The Jefferson wines

Imagine the surprise to find a bottle of 1787 Lafitte handpicked by Thomas Jefferson. This is what Bill Koch thought when he purchased four bottles in 1988 at well over $100,000 each. It would have been a great find if it was real, but as it turned out there were a couple of glaring clues that these bottles were fake.

The first was that the signature Th.J was inaccurate. According to Monticello's resident historian, Jefferson initialed his name Th:J. The second and most telling is that Jefferson made no record of these purchases in his diaries, and as we all know he was an extremely dutiful diarist, cataloging his life in exquisite detail, except for his relationship with Sally Hemings.

So, why didn't a billionaire like Bill Koch do his due diligence before making such a hefty purchase? For one, he trusted their providence since the bottles were originally sold at Christie's, a well-respected auction house; and two the temptation was just too great to pass up. When would bottles like these next appear on the market?

Vintage wines became a gold mine for speculators in the late 80s and 90s, with prices soaring through the cellar roof. Bill Koch quickly amassed an enormous collection, having to greatly expand his cellar under his West Palm Beach home to accommodate all these rare vintages.

Yes, he is one of the infamous Koch brothers, so no reason feeling too sorry for him, but as you can imagine he was none too happy when he found he had been cheated. He did what any tycoon would do, hire an investigative team to track down the source of this fraud.

It turned out to be a man who went by the name Hardy Rodenstock. This alone should have tipped prospective buyers off, but Hardy not only had an uncanny way of finding extremely rare bottles of wine, but also the ability to convince people they were genuine. The self-professed German nobleman very quickly amassed a fortune to go along with his faux wines, staging lavish wine-tasting parties with no spitting allowed. He would only bring out his prized vintages at the end of the night, by which time everyone was pretty well sloshed and he could have given them bottles of cheap Merlot for all they knew.

Nevertheless, these parties became the talk of the wine world, and Hardy grew richer and richer and greedier and greedier, until he came up against the wrong man. Koch finally cornered Rodenstock in 2007. By this point, he was also hounding another dubious wine dealer named Rudy Kurniawan, who had sold him some fake Burgundies, and was the subject of the documentary, Sour Grapes, which lifted the lid off this fake wine business. Unlike Kurniawan, Rodenstock managed to skate clean, as charges were brought against him in the US, and Germany refused to extradite him. Rodenstock quietly passed away earlier this year, still claiming the Jefferson wines were real.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

TripplerJuly 18, 2018 at 6:07 AM
Recently, I watched an episode of Antiques Roadshow and saw where a great many items such as arts, antiques, vases, and historical letters have vastly declined in value. This appeared to be especially so for items that were American in origin. The only explanation given was that interest in the subject has greatly declined.

When I think about it, that may well explain why we no longer have long discussions on American topics in this forum. Sadly, interest in the subject has waned all over the USA both for books and once cherished items.

But who knows ~ this may well give an opportunity for some to invest in antiques because of their lower values. And then someday those values will likely go up again. Like I said, who knows??
James FergusonJuly 18, 2018 at 9:39 AM
I think persons are more leery about what they are buying. So many fakes out there. Not just wines.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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