Customers say
Customers find this book to be a fascinating story that provides a profound education on wine history and fakery, with well-researched content and great characters. However, the writing quality receives mixed feedback – while some find it fairly well written, others say it’s overly detailed for general readers. Moreover, the pacing and ease of follow are also mixed, with several customers finding it slow and tedious to read.
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A quick rundown of this product’s key features:
The rivetingly strange story of the world’s most expensive bottle of wine, and the even stranger characters whose lives have intersected with it.
The New York Times bestseller, updated with a new epilogue, that tells the true story of a 1787 Château Lafite Bordeaux—supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson—that sold for $156,000 at auction and of the eccentrics whose lives intersected with it.
Was it truly entombed in a Paris cellar for two hundred years? Or did it come from a secret Nazi bunker? Or from the moldy basement of a devilishly brilliant con artist? As Benjamin Wallace unravels the mystery, we meet a gallery of intriguing players—from the bicycle-riding British auctioneer who speaks of wines as if they are women to the obsessive wine collector who discovered the bottle.
Suspenseful and thrillingly strange, this is the vintage tale of what could be the most elaborate con since the Hitler diaries.
“Part detective story, part wine history, this is one juicy tale, even for those with no interest in the fruit of the vine. . . . As delicious as a true vintage Lafite.” —BusinessWeek
Our Top Reviews
Reviewer: Owl
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A Splendid Vintage of a Story
Review: OK: so imagine that off Greece some amphorae are discovered in a 2,000 year old wreck. They are inscribed “Falernian” together with initials that could be those of the poet Horace. The discoverer is reticent about which divers made the find and where the wreck was located. He puts them up for auction at a most respectable British house. How much would you pay for one of these if you had apparently had more money than Croesus? Would you drink the stuff? Display it? How could you or anyone now living tell whether this liquid still tasted as the legendary Falernian should? What if—just what if—more amphorae surfaced? Lots more. How could you or even the experts assure this was the real deal or if it was faked?”The Billionaire’s Vinegar” tells of the ingenious “discoverer” (Hardy Rodenstock)of a cache of fine label wines from the time of Thomas Jefferson, said to have been uncovered when a wall of an old cellar in Paris is breached. The bottles are labeled not only with the noble vintners (Margaux, Lafite Yquem) but also with the initials Th.J. engraved on the bottles.The story wraps itself around a legendary auctioneer (bicycle-riding Michael Broadbent of Christie’s), an old wine hunter whose nose supposedly has sniffed and whose palate tasted more old wines than anyone else’s. We meet the world of uber uber uber rich collectors whose cellars may include 30,000 bottles or more; the purveyors who may invite these luscious lucrative clients to elite vertical tastings the wines of which can go back 150 years or more. We learn charmingly about a tappet hen from the 1830s and more sinisterly about the growing suspicion that the curse of the Greeks and Romans—–falsifying wines—may have struck again and this time with prices stratospherically above (say $165,000 for a Th.J. bottle) what most of us might buy for a convivial evening.I recently bought my fourth copy of “The Billionaire’s Vinegar” ’cause I keep giving it to buddies together with a bottle of quite drinkable wine in the $15 range. A wonderful read, every chapter vividly written, well-researched, and overflowing with what may be intriguing, quirky insights into the wine-buying lives of the wealthy, avaracious, and acquisitive—-as well as the honor given to fine wines.One thinks of the lovely poem (See Odes and Epodes) in which Horace invites Maecenus to his farm where he will serve not the Chian or Falernian but Sabine wine, sealed by Horace’s own hands and laid down quite a few counselships ago. After reading “The Billionaire’s Vinegar,” we now know by that, Horace probably means “guaranteed unadulterated.”There is not a dull page in this book, even on re-readings, and even the more technical, science-y parts can be page-turners if your heart warms to off-beat stories, well-researched and well-told.A caution: If, however, reading about multi-billionaires getting taken interests you about as much as latest teen-star gossip or enrages you to march on Wall Street, I can not recommend this book.Otherwise, BIBENDUM!
Reviewer: Mary Whipple
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: “In May 1945, when allied forces liberated Hitler’s mountaintop redoubt in Bavaria, they found half a million bottles of wine.”
Review: Could the bottle of Lafite, with the initials of Thomas Jefferson and dated 1787, awaiting auction at Christie’s in London in 1987, possibly have been part of a newly discovered Nazi hoard? As Michael Broadbent, the head of the wine department of Christie’s, prepared to auction off this bottle, the oldest authenticated bottle of red wine ever to come up for auction at Christie’s, he knew that it would become the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold. Parts of the Old Marais district in Paris had recently been torn down, and some wondered if the bottle was found walled up in a basement. Others suggested that it had a Nazi history. Then again, Thomas Jefferson had sent hundreds of cases of wine home to Monticello when he left his job as Minister to France, and one of these cases may have been lost or stolen.Speculation was rife because of the age and importance of this bottle, not just for its qualities as wine but also because of its historical importance. The bottle had been consigned to Christie’s by Hardy Rodenstock, a German wine collector who refused to say exactly where it had come from, revealing only that it was from a hidden cellar in an unidentified 18th century house in Paris. The cellar supposedly contained a hundred bottles, two dozen of which, all from 1784 – 1787, were engraved with the initials “Th.J.” After a bidding war, Kip Forbes, son of publisher Malcolm Forbes, was declared the winner with a bid of $156,000.Questions began to arise about this bottle almost immediately. There was no evidence that Jefferson had ever purchased a 1787 Lafite, and in fact, Jefferson had recorded the purchase of only two of the four wines that Rodenstock had found. The engraving style on the auctioned bottle had never before been used by Jefferson, and all the other Rodenstock wines had exactly the same engraving style. “It seemed odd [too] that whoever first found the bottles would not have shopped them to the highest bidder, instead of automatically selling to Rodenstock.” As several more of the Jefferson bottles came up for auction over the next couple of years, each one setting a new record, questions continued to arise about the bottles themselves, the amount of evaporation, and ultimately, even the instruments used to engrave the bottles. Unusually, at every tasting Rodenstock sponsored, his men secured the corks and sealing wax after the bottles were opened, and no one had access to them for testing purposes.In the second half of the book, author Benjamin Wallace takes the reader from 1987 to the present, detailing the new techniques which can now be used (and were later used on the Jefferson bottles) to date bottles, wine, sediments, engraving, wax, and corks. High tech labs, with experts on everything from tests for germanium, thermoluminescence, carbon, and lead, create a fascinating story of how the wine market has evolved to the present and the safeguards now in place to prevent fraud of this nature. Benjamin Wallace keeps the excitement high as he details the search for information about the Jefferson wines and the eventual outcome regarding their “rightness.” Well researched and filled with details about the wine industry, the book bears reading now, in light of recent decisions in the lawsuits brought by William Koch and the auctioneer, Michael Broadbent.
Reviewer: G. Elston
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: And then what?
Review: This book promises so much and delivers almost all of it. The author is a great writer, and his prose pulls the reader into a totally immerse experience. Unfortunately after being totally absorbed for 90% of the book, the reader is left with an ending but no conclusion. It almost feels as if the author just gave up on the book, wrote a few pages as a concluding chapter, left it there and went off for tea. I found it incredibly frustrating that the book was not tied up at the end and I found myself checking to see if I had missed something, or if the Kindle had somehow not downloaded the whole book. The culture of ultra-rich wine connoisseurs and their amazing collections is covered extremely well, the main characters are developed to a point where you almost feel you know them personally. Oenophiles will love this book, but even those with a casual interest in wine will find it absorbing. I do though eventually look forward to this book being “completed” as the ending lets the book down to such a degree that it goes from 5 stars to three.
Reviewer: Inclusivity
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: After finishing reading this book, my faith in any so-called trained sommeliers has been totally annihilated. Even industry stalwarts, like Jancis Robinson, disappoint. Do I recommend this book?j Absolutely. But if you have ever considered trusting another’s judgement over your own on what or what not to buy (in terms of actual taste), think again. And if you have toyed with the idea of becoming an investor of wines…don’t, is the short answer. Quite a book, and yet the whole system (fraudulent as it may be), continues unabated. Fascinating.
Reviewer: Cassidy
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I was interested in this book due to recent news about wine fraud. I work in the wine industry, but think this is sufficiently well written and explanatory that those with little or no wine knowledge should find it easy to understand and a really enjoyable read. Thought it might be a little dry, but there’s enough ‘plot’ to keep it interesting.
Reviewer: Monika Goerigk – Schönleber
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Super toll geschrieben und sehr mitreißend, dass es schwer fiel das Buch zur Seite zu legen.Ich kann dieses Buch jedem Weinliebhaber wärmstens empfehlen, auch in deutscher Sprache.Zum Wohl!
Reviewer: Jacqueline younes
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Entrega muy rapidaTodo perfectoGracias
Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Fantastic book
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