless block of midtown Manhattan and flagged down a taxi. Back in the Pool Room, in the spot where he had last been standing, a crowd gathered. In the chaos of his departure, Sokolin had left the two loose bottle shards at the restaurant. Howard Goldberg, from the
New York Times,
took one piece as a souvenir, and Paul Kovi, the co-owner of the restaurant, took the second. Meanwhile, Gloria Sokolin, unaware of what had happened, was wondering where her husband was. Then she saw Goldberg.

“So, the bottle’s broken,” the
Times
reporter said.

Gloria did a double take. “Excuse me?” she said.

“Bill broke the bottle,” Goldberg repeated.

At first Gloria had a hard time believing that her husband could have left without her, but as she continued to look for him without success, it began to sink in. This was a problem. She had no money. She didn’t even have the ticket to retrieve her fur coat. Somewhat embarrassed, she had to borrow five dollars from a tablemate for a taxi. Fortunately, her husband had at least had the presence of mind, in his rushed departure, to leave her coat-check ticket with the attendant.

Gloria took a cab home, and on the way, a news report came on the radio about what had happened. She arrived home and, understandably annoyed, allowed herself an I-told-you-so. But she knew how bad it felt to break something. A few years earlier she had been removing her silver chest from its hiding place inside the wine closet when she accidentally broke an 1874 Lafite. She and Bill had literally lapped it up off the floor. He had been understanding then, saying, “Accidents happen.”

Now she found her husband “bereft,” as she later put it. “Bill was inconsolable.” Arriving home, Sokolin had gingerly removed the bottle from its carrier. Only about five ounces of wine, or 20 percent, remained. He went into the kitchen, where the walls were covered in paper, designed by Gloria, featuring a repeating pattern of signatures of great modern French chefs.
Paul Bocuse. Jean Troisgros. Alain Chapel.
Sokolin poured a small glass for himself, then put the rest of the wine in a small plastic container, which he put in the freezer. He tasted what was in his glass. It was recognizable as wine, but by no means tasted good. He put the empty bottle on a table in the living room.

At midnight, with the arrival of April 25, he turned fifty-eight. Forty minutes into Sokolin’s birthday, Howard Goldberg, the
Times
reporter who had made off with a piece of the bottle, telephoned, eager to secure his scoop. He asked if Sokolin had been drunk. Sokolin said he’d only had a single glass of Champagne and hadn’t finished any of his glasses of Bordeaux.

“I did something terrible,” Sokolin told Goldberg. “I’m very unhappy. I was in shock. I committed murder.”

The next morning, Tim Littler was staying with friends in Geneva when his host knocked on his bedroom door and said a reporter was calling from the
New York Times
. Littler didn’t think anyone knew where he was, so he wasn’t sure how the reporter had tracked him down, but he took the call. Goldberg delivered the bad news. At first, Littler thought it must be an April Fool’s joke, but it was already the fourth week of the month, so he quickly gave up on that idea. Several more newspapers called that day.

Littler wasn’t worried about the money. His attitude was a shopkeeper’s: you break it, you buy it. At first he thought, knowing Sokolin, that it might be a publicity stunt. But once he learned of the precise pattern of breakage, Littler ruled out that theory. If the bottle had fallen on the ground and shattered, that would be one thing, but no one could intentionally and cleanly puncture such an old bottle.

The next several days were a blur of media attention. Sokolin walked to a TV studio, bottle in hand, to appear on Regis Philbin’s show. “Murder at Four Seasons” was the headline in
U.S. News & World Report. People
went with “Oops!” and dubbed Sokolin’s misfortune “the world’s most expensive puddle.” The
New York Post
blared: “Grapes of Wrath: Clumsy Vintner Breaks a 519G Bottle of Wine.” For Fleet Street tabloids, the episode served as a platonic illustration of Yank barbarism. “What a Plonker!” screamed one, while another tossed off a “Thought for Today: There’s only one thing worse than an American with no taste: One who buys it, then drops it.”

Cartoonists had a field day. “Okay, stand back,” a man said to a crowd gathered around a puddle in one cartoon, “and let it breathe.” In another, a man opined, of a splotch on the floor, “It’s a pleasant stain, I think, but not a great one.” Paul Kovi, at the Four Seasons, sent Sokolin a bill for the $360 it had cost the restaurant to have the rug cleaned. Sokolin ignored it. His feeling was that Kovi had gotten about “ten or twenty million dollars’” worth of free advertising out of his gaffe. (It would be dwarfed, seventeen years later, when casino developer Steve Wynn put his elbow through a $139-million Picasso.)

When the reporter from
People
came to his home, Sokolin reached for the bottle, which still stood on the table where he had set it down, and almost knocked it over. Sokolin put his hand to his chest as the bottle swayed, but it remained standing. Sokolin retrieved the plastic container from the freezer and let the reporter smell it. It “looked like chocolate-brown goo and emitted an intense aroma not unlike that of stewed prunes,” the reporter wrote.

“You think I did it on purpose, don’t you?” Sokolin said to the reporter, who concluded that it had been a true accident. Two of the key questions muttered by suspicious colleagues after Sokolin broke the bottle had ready answers: the level of wine was so high, and the seal new, because of the recent recorkings by Margaux and Whitwhams.

Sokolin by now was embracing his fifteen minutes—mugging for the camera, bugging his eyes out, and holding the bottle forth defiantly. He said the bottle had been “worth maybe $10 million or maybe more.” He and Gloria, a real-estate broker, found themselves invited to social gatherings that previously would have eluded them. It wasn’t clear whether they were guests or entertainment. At one high-powered dinner party, the host introduced Sokolin as “Butterfingers.”

The
New York Times
saw a morality tale in what had happened, publishing an editorial that read, in part, “Everyone who has saved a perfume for a worthy occasion and found its lilies have festered by the time she gets around to opening the bottle knows what it is to be a William Sokolin.” A William Sokolin! He had become a cautionary archetype. The lesson, the
Times
concluded, was that wine is for drinking rather than saving.

A month after breaking the bottle, Sokolin removed the frozen wine from his freezer and defrosted it. No decanting, no ceremony. He just drank it from a glass. A strange thing had happened in the last month. “It was good, but it wasn’t wine,” Sokolin recalled. “It was grape juice.” The freezing had removed the alcohol, and with it the impurities. At least that was Sokolin’s take.

Sokolin says he asked Hardy Rodenstock for a replacement bottle, and Rodenstock replied that it would cost $800,000. “You’re crazy,” Sokolin told him. The insurance company Frank Crystal & Co. eventually made out a check to “Whitwhams and William Sokolin” in the amount of $197,625 and dated June 7, 1989. The money would go to Tim Littler, who had intended to reclaim the bottle in June, since he had an interested buyer in Japan.

Soon after, Littler and Michael Broadbent were chatting at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, when a man approached, ringing a small bell. Littler and Broadbent were old friends, and Whitwhams handled Christie’s shipping and customs clearance in Japan. Broadbent was doing an auction there. “Mr. Littler,” the bell-ringer said, “you have a fax.” It reported that the insurance check had arrived.

“I guess we’ve lost the record,” Broadbent said.

C
HAPTER
11

T
HE
D
IVINER OF
W
INES

I
N THE LATE
1980s, H
ARDY
R
ODENSTOCK TOLD HIS
friend Georg Riedel that he wished to create his own line of mouth-blown wineglasses. Riedel was the tenth generation in a remarkable glassmaking dynasty. It had begun in the Bohemian forest three centuries before and, after World War II, relocated to the Alpine Austrian village of Kufstein. Georg’s father, Claus, had a simple, brilliant insight: the shape of a glass—the size of the bowl, its curvature, the diameter of the rim—affects how a wine smells and tastes. Claus produced a glass for each of the classic wine regions, including Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, in the Rhône Valley. They were beautiful and functional. The
grand cru
Burgundy glass was enormous, with a flaring lip. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City acquired one for its permanent collection.

If Claus was the creative pathfinder, it was Georg who would make the glasses into a coveted commodity and transform his father’s breakthrough idea into conventional wisdom. In the 1970s, with the emergence of New World regions such as California and Australia, the wine world began to move away from speaking of wine in terms of place (a glass of Bordeaux) and toward speaking in terms of grape varietal (a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon). Georg set out to market varietal-specific glasses: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon…Several of the glasses were identical to those designed by his father, and had simply been relabeled, but Georg also oversaw the design of a number of increasingly specialized glasses. The thirty-three different glasses that would eventually constitute the high-end line included one expressly for Chardonnays from Burgundy’s Montrachet appellation, one for Rheingau Rieslings, and one for white wines from the Loire Valley.

Georg Riedel was custom-tailored both in his suits and in his soul. He wore pocket squares that matched his ties, and, still in his forties, had already planned the wine to be drunk at his funeral, setting aside sixty bottles of a late-harvest Austrian Riesling, a 1979 Trockenbeerenauslese from Freie Weingärtner. Riedel’s relationship with Hardy Rodenstock dated to 1982, when Riedel supplied the glassware for Rodenstock’s third tasting at Fuente. In return, he was invited to the event, and since then Riedel had attended and supplied the crystal—several thousand pieces of stemware—for every Rodenstock tasting.

He and Rodenstock grew close. It was through Rodenstock that Riedel learned about old wine and tasted the vintages that he considered to be his peak wine experiences. He first tasted the legendary 1870 Lafite at a Rodenstock tasting; he tasted the 1811 Yquem, the best wine that ever passed his lips, three or four times, all at Rodenstock tastings; and it was through Rodenstock that he tasted the “most perfect” wine he had ever enjoyed, the 1921 Mouton in Jéroboam. In his everyday drinking, too, Riedel favored mature wines—he wouldn’t touch a Bordeaux younger than ten years—and he became a regular customer of Rodenstock’s.

When Thomas Jefferson was alive, glasses were typically smaller and didn’t curve in at the top. Not until the twentieth century were significant changes made to the shape of wineglasses. A line called Les Impitoyables—The Pitiless—appeared in the United States in the 1980s, and consisted of four outsized, rather severe-looking mouth-blown crystal tulips. But Les Impitoyables was sometimes faulted for its glass-half-empty approach; as their name suggested, the glasses highlighted a wine’s flaws as much as its virtues. Riedel, ten years later, was the revolutionary glassware that caught on.

A tireless pitchman, Georg Riedel put himself wherever wine was being bought and drunk, at auctions and fairs and tastings and trade shows. He did this very simply. One nose at a time, he demonstrated the glasses side by side with the competition. By and large, his test subjects, people who were already very interested in wine, approached the demonstration with skepticism and came away true believers.

Riedel made a big push into the United States after the dollar started bleeding value in 1985; suddenly the demand for Riedel’s luxury gift items (bowls, vases, figurines) dried up. He needed to reposition the company, and wineglasses were the way. His first breakthrough in the American market was with the Mondavis, the pioneering California wine family, in January 1990. Like everyone else, the Mondavis initially reacted as if Riedel were peddling snake oil. But after being treated to his stock show-and-tell, they were converted; they got rid of all their old glasses, placed a large order for Riedels, and, like all good converts, began to spread the word themselves. Riedel did demonstrations for important wine writers, making a special trip to Maryland to demonstrate them for Robert Parker, who lived in the small town of Monkton. Parker was blown away. “Do I have to rewrite all my notes?” he wondered aloud to Riedel. In June 1991, Parker sang the glasses’ praises in his newsletter.

Riedel soon scaled up his efforts. At Marvin Shanken’s 1997 Wine Experience in New York, he made a presentation to one thousand noses at once. Riedel had a set speech: the glass was a loudspeaker for the wine; it transmitted the passion sealed in a bottle. Riedel took to saying: “Mondavi made wine, Parker wrote about it, we brought the glasses.”

Riedel glasses were an idea for their time. Wine connoisseurship was in a phase of accelerating precision. In the two centuries since Thomas Jefferson’s imprecise language for communicating about wine, attempts to describe the evanescent sensations provoked by tasting had been fitful. The romantic era of wine appreciation, which lasted well into the twentieth century, yielded such curlicues as this 1932 description, by H. Warner Allen, of the Latour 1869: “The palate recognised a heroic wine, such a drink as might refresh the warring archangels, and the perfection of its beauty called up the noble phrase ‘terrible as an army with banners.’”

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the idea of tasting notes had taken hold, and their descriptions had become increasingly sensory. The untrained nose might think it absurd to detect a grocery list of smells in a glass of wine, but it had an empirical basis—a wine could contain some of the same phenolic compounds as did said groceries—which was why different tasters often came up with the same adjectives. The apotheosis of this hyperdelineated linguistic movement came in 1990, with the invention of the “Wine Aroma Wheel” by a chemist at the University of California at Davis named Ann C. Noble. The wheel attempted to come up with a standard nomenclature. Pineapple, melon, and banana were examples of “tropical fruit” flavors, which, along with citrus, berry, tree fruit, and dried fruit, made up the “fruity” family of aromas. “Wet dog,” “burnt match,” and “skunk” were examples of “sulfur flavors,” which, along with “pungent” and “petroleum” flavors, formed the “chemical” family. In all, the wheel delineated nearly a hundred scents.

Some of the new precision was grounded in science. Much of it just looked as if it was. Attempts to rank various wines dated back to antiquity. The Classification of 1855 had been, in its way, an effort to differentiate among the Bordeaux hoards. Modern systems ranged from Michael Broadbent’s zero-to-five stars to the twenty-point systems of U.C. Davis,
Decanter,
and English critics Clive Coates and Jancis Robinson. But the reigning paradigm, starting in the early 1980s, was the 100-point scale pioneered by Robert Parker and copied by other influential tasting authorities, including
Wine Spectator
. The very fineness of the scoring system’s gradations cast doubt on its validity. Critics argued that it was absurd to suggest that there was a meaningful distinction between an 86 and an 87, or between a 92 and a 93. The endless verticals and horizontals were empirical studies of a sort. Was such-and-such vintage—the 1945, the 1961—still up to snuff? Was Pétrus really the best Pomerol? Which of the two Rothschild rivals—Lafite and Mouton—would prevail in a multi-vintage showdown? Was Latour truly the longest-lived of the first growths? Did the ’29 Pétrus taste different in different-size bottles? These were studies without scientific controls.

Another area of wine appreciation that had become more nuanced was the pairing of food and wine. A few rules of thumb (red wine with meat, white with fish) and a handful of traditional combinations—Sauternes and foie gras, Port with Stilton, Chablis alongside oysters—had given way to a much more complex picture. There were, after all, some fish (salmon) that went well with some reds (pinot noir). You could find people who swore by idiosyncratic combinations like “Margaux and chocolate,” and denounced pairing them with anything else. Rodenstock went so far as to suggest that when one was serving Yquem, its temperature should depend on what it was accompanying (43–46 degrees Fahrenheit with foie gras, 46–50 degrees with desserts, 50–53 degrees with Roquefort or Stilton). Many of the pairings did, at any rate, taste pretty good.

Until the late 1980s, the Riedel glass suggested for Sauternes was the one designed for mature white Bordeaux. Rodenstock believed Sauternes required its own glass. He made some sketches and gave them to Riedel, who turned them into designs and gave them back to Rodenstock, who made a couple of changes. Prototypes were made. The bowl of the glass tapered almost to a point at its base, and swelled elegantly to a bulge near its top. The shape tempered the dessert wine’s sweetness and emphasized its minerality, transforming intensity into finesse. The narrow mouth of the glass concentrated the wine’s inimitable nose, showcasing the sweet, yeasty aroma redolent of baked raisin bread. For Rodenstock, having his own line of Riedel glasses, the HR-1 Series, was the ultimate status symbol.

R
ODENSTOCK’S FAME HAD
spread since the auction of the Forbes bottle. The publicity from that one sale had made him known internationally in wine circles, enabling him to launch a robust career dealing wine. He had made a tidy sum just by selling off several more of the Jefferson bottles. In 1986, in partnership with an innkeeper in Austria’s Wachau wine region, he had begun to organize annual commercial tastings, where he provided the wine and guests paid sums into the thousands of dollars to attend. His wine business now extended to the Far East, where he also owned a Taiwanese company that packaged condoms in hazelnut shells and marketed them as gag gifts. At the end of his tastings, Rodenstock would give the nuts away.

His knack for unearthing sensational wine rarities had not ended with the Jefferson bottles. The publicity from the Forbes sale, he said, had led to his being approached about old bottles found in Russia. The czars in St. Petersburg had been well-documented procurers of Yquem, and Rodenstock soon acquired four bottles purportedly dating to between 1740 and 1760. At his 1986 tasting, he had produced an Yquem he said he had obtained in Leningrad. Bulky and adorned with enamel flowers, the bottle was undated but bore the name Sauvage, the family that owned Yquem before it became a Lur Saluces property. “The rarest of all these rarities,” Jancis Robinson later described the bottle, extolling “these glasses of unctuous history.”

Rodenstock spoke of a confederate, in the employ of Lufthansa, who smuggled Yquems out of Russia for him. He told friends that he had found another trove, for which he had paid a million dollars cash, in Caracas, Venezuela. “[F]or ancient wines,” Edmund Penning-Rowsell wrote in 1989, “[Rodenstock] appears to have similar powers of discovery to water diviners, in their more pedestrian calling.”

Rodenstock had become wealthier, his tastings more lavish every year. They were now located in the chic ski resort of Arlberg, in western Austria, lasted an entire weekend, and included nearly seventy guests, many of them European celebrities. Rodenstock, who had never ended up marrying Heinz-Gert Woschek’s daughter Patricia, had traded up to richer, more socially prominent girlfriends. In addition to wine, he now collected porcelain and watches, and always wore something unusual on his wrist. He was also a tax exile, officially a resident in Somerset Maugham’s “sunny place for shady people”—the haven of Monte Carlo—and kept additional homes in Munich and at Lacanau, a seaside resort outside of Bordeaux. (A few years later, he would add homes on the Spanish island of Marbella and in the Austrian ski village of Kitzbühel.) Though the few people who saw the homes noted that none was very large, the addresses helped him to gain entrée to a circle of people who were flashy, well-heeled, and generally dismissive of outsiders—or at least to look as though he had.

Up to now, Rodenstock had shied away from publicity focused personally on him, but with his business growing, he decided to grant a handful of carefully chosen journalists the kind of access necessary to write big features that would spread his name among prospective customers. In December 1988,
Wine Spectator
put him on its cover, a glass of Yquem in one hand, a No. 2 Davidoff cigar in the other, with the words “Money Doesn’t Matter: The World’s Most Extravagant Wine Collector.”