The Christie’s catalogue suggested that the wine had belonged to Thomas Jefferson and that its value was “inestimable.”
The most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at auction was offered at Christie’s in London, on December 5, 1985. The bottle was handblown dark-green glass and capped with a nubby seal of thick black wax. It had no label, but etched into the glass in a spindly hand was the year 1787, the word “Lafitte,” and the letters “Th.J.”
The bottle came from a collection of wine that had reportedly been discovered behind a bricked-up cellar wall in an old building in Paris. The wines bore the names of top vineyards—along with Lafitte (which is now spelled “Lafite”), there were bottles from Châteaux d’Yquem, Mouton, and Margaux—and those initials, “Th.J.” According to the catalogue, evidence suggested that the wine had belonged to Thomas Jefferson, and that the bottle at auction could “rightly be considered one of the world’s greatest rarities.” The level of the wine was “exceptionally high” for such an old bottle—just half an inch below the cork—and the color “remarkably deep for its age.” The wine’s value was listed as “inestimable.”
Before auctioning the wine, Michael Broadbent, the head of Christie’s wine department, consulted with the auction house’s glass experts, who confirmed that both the bottle and the engraving were in the eighteenth-century French style. Jefferson had served as America’s Minister to France between 1785 and the outbreak of the French Revolution, and had developed a fascination with French wine. Upon his return to America, he continued to order large quantities of Bordeaux for himself and for George Washington, and stipulated in one 1790 letter that their respective shipments should be marked with their initials. During his first term as President, Jefferson spent seventy-five hundred dollars—roughly a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in today’s currency—on wine, and he is generally regarded as America’s first great wine connoisseur. (He may also have been America’s first great wine bore. “There was, as usual, a dissertation upon wines,” John Quincy Adams noted in his diary after dining with Jefferson in 1807. “Not very edifying.”)
In addition to surveying the relevant historical material, Broadbent had sampled two other bottles from the collection. Some nineteenth-century vintages still taste delicious, provided they have been properly stored. But eighteenth-century wine is extremely rare, and it was not clear whether the Th.J. bottles would hold up. Broadbent is a Master of Wine, a professional certification for wine writers, dealers, and sommeliers, which connotes extensive experience with fine wine, and discriminating judgment. He pronounced a 1784 Th.J. Yquem “perfect in every sense: colour, bouquet, taste.”
At two-thirty that December afternoon, Broadbent opened the bidding, at ten thousand pounds. Less than two minutes later, his gavel fell. The winning bidder was Christopher Forbes, the son of Malcolm Forbes and a vice-president of the magazine Forbes. The final price was a hundred and five thousand pounds—about a hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars. “It’s more fun than the opera glasses Lincoln was holding when he was shot,” Forbes declared, adding, “And we have those, too.”
After the auction, other serious collectors sought out Jefferson bottles. The publisher of Wine Spectator bought a bottle through Christie’s. A mysterious Middle Eastern businessman bought another. And in late 1988 an American tycoon named Bill Koch purchased four bottles. The son of Fred Koch, who founded Koch Industries, he lived in Dover, Massachusetts, and ran his own highly profitable energy company, the Oxbow Corporation. Koch purchased a 1787 Branne Mouton from the Chicago Wine Company in November, 1988. The next month, he bought a 1784 Branne Mouton, a 1784 Lafitte, and a 1787 Lafitte from Farr Vintners, a British retailer. Altogether, Koch spent half a million dollars on the bottles. He installed them in his capacious, climate-controlled wine cellar, and took them out occasionally over the next fifteen years to show them off to friends.
Koch’s collection of art and antiques is valued at several hundred million dollars, and in 2005 the Boston Museum of Fine Arts prepared an exhibition of many of his possessions. Koch’s staff began tracking down the provenance of the four Jefferson bottles, and found that, apart from Broadbent’s authentication of the Forbes bottle, they had nothing on file. Seeking historical corroboration, they approached the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, at Monticello, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Several days later, Monticello’s curator, Susan Stein, telephoned. “We don’t believe those bottles ever belonged to Thomas Jefferson,” she said.
Koch (pronounced “coke”) lives with his third wife, Bridget Rooney, and six children, from this and previous marriages, in a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot Anglo-Caribbean-style house in Palm Beach. When I visited him there not long ago, the front lawn had been excavated to extend the house’s basement. Koch explained that he needs more storage space. “I’m a bit of a compulsive collector,” he said. We strolled past Modigliani’s 1917 “Reclining Nude” and Picasso’s blue-period “Night Club Singer,” a Renoir, a Rodin, and works by Degas, Chagall, Cézanne, Monet, Miró, Dali, Léger, and Botero. Surveillance cameras, encased in little bulbs of black glass, protruded from the ceiling.
“My father was a collector of sorts,” Koch said. “I guess I got it from him. He had a small collection of Impressionist art. He collected shotguns. Then he collected ranches.” We sat down in Koch’s “cowboy room,” surrounded by Charles Marion Russell paintings, Frederic Remington bronzes of men on horseback, antique cowboy hats, bowie knives, and dozens of guns, displayed in glass-topped cases: Jesse James’s gun, Jesse James’s killer’s gun, Sitting Bull’s pistol, General Custer’s rifle.
Koch, who is sixty-seven, is rangy and tall, with tousled white hair, round spectacles, and a boyish, high-pitched laugh. At M.I.T., where he received his undergraduate degree and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, he contracted hepatitis, and could no longer stomach hard alcohol. But he could drink wine. At restaurants, he ordered the most expensive wines on the list, and discovered some that he liked. Eventually, he began purchasing wine at auction: first-growth Bordeaux, like Lafite and Latour, and the famous Burgundies of Romanée-Conti. “When I went crazy is when I sold my stock in Koch Industries,” he said. That was 1983; he made a reported five hundred and fifty million dollars on the sale. At that point, he decided he would build a world-class wine collection. When I asked why, he looked at me as if I’d failed to grasp the obvious. “Because it’s the best-tasting form of alcohol in the world,” he said. “That’s why.”
Koch may be as compulsive about filing lawsuits as he is about collecting. He waged a twenty-year legal battle against two of his brothers relating to the family business. (The matter was settled in 2001.) He sued the state of Massachusetts over an improperly taxed stock transaction and won a forty-six-million-dollar abatement. When a former girlfriend whom he had installed at a condo in Boston’s Four Seasons hotel refused to leave, Koch took her to housing court and had her evicted. He talks about “dropping a subpoena” on people as if he were lobbing a grenade.
Fine-wine fraud was almost unheard of when Koch bought his four bottles of Th.J. Bordeaux, and the only assurance he demanded was that they came from the same collection that Broadbent had authenticated. He was angry to find out that Monticello believed his bottles were fake. “I’ve bought so much art, so many guns, so many other things, that if somebody’s out to cheat me I want the son of a bitch to pay for it,” he told me, his color rising. “Also,” he said, smiling, “it’s a fun detective story.”
The extraordinary inflation of rare-wine prices—of which the Jefferson bottles are the most conspicuous example—has led in recent years to an explosion of counterfeits in the wine trade. In 2000, Italian authorities confiscated twenty thousand bottles of phony Sassicaia, a sought-after Tuscan red; Chinese counterfeiters have begun peddling fake Lafite. So-called “trophy” wines—best-of-the-century vintages of old Bordeaux—that were difficult to find at auction in the nineteen-seventies and eighties have reëmerged on the market in great numbers. Serena Sutcliffe, the head of Sotheby’s international wine department, jokes that more 1945 Mouton was consumed on the fiftieth anniversary of the vintage, in 1995, than was ever produced to begin with. The problem is especially acute in the United States and Asia, Sutcliffe told me, where wealthy enthusiasts build large collections very quickly. “You can go into important cellars and see a million dollars’ worth of fakes among five or six million dollars’ worth of nice stuff,” she said.
Since much of the fine-wine business is conducted in off-the-books “gray market” exchanges between buyers and resellers with no direct link to the château, ascertaining who actually put a particular bottle of wine into circulation can be difficult. But Koch sent emissaries to the Chicago Wine Company and to Farr Vintners, and learned that all four bottles originally came from the person who had supplied the bottle auctioned at Christie’s, a flamboyant German wine collector named Hardy Rodenstock.
Rodenstock was a former music publisher who managed German pop acts in the seventies. He maintained residences in Munich, Bordeaux, and Monte Carlo, and was rumored to be part of the wealthy Rodenstock family, which manufactured high-end eyeglasses. He told people that he had started out as a professor, and intimated that he had made a fortune on the stock market.
Rodenstock became interested in wine in the seventies, and developed a passion for the sweet white wine of Château d’Yquem. He especially loved wines that predated the phylloxera epidemic of the late nineteenth century, when a grape-vine pest decimated Europe’s vineyards, forcing growers to replant with phylloxera-resistant rootstocks from North America. “In the pre-phylloxera wines of Yquem, you find more flavors, more caramel, more singularity, more power, more class,” he once told an interviewer. He boasted to Wine Spectator that he had tasted more vintages of old Yquem than the owner of the château had—and the château owner agreed.
Starting in 1980, Rodenstock began holding lavish annual wine tastings, weekend-long affairs attended by wine critics, retailers, and various German dignitaries and celebrities. He opened scores of old and rare wines, all provided at his own expense, and served in custom-made “Rodenstock” glasses that were supplied by his friend the glassmaker Georg Riedel. Impeccably dressed, wearing stylish Rodenstock eyeglasses and shirts with stiff white collars, he bantered with guests, exclaiming, over an especially fine bottle, “Ja, unglaublich! One hundred points!” He was punctilious about being on time, barring latecomers, and when serving older wines he banned spitting, which prompted some guests, alarmed at the number of bottles they would be sampling, to hide spittoons in their laps. “You don’t spit away history,” Rodenstock admonished them. “You drink it.”
Rodenstock made no secret of having discovered the Jefferson bottles; on the contrary, the record sale to Forbes had made him a celebrity in the wine world. In the spring of 1985, he would later explain, he received a phone call about an interesting discovery in Paris, where someone had stumbled upon some dusty old bottles, each inscribed with the letters “Th.J.” Rodenstock refused to reveal who had sold him the bottles, but apparently the seller did not realize the significance of the initials. “It was like the lottery,” Rodenstock said of the experience. “It was simply good luck.” He would not say how many bottles there were—in some accounts, it was “a dozen or so,” in others, as many as thirty. Nor would he disclose the address in Paris where they were discovered.
The Jefferson bottles were the first in a series of astonishing finds. Rodenstock became known as an intrepid hunter of the rarest wines. One collector, who was a friend of Rodenstock in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, told me that in 1989 he had arranged a horizontal tasting of bottles of 1929 wines from many different châteaux. The one bottle he had been unable to find was a 1929 Château Ausone. Several days before the tasting, he received a telephone call from Rodenstock. “I’m in Scotland,” Rodenstock announced. “I found a bottle of Ausone ’29!” Rodenstock travelled to Venezuela, where, according to press reports, he found a hundred cases of Bordeaux; in Russia, he uncovered “the tsar’s lost cache” of nineteenth-century wine. At Munich’s Hotel Königshof in 1998, he held a vertical tasting of a hundred and twenty-five years’ worth of Yquem, including two bottles from the Jefferson collection. “Amazingly, they didn’t taste over the hill or oxidized,” Wine Spectator’s correspondent remarked. “The 1784 tasted as if it were decades younger.”
Some members of the wine press avoided the events. The critic Robert Parker attended only one tasting; he told me that the extravagance of the affairs kept him away. Rating the selections would be of little use to most of his readers, he said, because they could hardly find, much less afford, such wines. And the policy against spitting, combined with Rodenstock’s tendency to withhold the most exciting offerings until the end of a tasting, could seriously impair any objective assessment of the wine. “He always seemed to serve the great stuff after you were primed pretty good,” Parker said of the one event he did attend, a 1995 tasting in Munich. “People were getting shitfaced.”
Even so, Parker was amazed at some of Rodenstock’s wines. “Out of this universe!” he wrote of a large-format magnum of Pétrus from 1921 that Rodenstock served. “This huge, unbelievably concentrated wine could have been mistaken for the 1950 or 1947.” In his journal, The Wine Advocate, Parker deemed the three-day tasting “the wine event of my lifetime.” “I quickly learned,” he wrote, “that when Hardy Rodenstock referred to a ’59 or a ’47, I needed to verify whether he was talking about the nineteenth or the twentieth century!”
Michael Broadbent regularly attended Rodenstock events. In his book “Vintage Wine: Fifty Years of Tasting Three Centuries of Wines,” Broadbent acknowledges that it was through Rodenstock’s “immense generosity” that he was able to taste many of the rarest entries. Much of his section on eighteenth-century wines consists of notes from Rodenstock tastings.
Bill Koch was never invited to one of these tastings, but he had heard of Rodenstock, and the two had met on one occasion, in 2000, when Christie’s held a tasting of Latour in its offices in New York. According to Koch, Rodenstock arrived late, and Koch approached him. “Hi, I’m Bill Koch,” he said. “I bought some wine from you.”
Rodenstock shook Koch’s hand. He looked uncomfortable, Koch thought. “So you’re the famous collector,” Rodenstock said, before hastily walking away.
In legal disputes, Koch has occasionally relied on the services of a tenacious retired F.B.I. agent named Jim Elroy. During his law-enforcement career, Elroy worked on many fraud investigations, and when questions about the Jefferson bottles arose he told Koch, “If you want your money back, I’ll get it.”
That wasn’t enough for Koch. “I want to lock him up,” he told Elroy. “Saddle up.” (Koch’s enthusiasm for cowboy culture has rubbed off on Elroy. He describes his boss as “the new sheriff in town”; his cell-phone ring tone is the whistled theme from “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”)
Elroy is in his sixties and has a weathered, tanned face and a conspiratorial smile. He’s a bit of a raconteur, and when we met for lunch recently he related the details of his investigation in the studied cadences of someone who had told the story before. “Cases either get better or they get worse,” he told me. “This one just kept getting better.” From the beginning, Koch was interested in suing Rodenstock, Elroy explained, but he also wanted Elroy to prepare a criminal case against him which could ultimately be handed to federal authorities. Elroy was invigorated by Koch’s ambitions. “This investigation has all the earmarks of an F.B.I. investigation,” he told me. “Only with the best people in the world available instantly. And with none of the bureaucracy.” He estimated that since 2005 Koch has spent more than a million dollars on the Rodenstock case—twice what he paid for the wine.
As Elroy and his team—a former Scotland Yard inspector in England, a former MI5 agent in Germany, and several wine experts in Europe and the United States—began their investigation, in 2005, they learned from the staff at Monticello that doubts about the authenticity of the Jefferson wines date back to the auction of the original bottle. Broadbent had approached Monticello in the fall of 1985, to inquire about references to wine in some of Jefferson’s letters. A researcher named Cinder Goodwin, who had spent fifteen years studying Jefferson’s voluminous papers, responded to Broadbent that November, expressing skepticism. “Jefferson’s daily account book, virtually all of his letters, his banker’s statements, and miscellaneous internal French customs forms survive for this period and mention no 1787 vintages,” she wrote. When a reporter from the Times reached Goodwin, before the auction, to ask about the connection, she noted that whereas the initials on Rodenstock’s bottles were written “Th.J.,” in his correspondence Jefferson tended to use a colon—“Th:J.”
Broadbent did not mention these doubts in the catalogue, and the Times story did not dissuade the bidders. (In an article published in this magazine at the time, Broadbent told a reporter that he found “no proof” but plenty of circumstantial evidence—“masses of it”—that Jefferson had owned the bottle.) Shortly after the auction, Goodwin prepared a research report on the bottles, in which she concluded that although they could very well be authentically eighteenth century, the specific connection with Jefferson was not borne out by the historical record. She was at pains to insist that she was not questioning the good faith of Rodenstock or Broadbent, but she wondered, “Were there not Thomases, Theodores, or Theophiles, and Jacksons, Joneses, and Juliens who also had a taste for fine Bordeaux wine, and who would have been resident in Paris?” She pointed out that historical records document the inhabitants at various addresses in Paris. If Rodenstock would reveal the address where he discovered the wine, “a proper connection might be made.”
Soon a flurry of letters from Rodenstock began arriving at Monticello. Though he speaks passable English, the letters were in German; a Monticello tour guide translated them. On December 28, 1985, Rodenstock wrote, referring to Goodwin, that “one should courteously keep back one’s dubious and unfounded remarks and one shouldn’t make oneself important in front of the press.” Dan Jordan, Monticello’s executive director, wrote back, protesting that Goodwin was a highly regarded Jefferson scholar, and that, unlike Rodenstock or Christie’s, she had no financial interest in the determination of authenticity.
“Can you study ‘Jefferson’ at university?” Rodenstock replied. “She doesn’t know anything about wine in connection with Jefferson, doesn’t know what bottles from the time frame 1780-1800 look like, doesn’t know how they taste.”
Broadbent wrote letters to Monticello as well, standing by Rodenstock and the bottles. Some unbridgeable philosophical gap seemed to separate the historians in Virginia and the connoisseurs in Europe. Broadbent, like Rodenstock, expressed confidence that the sensory experience of consuming a bottle of wine trumped historical evidence. In June, 1986, he noted that he had just tasted a bottle of Rodenstock’s 1787 Th.J. Branne Mouton. The wine was “sensationally good,” Broadbent wrote. “If anyone had any lingering doubts about the authenticity of this extraordinary old wine, they were completely removed. . . . Admittedly, there is no written evidence that these particular bottles had been in the possession of Jefferson, but I am now firmly convinced that this indeed was the wine that Jefferson ordered.”
It wasn’t only the researchers at Monticello who raised doubts about the wine. Before Christie’s auctioned the bottle to Forbes, Rodenstock had offered a bottle of the Th.J. Lafitte to a German collector named Hans-Peter Frericks, for around ten thousand Deutsche marks. After Forbes spent forty times that sum, Frericks decided to auction his own bottle and approached Broadbent. But Rodenstock intervened, saying that he had sold the bottle to Frericks on the condition that Frericks not resell it. (Frericks denies that such a condition existed.) Frericks turned to Sotheby’s, but, after examining the evidence, the auction house declined, citing the bottle’s uncertain provenance.
Rodenstock’s efforts to stop the sale, along with Sotheby’s doubts about the bottle, made Frericks suspicious, and in 1991 he sent the bottle to a Munich lab to have its contents carbon-dated. All organic material contains the radioactive isotope carbon 14, which exhibits a predictable rate of decay; scientists can thus analyze the amount of the isotope in a bottle of wine in order to approximate its age. Carbon 14 has a long half-life, and carbon dating is relatively imprecise for evaluating objects that are several centuries old. But nuclear atmospheric tests in the nineteen-fifties and sixties offer a benchmark of sorts, since levels of carbon 14 rise sharply during that period. In this case, the amounts of carbon 14 and of another isotope, tritium, were much higher than one would expect for two-hundred-year-old wine, and the scientists concluded that the bottle contained a mixture of wines, nearly half of which dated to 1962 or later. Frericks sued Rodenstock, and, in December, 1992, a German court found in his favor, holding that Rodenstock “adulterated the wine or knowingly offered adulterated wine.” (Rodenstock appealed, and sued Frericks for defamation. The matter was ultimately settled out of court.)
In addition to the former MI5 agent, the indefatigable Elroy employed two private investigators in Germany, who discovered that Hardy Rodenstock was a fictitious name. The investigators visited Rodenstock’s home town, Marienwerder, in what is now Poland. They reported to Koch that Rodenstock had started out as Meinhard Goerke, the son of a local railroad official. They interviewed Rodenstock’s mother and visited his elementary school. The investigators told Koch that Rodenstock had trained as an engineer and taken a job with German Federal Railways; they could find no evidence to support his claims of being a professor. They also interviewed Tina York, a German pop singer with whom Rodenstock was romantically involved in the seventies and eighties. York told them that during her decade-long relationship with Rodenstock he hid the fact that he had two sons from an earlier marriage. “He always talked about two nephews,” she said.
Rodenstock had adopted his new identity at about the time he met York, the investigators said, and told her that he was part of the famous Rodenstock family. It was while he was with York that he first became interested in wine. She didn’t share his devotion to the hobby. She remembered placing a bowl of potato salad in his air-conditioned wine cellar one day, to keep it cool. “Rodenstock just flipped out,” she said.
Rodenstock was known for his discerning nose and his ability to identify wines in blind tastings. Elroy wondered whether he might possess the skills of a mixer, the type of expert that vineyards employ to achieve a precise blend of grapes. There are no scientific tests that can reliably determine the grape varietals in a bottle of wine, and Elroy speculated that Rodenstock might have concocted forgeries by mixing various wines—and even a dash of port, as forgers have been known to do—in order to create a cocktail that tasted like the real thing. Pursuing these suspicions, Elroy’s team of investigators asked several people they interviewed whether they had any recollection of Rodenstock’s having a laboratory where counterfeits could be made. Then, last October, a German named Andreas Klein approached Koch’s team and said that Rodenstock had lived for several years in an apartment owned by his family. The two had quarrelled over Klein’s desire to add an apartment above Rodenstock’s, and ended up in court. In 2004, after Rodenstock abandoned the apartment, Klein entered his former tenant’s cellar and discovered a collection of empty bottles and a stack of apparently new wine labels. In response to these claims, Rodenstock has initiated legal proceedings against Klein.
There are two types of wine counterfeiters: those who do not tamper with what is inside the bottle and those who do. Because the price of a great vintage of fine wine often dwarfs the price of an indifferent one, many forgers will start with a genuine bottle of, say, 1980 Pétrus and simply replace the label with one from 1982. (The ’82 vintage is especially coveted and expensive.) With a good scanner and a color printer, labels are easy to replicate—one former auctioneer I spoke with called it “desktop publishing.” The cork in the bottle is marked with the year, but forgers sometimes scratch away the last digit, assuming that the buyer won’t notice. Moreover, because corks tend to deteriorate after decades in the bottle, some vineyards offer a recorking service, so a bottle with a newer cork might not immediately arouse suspicion. In any event, the cork is generally concealed by the foil capsule until the buyer opens the bottle.
The forger’s greatest advantage is that many buyers wait years before opening their fraudulent bottles, if they open them at all. Bill Koch told me that he owns wine that he has no intention of ever drinking. He collects bottles from certain vineyards almost as if they were baseball cards, aiming to complete a set. “I just want a hundred and fifty years of Lafite on the wall,” he said. He would hesitate before consuming the harder-to-come-by vintages, because to do so would render the set incomplete, and also because the rarest old wines often come not from the best vintages but from the worst. Historically, when good vintages were produced, collectors would lay them down to see how they would age, Koch explained. But when renowned vineyards produced mediocre vintages people would drink them soon after they were bottled, making the vintage scarce. When I wondered why he would buy old wines that he never intended to drink, Koch shrugged. “I’m never going to shoot Custer’s rifle,” he said.
The second great advantage for wine forgers is that when collectors do open fraudulent bottles they often lack the experience and acute sense of taste to know that they have been defrauded. To begin with, even genuine old wines vary enormously from bottle to bottle. “It’s a living organism,” Sotheby’s Serena Sutcliffe told me. “It moves, it changes, it evolves—and once you’re into wines that are forty, fifty, sixty years old, even if the bottles are stored side by side in similar conditions, you will get big differences between bottles.”
Studies suggest that the experience of smelling and tasting wine is extremely susceptible to interference from the cognitive parts of the brain. Several years ago, Frédéric Brochet, a Ph.D. student in oenology at the University of Bordeaux, did a study in which he served fifty-seven participants a midrange red Bordeaux from a bottle with a label indicating that it was a modest vin de table. A week later, he served the same wine to the same subjects but this time poured from a bottle indicating that the wine was a grand cru. Whereas the tasters found the wine from the first bottle “simple,” “unbalanced,” and “weak,” they found the wine from the second “complex,” “balanced,” and “full.” Brochet argues that our “perceptive expectation” arising from the label often governs our experience of a wine, overriding our actual sensory response to whatever is in the bottle.
Thus there is a bolder kind of forger who actually substitutes one type of wine for another. He often works with genuine bottles bearing genuine labels, obtaining empties from restaurants or antique shops, filling them with another type—or types—of wine, and replacing the cork and the capsule, assuming that the status-conscious buyer will never taste the difference. And, in many cases, this assumption is right. Sutcliffe believes that the vast majority of fake wines are happily enjoyed. Rajat Parr, a prominent wine director who oversees restaurants in Las Vegas, told me that several years ago some of his customers ordered a bottle of 1982 Pétrus, which can sell in restaurants for as much as six thousand dollars. The party finished the bottle and ordered a second. But the second bottle tasted noticeably different, so they sent it back. The staff apologetically produced a third bottle, which the diners consumed with pleasure. Parr closely examined the three bottles and discovered the problem with the second one: it was genuine.
If the Th.J. bottles were counterfeit, the question facing Jim Elroy was whether someone else’s genuine eighteenth-century bottles had been passed off as Thomas Jefferson’s or whether the wine had actually been adulterated. The fact that Broadbent and other connoisseurs had tasted several Jefferson bottles and declared them authentic seemed to suggest that the wine in the bottles was the real thing. Jancis Robinson, another Master of Wine and the wine columnist for the Financial Times, had attended the 1998 Yquem tasting, and found the two Th.J. bottles “convincingly old,” slightly moldy initially, but then, as “the miracle of great old wine began to work,” opening up, with the 1784 giving off a “feminine fragrance of roses” and the 1787 “autumnal aromas of burnt sugar and undergrowth.”
But Brochet told me that, in tastings, experts are more susceptible than average drinkers to interference from their own experience and presumptions. And these endorsements seem to be disputed by the scientific test commissioned by Hans-Peter Frericks, which found that nearly half of the wine in his 1787 Lafitte dated to sometime after 1962. Following Frericks’s test, Rodenstock had commissioned his own, on another bottle of 1787 Lafitte, from Dr. Georges Bonani, a Zurich scientist. Bonani carbon-dated the wine and determined that no wine in the bottle dated to 1962 or later, thus contradicting the specific finding of Frericks’s study. Rodenstock frequently referred to Bonani’s results as “conclusive” in their authentication of the bottle. But it seems difficult to consider any of these tests truly conclusive. For one thing, the different tests were conducted on different bottles, and it seems rash to extrapolate from the results of one bottle anything about the authenticity of the others. Further, carbon dating can’t provide a reliable determination of the age of wines bottled during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and an examination of Bonani’s lab report reveals that his findings reflected a considerable margin of error. While the test might have ruled out the presence of late-twentieth-century wine, it did not provide absolute proof that the wine dated to 1787. “The test says only that the wine is from somewhere between 1673 and 1945,” Bonani wrote in a recent e-mail.
Skeptical of both parties’ tests, Elroy sought out Philippe Hubert, a French physicist who had devised a method of testing the age of wine without opening the bottle. Hubert uses low-frequency gamma rays to detect the presence of the radioactive isotope cesium 137. Unlike carbon 14, cesium 137 is not naturally occurring; it is a direct result of nuclear fallout. A wine bottled before the advent of atmospheric nuclear testing contains no cesium 137, so the test yields no results for older wines. But if a wine does contain cesium 137 the short half-life of the isotope—thirty years—allows Hubert to make a more precise estimate of its age.
Elroy flew to France, with the Jefferson bottles packed in two bulletproof, impact-resistant cases, which he carried as hand luggage. (He had obtained a carnet, a sort of passport for objects, so that he would not have to pay any duties while crossing borders with a half million dollars’ worth of wine. When airport security scrutinized the bottles between flights at Heathrow, Elroy deadpanned, “You just can’t get a good bottle of wine on the airplane.”)
The lab where Hubert and Elroy tested the wine is under a mile-high stretch of the Alps on the French-Italian border. The bottles were placed into a detector that was surrounded by ten inches of lead and were subjected to a week of tests.
Elroy was confident by now that he and his investigators were closing in on Rodenstock. “With the evidence I’m seeing from Monticello, combined with what I’m seeing from Germany, I’m ninety-nine-per-cent sure this guy is a fraud,” he recalled. When Hubert completed the tests, however, he identified no cesium 137 in the bottles. “I don’t know whether it’s 1783 or 1943,” Hubert told Elroy. But the wine predated the atomic age.
“I can’t tell you how disappointing it was,” Elroy told me. “I’ve got the historical evidence, but if we’re going to do this criminally there’s got to be more than that. I’ve got to have some kind of scientific or other evidence, or it’s not going to be prosecutable.”
On the plane back to the United States, Elroy took one of the bottles down and held it in his hands. “I’m looking at the capsule and the glass itself,” he said. “I run my hand over the engraving. I can feel it. And then I think, This is a tool mark. This was done with a tool.”
When Elroy landed, he called the F.B.I.’s laboratory, in Quantico, Virginia. The lab’s ballistics experts specialize in tool-mark examinations, noting the telltale impression that a gun barrel leaves on a bullet, or a screwdriver makes when it pries open a window. The lab gave Elroy the names of some recently retired specialists. He also visited the Corning Museum of Glass, in upstate New York, where he was referred to an expert glass engraver, Max Erlacher, an Austrian-born craftsman who had done work for a number of American Presidents.
Several weeks later, Elroy hired Erlacher and a retired F.B.I. tool expert named Bill Albrecht to examine the bottles at Bill Koch’s estate in Palm Beach. Elroy wanted to know whether the writing on the bottles had been done with a copper wheel, the sort of tool used in the eighteenth century to engrave glass. In Jefferson’s time, the copper wheel, usually operated by a foot pedal, spun in a stationary position, and the engraver moved the bottle around it.
Erlacher and Albrecht inspected the bottles, examining the ridges of the engraving under a powerful magnifying glass. Letters engraved by a copper wheel tend to vary in thickness, like the strokes of a fountain pen. But the lettering on the bottles was strangely uniform, and it slanted in a way that a copper-wheel engraving would not. The initials could not have been made in the eighteenth century, Erlacher concluded. Instead, they looked as if they might have been done with a handheld tool like a dentist’s drill or a Dremel—a tool powered by electricity. This was “a quantum leap,” Elroy thought. As it happened, he had a Dremel tool at home. “I get a bottle of wine, and I screw with it,” he recalled. “And in an hour I can engrave ‘Th.J.’ ”
On August 31, 2006, Bill Koch filed a civil complaint against Rodenstock (“a.k.a. Meinhard Goerke”) in New York federal court. Although it was the Chicago Wine Company and Farr Vintners that had sold Koch the wines, the complaint alleged that Rodenstock had orchestrated an “ongoing scheme” to defraud wine collectors. “Rodenstock is charming and debonair,” the complaint read. “He is also a con artist.”
Before filing the suit, Koch’s lawyers were interested to see whether Rodenstock would acknowledge a personal connection to Koch’s Jefferson bottles (given that Koch had not bought them directly from him), and whether he might effectively continue the alleged fraud by still insisting that they were real. So Koch faxed Rodenstock a cordial letter, in January, 2006, saying that he was trying to authenticate his Jefferson wines, and asking Rodenstock to send a letter indicating that he had “every reason to believe” that the bottles “once belonged to Thomas Jefferson.” Rodenstock replied on January 10th, saying, “The Jefferson bottles are absolutely genuine and . . . come from a walled up cellar in Paris.” He pointed out that Christie’s had vouched for the bottles’ authenticity, and enclosed a copy of Bonani’s report. “You will surely understand that the discussions on the genuineness of the Jefferson bottles [are] herewith closed for me,” he wrote.
In April, Koch wrote to Rodenstock again, asking whether the two could meet, “over a good glass of wine, at a place of your choosing,” to discuss some of his concerns about the bottles. Rodenstock declined. “From a legal point of view the purchase and the sale are barred by the statute of limitations,” he wrote. The person who sold him the bottles in 1985 was in his sixties at the time, he continued, and might no longer be alive. Questions about the bottles’ authenticity were “grist for the mill of the yellow press.” When the suit was filed, Rodenstock moved to dismiss it.
Koch’s lawyers flew to London in October to interview Michael Broadbent, who was by then seventy-nine years old but still active on the international wine circuit. Broadbent said he had asked Rodenstock “over and over again” to divulge the address where the bottles were found. But he continued to maintain that the Jefferson bottles were real.
In a way, Broadbent had little choice. He had based hundreds of tasting notes in his books and auction catalogues on wines supplied by Hardy Rodenstock. The notion that twentieth-century connoisseurs could testify to what an eighteenth-century wine tastes like depended on the integrity of Rodenstock, one of the primary suppliers of those wines. If Rodenstock was exposed as a fraud, the credibility of Broadbent, who had repeatedly certified Rodenstock’s findings, would suffer a considerable blow. When asked why he had not done more research into the Th.J. Lafitte before the auction, he replied, “We are auctioneers; we are like journalists on deadlines. I did not have the time.” The lawyers asked whether Christie’s had prepared any written evidence back in 1985 to buttress the wine department’s claims about the bottles. Broadbent responded that it never occurred to him to put anything in writing. “With Christie’s we are all perfect gentlemen,” he said.
Last fall, Richard Brierley, the head of Christie’s wine sales in the United States, told John Wilke, at the Wall Street Journal, that while he wasn’t involved in the 1985 authentication of the Jefferson bottles, “looking back, more questions could have been asked.” (Christie’s contends that Brierley was quoted out of context.) Hugo Morley-Fletcher, who, in 1985, was the head of Christie’s ceramics department and was one of the glass experts Broadbent consulted about the authenticity of the Forbes bottle, told me, “My opinion at that time, within my experience, was that it was correct. . . . The trouble is we are engaged in an activity which is not a precise science.” He explained that he had judged that the bottle dated to the eighteenth century, and that the engraving dated to the same period. When I asked whether there was any possibility that he could have been mistaken about the engraving, he replied, “Of course,” and added, “One has to come up with an opinion. It is possible that one was conned.” Despite numerous attempts, I was unable to reach Michael Broadbent, but a Christie’s spokesman told me that “Mr. Broadbent’s decision to go forward with the sale represented his considered opinion based on all of the facts available to him at that time—a decision that we would not speculate upon twenty-two years later.”
Still, Christie’s fine-and-rare-wine auction in New York in December, 2006, featured a 1934 Pétrus accompanied by a description, taken from Broadbent’s book, of a 1934 Pétrus imperial that he had tasted years earlier. “Where Hardy Rodenstock finds these wines I know not,” it read. “There are simply no records of production, of stock or sales prior to 1945. All I can say is that the big bottle was delicious.” Koch did not know whether Rodenstock had consigned the bottle (Christie’s told me he had not). But he was angry that even in the face of the allegations in his suit the auction house would promote wine with Broadbent notes on Rodenstock bottles. He telephoned the auction house to complain, but Christie’s proceeded with the auction. The wine was offered at twenty-two hundred dollars. It went unsold.
No one knows how many bottles of wine—real or fake—Hardy Rodenstock has sold over the years. His deals were often in cash. (“If you pay in cash, then people don’t have to declare the sale for tax purposes,” he once told an interviewer. “Two hundred thousand dollars in cash can sometimes be better than a million-dollar check.”) Protective of both his suppliers and his buyers, he did not volunteer information about particular sales. Jim Elroy thinks that, at ten thousand dollars a bottle or more, Rodenstock could have sold ten bottles a month and made more than a million dollars a year. As Koch was launching his suit against Rodenstock, a Massachusetts software entrepreneur named Russell Frye filed a lawsuit against the Wine Library, a distributor in Petaluma, California, alleging that it had sold him nineteenth-century Lafite and Yquem, along with dozens of other rare old wines, that were counterfeit. Frye’s complaint notes that one of the defendants in the case “has recently informed plaintiff that many of the bottles that plaintiff alleges are counterfeit or questionable were ultimately obtained from Hardy Rodenstock.”
Koch owns some forty thousand bottles of wine, stored in three cellars. In May, I visited one, a refrigerated warren of dark-wood racks underneath his house in Osterville, on Cape Cod. Jim Elroy had sought the help of two experts, David Molyneux-Berry and Bill Edgerton, to go through the cellar and identify suspicious bottles.
Molyneux-Berry worked at Sotheby’s for years before becoming a private wine consultant, and it was he who rejected Hans-Peter Frericks’s bottle of Th.J. Lafitte. In Frericks’s cellar, he had identified one obvious fake after another. According to the collector’s detailed records, they had all come from Hardy Rodenstock. Molyneux-Berry was also suspicious of Rodenstock’s many colorful discoveries. As a representative of Sotheby’s, Molyneux-Berry had made frequent official trips to Russia. “I went to Kiev and saw the cellar there,” he told me. “I went to Moldova and saw the cellars there. I had the highest introductions you can get. Yet Rodenstock goes to Russia and finds the tsar’s cellars somewhere else. And it’s the entire first growth of Bordeaux. . . . And he found magnums. In volume.”
From a sample of three thousand bottles of pre-1961 vintages of often counterfeited brands, Molyneux-Berry and Edgerton identified about a hundred and thirty suspicious or obviously fake bottles in Koch’s collection. “You get to know what bottles look like,” Molyneux-Berry told me. “Obvious fakes stand out like a sore thumb.” They put a white sticker on each suspicious bottle. The next day, a professional photographer took high-resolution pictures, which, if necessary, could be introduced in court.
In some cases, the bottle, the label, and the capsule all appeared genuine, but the rarity of the wine alone was ground for suspicion. Koch owns two magnums of Lafleur from 1947, for instance. “Forty-seven is the great Lafleur,” Molyneux-Berry said. But, he continued, he has heard that in 1947 the vineyard bottled only five magnums. “What’s the chance of him having two out of five?” he asked. Edgerton maintains an online database that tracks auction sales and prices. Nineteen magnums of ’47 Lafleur have sold at auction since 1998.
Serena Sutcliffe, of Sotheby’s, told me that most wealthy collectors would rather not know about the fakes, or, if they do know, would rather not make it public. She said that on a number of occasions she has inspected a cellar that a collector was interested in auctioning and rejected it, in whole or in part, because of the preponderance of fakes, only to learn that the collector sold the phony wine through one of her competitors. The collectors “don’t want to take the hit,” she said.
“The case is much bigger” than Rodenstock, Koch told me. “When I get finished going through all the wine in my collection, I’m going after all the people who sold it to me,” he said. “The retailers, they know they’re doing it. They’re complicit.”
One of Koch’s problem bottles is a magnum of 1921 Pétrus that he bought for thirty-three thousand dollars at an auction organized by the New York wine retailer Zachys, in 2005. Koch believes that the wine originated from Rodenstock; he mentions the bottle in his lawsuit. (Zachys says it has no evidence to indicate whether the wine originally came from Rodenstock.) It was another magnum of 1921 Pétrus that Robert Parker had awarded a hundred points and pronounced “out of this universe” at Rodenstock’s Munich event in 1995.
Last spring, Jim Elroy took Koch’s magnum to Bordeaux to have it inspected at the winery. The Pétrus staff ultimately concluded that the cork was the wrong length, and that the cap and the label appeared to have been artificially aged. Pétrus confirmed that they had doubts about the authenticity of the bottle. And the cellar master, in his interview with Elroy, said that he had never heard of a magnum of 1921 Pétrus and did not believe that any were bottled at the vineyard.
This raised an interesting question. If Pétrus made no magnums in 1921, what was Parker drinking at the Rodenstock event? Parker’s nose is insured for a million dollars; it seems almost pathological that Rodenstock would invite such a man to his table and serve him a fake. Elroy sees this as further proof of Rodenstock’s guilt, maintaining that this kind of risktaking is not unusual in a counterfeiter. “I know a lot about fraudsters,” he said. “I put a lot of them in prison. They feel, I’m so smart. I’m smarter than anyone in the world. Rodenstock feels that way.”
If indeed Parker’s hundred-point 1921 Pétrus was a fake, such hubris might not be misplaced. Could Rodenstock have become so proficient at making fake wine that his fakes tasted as good as, or even better than, the real thing? When I asked Parker about the bottle, he hastened to say that even the best wine critics are fallible. Yet he reiterated that the bottle was spectacular. “If that was a fake, he should be a mixer,” Parker said. “It was wonderful.”
Early this summer, Hardy Rodenstock fired the Manhattan lawyers he had engaged to contest Koch’s suit. In a letter to the trial judge, he objected that the court had no jurisdiction over him, as a German citizen; that Koch had bought the bottles not directly from him but from third parties; and that the case should be barred by the statute of limitations. It might be Koch’s “hobby to take actions against people for years,” he suggested, but he wanted no part of “such ‘silly games.’ ” After spelling out his objections, he announced, “I get out of the procedure.”
Rodenstock would not agree to be interviewed for this piece, but in a series of faxes, most of them in German, he maintained his innocence and fiercely objected to Bill Koch’s portrayal of him, denouncing Koch’s “concoctions and shenanigans.” He acknowledged that his legal name is Meinhard Goerke, but insisted that many people change their names, pointing to Larry King as an example. Rodenstock denied telling Tina York that he was a member of the Rodenstock family, and maintained that he was indeed a professor, writing, “That is a fact! Verifiable!” He disputed accounts that he found a hundred cases of Bordeaux in Venezuela, observing, “That would be 1200 bottles?!?!?!” As for Andreas Klein’s allegations about finding empty bottles and labels in his basement, Rodenstock wrote that it was not uncommon for wine connoisseurs to save empties after a wine tasting. “I take the labels from old bottles to have them framed,” he said. “This looks very nice!” He denied supplying any bottles to the Wine Library, or the magnum of Pétrus that Koch mentioned in the lawsuit, and insisted, “My 1921 Pétrus bottles were always absolutely genuine!!!” He cited Parker’s hundred-point review, and asked, “Is there any better proof that the wine was genuine when world-renowned experts described it as superb and gave it the highest possible grade?”
Rodenstock took particular exception to Bill Koch’s account of their one meeting, in 2000, at Christie’s Latour tasting. “I was not late!!” he insisted. “I neither looked uncomfortable nor did I run away from him fast. My facial expression was, I am sure, full of pleasant anticipation of the wonderful Latour tasting. I was in a very good mood!!!” In Rodenstock’s recollection, Koch said that he owned some Jefferson bottles, and Rodenstock replied, “Good for you, but you didn’t get them from me.”
When it comes to the authenticity of the Th.J. bottles, Rodenstock offers a number of sometimes contradictory defenses. “If Christie’s had the slightest doubt about the authenticity, they would not have accepted the bottle of 1787 Lafitte,” he wrote. “I am therefore beyond reproach!” He suggested that Koch’s analysis of the initials was performed not by scientists but by “amateur engravers” who were friends of Koch, and were being paid for their conclusions. But in his letter to the court he entertained the possibility that the initials were modern, hypothesizing that whoever originally sold him the wines “had some bottles re-engraved over the old engravings . . . because they were no longer clearly legible.” He has also suggested that Koch himself or one of his staff may have had the bottles reëngraved, and added, “A great deal can have happened to the bottles in twenty years!!!” (When Hans-Peter Frericks sued over his Jefferson bottle, Rodenstock made a similar claim, suggesting that Frericks had tampered with his own bottle in order to frame Rodenstock.)
On August 14th, the magistrate judge, who has supervised pretrial procedural issues, recommended that the court enter a default judgment against Rodenstock, because of his refusal to participate. The trial judge must now decide whether or not to accept Rodenstock’s various procedural defenses. But even if he is handed a default judgment Rodenstock insists that German courts will not enforce it.
Meanwhile, Jim Elroy has turned over the findings of his investigation to the authorities, a grand jury has been convened to hear evidence, and the F.B.I. has begun issuing subpoenas to wine collectors, dealers, and auction houses. “It’s going to have a salutary effect on the whole industry,” Koch told me. “And if the judge throws the lawsuit out for some technical reason I’ve got five others I could bring.”
In the back of his Palm Beach wine cellar, past rows of priceless bottles, behind elegant cast-iron grillework, is a closet in which Koch keeps his very oldest bottles, many of which he now believes are fake. I picked up a bottle of the 1787 Th.J. Lafitte. It was cold and surprisingly heavy in my hands, and I ran my fingers over the letters. Could a shared passion for the rarest old wines have blinded everyone—the collectors, the critics, the auctioneers—to the sheer improbability of those initials? Jefferson had asked in the 1790 letter that his wine and Washington’s wine be marked, but surely he was referring to the cases and not the individual bottles.
Koch uncorked a bottle of 1989 Montrachet, and we walked upstairs and settled into comfortable leather chairs in the cowboy room. The wine was crisp and minerally; to my untutored palate, it tasted pretty good. As we discussed the case, I noticed that Koch seemed anything but aggrieved. He has thrown himself into his battle against Rodenstock and phony wine with the same headlong enthusiasm that he devoted to collecting wine. “I used to brag that I got the Thomas Jefferson wines,” he said. “Now I get to brag that I have the fake Thomas Jefferson wines.”
Outside, the sun was beginning to set, and Koch’s chef informed him that dinner would be softshell crab and venison. Koch flipped through his cellar book, a hefty binder listing his wines. Upstairs, one of the children was bouncing a basketball. Bridget Rooney walked in, with the couple’s one-year-old daughter, Kaitlin, in her arms. “We’re talking fake wine,” Koch said. “Want to join us?”
Rooney took a seat next to him. She wore a rope of enormous pearls around her neck, and didn’t seem to notice that Kaitlin was chewing on them. She reached for Koch’s glass and took a sip.
“Mmm,” she murmured. “That’s not fake.” ♦
