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| The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine | 
 enlarge | Author: Benjamin Wallace
Publisher: Crown
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $14.72
You Save: $10.23 (41%)
New (37) Used (16) from $13.17
Avg. Customer Rating:  45 reviews
Sales Rank: 3291
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0307338770
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.2223
EAN: 9780307338778
ASIN: 0307338770
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 caveat emptor September 16, 2008
as good as an Ian Rankin mystery! If you have ever bought or sold anything at auction, this is
required reading. It's a great story...runs from Jefferson to the nuclear age without missing a beat!
Fraud? it's there. Greed? it's there. Ego? it's there. Revenge? it's there.
LIke a fine wine, it is very good upon entry, improves in the middle and finishes
long and memorable!
A Fool and His Money September 11, 2008
"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." Most people experience this by the time they reach the age of ten. Whether it's a minor annoyance like discovering that sea monkeys are just brine shrimp or a soul-crushing defeat like when the little girl down the street said she wanted to give you a kiss but ended up throwing rocks at you instead, almost everyone at some point in their childhood has this notion hammered home. Reading "The Billionaire's Vinegar," one comes away with the distinct impression that this was a lesson sorely missing from wine collectors' young lives.
Benjamin Wallace's book is ostensibly about a supposed 200 year old cache of wine that was purportedly owned by Thomas Jefferson. Yes, that Thomas Jefferson, of the Founding Fathers' Thomas Jeffersons. How did everyone know these ancient bottles belonged to old TJ himself? Why, they had his initials engraved on them, of course! And the fact that they also had dates like "1784" and "1787" on them made everyone know that they weren't owned by Theodore Jablowski (Harvard, class of 1982). Like a lot of old things, this cache of wine become highly sought after by individuals with too much money and way too much interest in centuries old fermented grape juice. It is in the exploration of this cast of characters where "The Billionaire's Vinegar" shines.
The world of high end wine collecting is populated by figures with so-much-better-than-you names like Broadbent, Rodenstock, and Shanken. Americans with names like Forbes and Koch didn't stand a chance getting involved with such people. According to Wallace, the good old days of wine collecting came to an end when the vulgar Americans entered the scene. Prior to that, apparently, the hobby was filled with proper European gentlemen playing in their wine cellars older than the New World, engaging in vertical and horizontal (what, no diagonal?) tastings, and generally living in an utopia. But once the Americans -- all new money and no taste -- got wind that wine was cool, well, the temptation became too great. Serpents entered this Eden with dollar signs in their eyes, and Paradise was lost. Wallace spends most of "The Billionaire's Vinegar" on one of these alleged serpents: the discoverer of the Jefferson bottles, Hardy Rodenstock, nee Meinhard Görke. Chapter after chapter outlines how Rodenstock's too-good-to-be-true finds were gobbled up by everyone from Malcolm Forbes (yes, daddy of that guy who ran for President so many years back) to industrialist Bill Koch ("pronounced like the soda"; yeah, I'd never heard of him, either). In the end, Forbes winds up storing his Jefferson bottle vertically under hot lights, causing the cork to take a swim in the elixir below it; Koch eventually gets the "if it sounds too good to be true" lesson and ends up spending five times what he paid for his Jefferson bottle engaging ex-FBI guys and nuclear physicists to make the German pay. We Americans may be uncouth, but we sure know how to party.
Interspersed amongst these chapters of Rodenstock's alleged malfeasances are scenes of haughty oenophiles (wine connoisseurs -- get yer mind out of the gutter) engaging in days-long tastings of wines that they say are awesome or gnarly or whatever oenophiles say to describe quality hooch. Sadly, Wallace makes the persuasive argument that a number of these wines are fake. Even worse, so many of these wine lovers have, over the years, tended to turn a blind eye to this rampant forgery. One scene near the end of the book describes how a panel of experts came together in the mid-1990s to develop a set of recommended best practices that the wine producers could have used to curtail forgers. Nothing came of it. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil: maybe this would make a more appropriate theme for this book.
In the end, "The Billionaire's Vinegar" is less about the wine hobby than it is about the individuals that populate it and the self-delusional and even self-destructive tactics they use to play in it. As a reader, you'll alternately want to slap these people and feel sorry for them. You'll marvel at how Michael Broadbent ties his career to the shady Rodenstock, all the while cheering Bill Koch to uncover the the truth behind his collection. "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." A valuable lesson that "The Billionaire's Vinegar" shows you're never too old to learn.
 Inconclusive, unsatisfying, overrated. September 8, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book is written in a fluent and accessible style, and is, at times, a true page turner.
However, the book ends with a fizzle and left me unsatisfied. Moreover, I have doubts about the objectivity of the book. Why would a purported master-forger use a basement in a rental house of which he was being evicted to produce counterfeit bottles? It seems unlikely that he would be so sloppy in covering his tracks.
I would not recommend this book.
Lost in our Pursuits September 1, 2008
The author does a nice job with this book. With the exception of a moderately tedious middle section and somewhat abrupt ending, The Billionaire's Vinegar is well-written and well-researched. For decades, people have attempted to build impressive wine cellars with old, even ancient, bottles. And for what? For some, it is the joy of owning a piece of history, or at least bragging about owning a piece of history. For some, it is a quest to be accepted among the epicureans. For some, it is about the wine itself, a mysterious substance that has seduced many followers. And, of course, for some it is simply about the money. In the end, like the wine, all of these evaporate.
Interesting story and good writing, but it runs out of gas August 19, 2008
I am a big fan of wine and a big fan of antiques, so I read this book with great anticipation. I really enjoyed this book for about two thirds its length. After that, I think it really lost its steam. The trick to writing a "nonfiction mystery" is to dole out the clues and facts a little at a time. Enough to keep the reader engaged, but with enough questions left to keep you interested. In other words, a mystery is all about the chase. This is especially true with nonfiction where you already know the outcome.
Wallace is a skilled writer and excellent researcher, but he solves the mystery all at once and then leaves you to slog through the final cleaning up of details.
Still, I enjoyed the story enough to recommend it. The writing is fluid and the mystery is intriguing, but the most compelling part of this book is the characters. These people are the right amount of eccentric and obsessive.
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