Review of reviews:?Books

The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine

by Benjamin Wallace

(Crown, $24.95)

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In December 1985, a bottle of wine bearing cryptic markings and an intriguing story went up for auction at Christie’s in London. Etched into the glass was the year “1787,” the vineyard name “Lafite,” and the initials “Th.J.” It was the first of a small cache of wine that purportedly had been discovered behind a wall in a Paris apartment. Documents also had been found indicating that Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and first oenophile, had lost track of a single box of wine bottles after fleeing Paris during the 1789 French Revolution. Bidding on the alleged Bordeaux started at the equivalent of $15,000. One minute and 39 furious seconds later, a bang of the gavel declared Malcolm Forbes’ son, Kip, the winner. The publishing scion had wagered $156,000, a record that still stands.

The true contents of that bottle remain a mystery, said Jerry Shriver in USA Today. Benjamin Wallace’s “splendid” new book informs us that the Forbes family unwisely displayed its prize upright under a hot light, causing the bottle’s wax-encased cork to shrink and fall in. The wine was undrinkable before anyone could taste it. But four other bottles of the Jefferson wines were later sold for a half-million dollars to U.S. energy magnate Bill Koch. When the litigious Koch began to suspect that he had been swindled, he hired a private investigator to find the truth. That hunt provides Wallace with all he needs for “a delicious mystery” that “winds through musty European cellars, Jefferson-era France and Monticello, engravers’ shops, a nuclear physics lab,” and finally to the “legendary multiday tastings” that were staged throughout the 1980s by the shadowy German collector who first discovered the Jefferson wines.

You don’t have to be a wine fanatic to enjoy The Billionaire’s Vinegar, said The Economist. “This is a gripping story, expertly handled.” With “wit and verve,” Wallace draws the reader into “subculture strewn with eccentrics and monomaniacs.” “Come to think of it,” said Sherryl Connelly in the New York Daily News, you don’t even have to care who the ultimate culprit is to savor this book. “Wallace’s depiction of rabid oenophiles staging almost decadent events to swill rare wine, knowingly depleting the reserves, are as much fun as the mystery.”