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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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 Chateaux 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, Cezanne, Monet, Miro, Dali, Leger, 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 Romanee-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...
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