The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine
by Benjamin Wallace
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Book Summary Information
Author: Benjamin WallaceEdition: Hardcover
Published: 2008-05-13
ISBN: 0307338770
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Crown
Book Reviews of The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine
Book Review: Fascinating at first, but fell off at end
Summary: 4 Stars
I read the first chapter for this online after seeing an ad for it in the NY Times. I was hooked and had to buy the book. It was a fascinating story, and taught me a lot about wine and its history. The writer succeeded in giving this nonfiction work and fictional feel and made it an easy read. My only complaint is that I did not feel the story had an ultimate resolution, and I was left wondering what happened next. That's the problem with nonfiction, you can't just make up the missing details.
Summary of The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine
It was the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold.In 1985, at a heated auction by Christie’s of London, a 1787 bottle of Ch?teau Lafite Bordeaux—one of a cache of bottles unearthed in a bricked-up Paris cellar and supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson—went for $156,000 to a member of the Forbes family. The discoverer of the bottle was pop-band manager turned wine collector Hardy Rodenstock, who had a knack for finding extremely old and exquisite wines. But rumors about the bottle soon arose. Why wouldn’t Rodenstock reveal the exact location where it had been found? Was it part of a smuggled Nazi hoard? Or did his reticence conceal an even darker secret?
It would take more than two decades for those questions to be answered and involve a gallery of intriguing players—among them Michael Broadbent, the bicycle-riding British auctioneer who speaks of wines as if they are women and staked his reputation on the record-setting sale; Serena Sutcliffe, Broadbent’s elegant archrival, whose palate is covered by a hefty insurance policy; and Bill Koch, the extravagant Florida tycoon bent on exposing the truth about Rodenstock.
Pursuing the story from Monticello to London to Zurich to Munich and beyond, Benjamin Wallace also offers a mesmerizing history of wine, complete with vivid accounts of subterranean European laboratories where old vintages are dated and of Jefferson’s colorful, wine-soaked days in France, where he literally drank up the culture.
Suspenseful, witty, and thrillingly strange, The Billionaire’s Vinegar is the vintage tale of what could be the most elaborate con since the Hitler diaries. It is also the debut of an exceptionally powerful new voice in narrative non-fiction.
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