Love a good whodunit? Read this book.
Love a great piece of investigative journalism? This book’s for you.
The Billionaire’s Vinegar, by magazine writer Benjamin Wallace, is going to this summer’s hot, go-to beach book. At least for wine lovers.
Filled with a cast of larger-than-life braggarts, connivers, narcissists, and some of wine’s most colorful characters – Christie’s Wine Guy, Michael Broadbent, for one – The Billionaire’s Vinegar is the tale of some questionably authentic, questionably old wines, including bottles that may, in fact, have come from a cache belonging to Thomas Jefferson.
If you have followed some of the headlines over the last 25 years, you know that German bon vivant, Hardy Rodenstock, claims to have uncovered several cellarsful of old wines – one lot from Caracas, Venezuela, and a more important haul from a vault in Paris where he claims to have found bottles of 1787 Lafite, bearing the imprint of Thomas Jefferson.
The author, Benjamin Wallace, has written for GQ and Food and Wine magazines. In The Billionaire’s Vinegar he earns his stripes as a serious gum-shoe. The detail in the book is astounding, yet it never bogs down… reads like a real thriller.
Whether these wines are real, and belonged to Thomas Jefferson, or whether they are counterfeit, is the subject of this book, written in a wonderful gum-shoe tradition; you just never know what the Truth of the claims, allegations, and counter-claims is until the end of the book.
In my career, I have met several of the larger-than-life wine writers and wine aficionados mentioned in this book and can attest to Wallace’s descriptions of them as being accurate. So it’s not a stretch to presume that everyone else he mentions is also properly painted.
And the accuracy of wine detail is staggering. I would hate to have been Wallace’s fact-checker because just about every vintage of the great growths of Bordeaux is mentioned multiple times, there are wine tastings in which hundreds of bottles were opened and Wallace has taster’s recollections of many of the opened bottles.
While there is a fabulously annotated bibliography at the end of this book, the one thing missing, for me anyway, is a proper index, which would permit the reader to return to certain passages about a particular wine without having to thumb through the volume back to front and front to back for half-an-hour. Maybe they’ll incorporate an index when the book is published in paperback?
The Billionaire’s Vinegar is already Number 73 on amazon.com’s bestseller list but I wouldn’t be surprised to find it on top of the non-fiction list by summer’s end – it’s that good, that compelling, that much fun.
The Billionaire’s Vinegar, by Benjamin Wallace, Crown Publishers, $24.95.
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