Book Excerpt: Vintage Crime – A Short History of Wine Fraud

BY REBECCA GIBB MW&nbsp;|&nbsp;OCTOBER 11, 2023In her new book Vintage Crime – A Short History of Wine Fraud, Rebecca Gibb MW tells
the history of wine through some of the most well-known cases of fraud, in
addition to less well-documented incidents that intrigued Rebecca personally.

Having passed the notorious Master of Wine tasting exams in
2012, there was just the dissertation to complete before acquiring the elusive
MW letters. But one proposal after another was rejected. In need of
inspiration, Don and Petie Kladstrup’s Champagne book How the World's Most
Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times came to the rescue. If you
have not read it, the book is a colorful wine history and includes a snappy
chapter on the 1911 Champagne riots. It seemed like a juicier topic than a
Beaujolais, and it emerged that there was a scarcity of information about it,
particularly in English.<img alt="" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.vinous.com/uploads%2F1697036501215-vintage+crime+cover_copy.jpg">Three years, a hefty mortgage and one sizeable baby later,
Rebecca had also become an expert on the reasons behind the Champagne riots and
the world’s 384th Master of Wine. Fraud was one of the major causes of the
protests, and it stirred an interest in the dark side of the wine world that
has culminated in this book.

This is not a history of every wine fraud that has taken
place—there are far too many to count—but each of the instances chosen takes
place within a seminal period of change for the world of wine, allowing us to
better understand that period of social and cultural history. Some chapters do
not rest on a single instance of fraud but on general wheeling and dealing
across an extended period (such as imperial Rome), while a chapter devoted to
lead in wine traces its use from the 1600s to modern times.

The book covers a broad timespan from the Roman Empire via
England, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and more to a twenty-first-century
courthouse in New York City. This well-researched yet accessible romp through
the history of wine questions why we drink wine, the multifaceted reasons for
wine fraud throughout the ages and, ultimately, if the game is up.

This excerpt from Vintage Crime – A Short History of Wine
Fraud will give readers a good idea of the book.

<div class="wysiwyg-text-align-center">

</div>Indiana Jones and the Glass Crusade

It was all over in ninety-nine seconds.

Kip Forbes, the son of US magazine magnate Malcolm Forbes,
had dropped a record-breaking £105,000 ($155,295) on a single bottle of wine.
And it had taken less than two minutes. Sent to do his millionaire father’s
bidding, the younger Forbes wasn’t leaving the packed Christie’s auction room
without his prize—a bottle of Lafitte 1787 bearing the initials Th.J., a bottle
the vendor claimed was once the property of Thomas Jefferson, the third
president of the United States. Within hours of the gavel slamming down on
December 5, 1985, the bottle engraved with Jefferson’s initials was comfortably
installed in its own seat on a private jet, leaving behind the gray skies of
London for a new home on New York’s glitzy Fifth Avenue.

Despite the breakneck pace of the sale, the whiffs of skepticism
concerning the authenticity of the bottle sold on that December day caused a
life-long hangover for its vendor, former pop-band manager Hardy Rodenstock,
and the Christie’s auctioneer, Lancashire-born J. Michael Broadbent. The pair
were ensnared in years of speculation and numerous court cases and became the leading
characters in Benjamin Wallace’s book The Billionaire’s Vinegar, whose
long-awaited screen adaptation has been linked to various Hollywood A-listers,
including Matthew McConaughey.

It was the wine discovery of the century: a stash of bottles
in a cellar in the Marais district of Paris. While the French capital’s finest
wine cellars, including 80,000 bottles from the historic restaurant La Tour
d’Argent, had been pillaged by German soldiers during World War II, these
pre-Revolution bottles had remained untouched by friend and foe alike until an
elderly gentleman stumbled across the bricked-up cellar. Covered in the thick
dust of centuries of repose, a quick wipe revealed the dozen or so bottles
belonged to the who’s who of Bordeaux: Lafitte, now known as Lafite Rothschild
or simply Lafite; Yquem; Margaux; and Mouton Rothschild, then known as Brane Mouton.
Not only that, they dated from the 1780s. And the bottles were engraved with
the initials Th.J. It was an unbelievable find. Who did the Frenchman call? How
about “the most envied wine tracker in the world,” Hardy Rodenstock? The former
band manager turned rare wine collector and dealer, whose real name was
Meinhard Görke, raced to Paris from Munich to inspect this cache. He took
possession of the bottles on the spot and drove away with a piece of history.
Or at least that was Rodenstock’s story. It was an account decidedly scant on
detail, including the all-important location of the stash, information that
went with him to his grave.Vintage Crime – A Short History of Wine Fraud&nbsp;is published by UC Press. We
are pleased to offer all our readers a 30% discount on the purchase price. You
can redeem this offer by using the promo code UCPSAVE30. If you are in
the UK, please contact the distributor, Wiley, directly and mention the promo
code to receive the discount (Phone: +44 (0) 1243 843291; <a target="_blank">customer@wiley.co.uk</a>).
For readers in the US, you can apply at checkout on the UC Press <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520385931/vintage-crime">website</a>.© 2023, Vinous. No portion of this article may be copied, shared or re-distributed without prior consent from Vinous. Doing so is not only a violation of our copyright, but also threatens the survival of independent wine criticism.

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