Book: The Billionaire's Vinegar

Enjoying a lot the book on "the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold" which may, or may not have been what it was purported to be -- a 1787 Lafite once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Lots of history of winemaking, mixed in with the outsized personalities in the connoisseur wine collector world, plus some political intrigue (the Nazis systematically plundered wine cellars in their advance, and Hitler's "Eagle's Nest" hideout was found to house a half million bottle of rare wine).

A fascinating real-life mystery-within-an-enigma.

It was an excellent book.  You learn a lot about winemaking and the history of wine, about Thomas Jefferson, and about the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.  About the incredible wine-tasting competitions they threw in the 1970s and 1980s, where they'd compete to see who could open and serve the most rare and expensive wine.  This led to so-called "vertical tastings" where they'd serve every vintage of some particular wine, 1878 through 1890, or 1921 through 1940.  Each of the bottles could be hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The rich are different from you and me.

The book only really talks about Bill Koch in the latter chapters.  He bought several bottles of "Jefferson wine" in the 1980s, and when their provenance began to be questioned in the 1990s he hired lawyers and investigators -- at many times the cost of the wine -- to find out if they were fakes or not.  Apparently vintage faking is incredibly common in the collector wine market.

One of the ways mentioned in the book to make wine appear and taste older than it is is to add a small amount of Creme de Cacao to it.  This darkens it and makes it sweeter, just like old wine.  I tried this last night.  After two sips it went down the disposal.  Despite the affinity between chocolate and red wine it tasted horrible.

Ran across a bottle of red in the grocery store yesterday, "Chocolate Shop." Described as "the chocolate lover's wine." It was only eight bucks so I brought a bottle home.

It is red wine infused with some chocolate favor, a lot more subtle than my crude attempt to mix Creme de cacao.

It's still pretty vile.

Watched a documentary on Netflix last night, "Sour Grapes" (2016) about a young wine connoisseur named Rudy Kurniawan who could identify any wine or vintage by taste.  He suddenly appeared in the hoity-toity wine auctions (populated by CEOs and hedge fund managers who had "fuck you" money in the late 1990s), buying hundreds of thousands of dollars of rare wine and singlehandedly causing the whole market to balloon into a huge bubble.

Somewhere along the line, Kurniawan started selling more wine than he was buying, a lot of rare and very expensive vintages.  Trouble is, he got sloppy and offered some vintages that didn't exist.  His counterfeiting was masterful -- not only did the bottles, corks and labels fool all the other experts for a decade, Rudy blended wines to produce fairly accurate imitations of the wines he was faking.

He eventually got caught, with the help of a French vintner and Bill Koch, the wine-collecting Koch brother*.  Rudy went to jail for 10 years, longer than many murder convictions.

Rich people do not like being duped.

Meanwhile, the market for expensive wines has all but collapsed due to distrust of provenance.  It's estimated (very ROUGH estimate!) that as many as 10,000 bottles of Rudy's fakes are still circulating or in private collections -- but nobody really knows for sure.  Or wants to find out.

The documentary showed the Justice Department crushing 40,000 bottles from Rudy's wine cellar after his conviction.  Some of those were undoubtedly fake, but some were $1million bottles of truly rare wine.  Nobody could tell which was which, so they smashed all of it.  I'm sure that helped the market for rare wines.

Rich people!




* - Scenes shot in and around Koch's palace are simply jaw-dropping.  Huge manicured grounds with statues and reflecting ponds, gilded golden doors, rooms filled with Picassos and famous statues.... The obscene opulence is just astonishing.  The rich are truly not like you or me.  And now they own the government.

Well, probably they have for a while.