Someone paid $500,000 for four bottles, and 3x more to verify that they are fake
Ignoramus28957
Sour Note
Wine Lover's Nose
For Fakery Leads
To Famed Bottles
Collector of 1780s Bordeaux
Says He Was 'Swindled';
German Dealer Denies It
A Probe Using Gamma Rays
By JOHN R. WILKE
September 1, 2006; Page A1
PALM BEACH, Fla. -- When Boston's Museum of Fine Art displayed William
Koch's private collection last year, the treasures included paintings
by Monet, Degas and Dali, a trove of Greco-Roman and American West
artifacts, and his renowned racing yacht, winner of the 1992 America's
Cup.
But the museum wanted proof of the provenance of some of the energy
tycoon's most prized possessions: hand-blown bottles of Bordeaux from
the 17,000-bottle cellar beneath his estate here. The wines bear the
vintages 1784 and 1787 and the initials of the then-ambassador to
France, Thomas Jefferson.
[William Koch]
The museum's questions prompted Mr. Koch to bankroll a year-long quest
to discover whether he, along with many experts in the wine world, had
been duped by the mysterious bottles.
Mr. Koch assembled a team of former Federal Bureau of Investigation
and British intelligence agents, wine and glass experts, Sotheby's
former head of wine sales, even a nuclear physicist. Led by a former
federal judge, the effort has already cost more than twice the
$500,000 Mr. Koch paid for the four bottles in 1987.
Now the 66-year-old chemical engineer and yachtsman believes he has
found proof the bottles were fakes -- as well as evidence of other
fraud in the wine-auction business, especially for vintages older than
1945. And he wants to settle the score.
"I bought them for the mystique, to own something that belonged to the
third president, a framer of the Constitution," Mr. Koch says over a
silken 1971 Petrus in his ornate dining room here. "If someone robs
you of those bragging rights, you get p----- off."
In the rarefied world of historical wine collecting, the Jefferson
bottles, said to have been discovered in a bricked-up cellar in Paris
in 1985, have long inspired awe and controversy. In December 1985, the
late Malcolm Forbes paid $156,000 for a Jefferson Lafite at a
Christie's auction, still a record bid for a bottle of wine.
While doubts about the authenticity of the bottles have been voiced
over the years, many wine experts vouched for them, including
Christie's board member and wine author Michael Broadbent. The
Jefferson bottles are believed to have been sold to wealthy buyers
around the world by auction and private sales.
Yesterday Mr. Koch filed suit in federal court in New York against a
German collector and dealer, Hardy Rodenstock, who supplied the
Jefferson bottles and other rare vintages to auction houses and
merchants. Mr. Koch alleges that the former pop-music promoter
defrauded him and engaged in a scheme to deceive wine buyers and
reviewers around the world. Even his name is a creation, the suit
says: He was born Meinhard Goerke, and later changed his name.
A second wealthy collector, Russell Frye, says he also bought wine
provided by Mr. Rodenstock, including some of the world's rarest
Bordeaux vintages. In federal court in San Francisco yesterday, the
Massachusetts software entrepreneur filed suit against a California
distributor that sold him Mr. Rodenstock's wines. Christopher Forbes,
vice chairman of Forbes Inc., publisher of Forbes magazine, has also
challenged the authenticity of the Jefferson bottle purchased by his
father.
"Mr. Rodenstock is a clever, intelligent and refined con artist,"
Mr. Koch says. "He has swindled a lot of wealthy people." More
troubling for the auction houses and great French chāteaus whose
brands could be tarnished by counterfeiting: Mr. Rodenstock and others
"completely polluted the market with fake and mislabeled wines," he
says.
Often called the Indiana Jones of fine wine for his uncanny ability to
unearth rare vintages, Mr. Rodenstock is known for his tastings, which
are widely cited in wine reference books. He denies Mr. Koch's
claims. In a series of faxed messages to The Wall Street Journal, he
repeated that the Jefferson wines were found in Paris, but said that
he bought them from a man who he said may no longer be living -- and
whom he wouldn't identify. He added that even if it turned out after
all these years that the bottles weren't genuine, any legal action
"would be barred by the statute of limitations."
Mr. Rodenstock sent pages from a French winery's records that he said
support the authenticity of the bottles by showing orders made by
Jefferson. He also rejected the claim that he has supplied other
mislabeled wines, such as a 1961 Petrus that was withdrawn from a
Christie's auction in Los Angeles in June. "Are there any pieces of
evidence, or is this again only a stupid rumor?" he asked.
Mr. Rodenstock maintained that "the subject [of] fakes is totally
over-rated" and that "it is nearly impossible to fake an old wine"
because it would be easily exposed. Still, he said in a July 18 fax,
"fakes have always existed and will certainly always exist, but that
does not mean the end of the wine world. Jesus Christ was already a
faker, as he changed water into wine."
Mr. Koch owns and operates Oxbow Group, a global energy company that
mines low-sulfur coal and produces coke and natural gas. He is perhaps
best known as skipper of the America3 racing yacht, which brought the
America's Cup back to the U.S. in 1992.
With wire-rim glasses, a thick shock of white hair and a perpetual
tan, Mr. Koch has long had an independent streak. His billionaire
brothers control Koch Industries, a $25 billion business empire. He
carried on a long legal battle with his brothers over the division of
family assets. The suits have been settled and he is reconciled with
his brothers. His twin, David, was best man at his wedding last year.
Mr. Koch says he took on the wine investigation because he didn't
expect police or federal prosecutors to be able to do much. "No one's
going to have much sympathy for rich guys who got cheated -- it's not
as if the public at large is hurt," says Mr. Koch. Besides, "I get a
kick out of being able to play Wyatt Earp."
Early in the investigation, his posse obtained a copy of a previously
unpublished 1985 report by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, a
nonprofit educational group that runs Jefferson's Monticello estate in
Virginia and supports scholarly research. The study, conducted after
Mr. Rodenstock approached the foundation about a tasting, examined the
former president's extensive personal records of his contacts in
Bordeaux. It raised serious questions about Mr. Rodenstock's claims
based on those records.
At that point, "we knew the game was afoot," says Mr. Koch, sitting in
his Palm Beach mansion under an oil portrait of the daring American
naval Capt. James Lawrence, an ancestor of Mr. Koch on his mother's
side, who famously commanded: "Don't give up the ship."
The Jefferson foundation's report found no documentary link to the
bottles Mr. Rodenstock discovered. The former president was indeed an
admirer of French wine and toured Bordeaux in 1787 as ambassador to
France, riding on horseback through the vineyards and buying cases of
Haut-Brion, d'Yquiem and Margaux for himself and for George
Washington.
He ordered more from Bordeaux on his return to the U.S. in 1790,
always keeping precise ledgers and receipts. "Jefferson's surviving
records for the period are virtually intact," the report said. And
Ch. Lafite 1787, the vintage sold to Mr. Forbes in 1985, "does not
appear in a single one," it said.
"Nor do any of the other vintages [found by Mr. Rodenstock] appear in
the records, except the Ch. d'Yquem 1784, which we know Jefferson
ordered and received in 1788," the report found. It also challenged
Mr. Rodenstock's interpretation of winery records that he cites in his
support.
"He seems to have made the connection between the bottles and
Jefferson by a study of the records," the foundation report said. "But
it is precisely those records which make such a connection less and
less likely."
The report has since been described in a book published early this
year by Bacchus Press, "An Evening with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas
Jefferson," by James Gabler. Mr. Gabler, a writer and lecturer on
Jefferson's passion for wines, said that based on his research, the
Rodenstock bottles "were not, in my opinion, ever owned or possessed
by Thomas Jefferson."
In response, Mr. Rodenstock said Mr. Gabler "never talked to me in
detail about the Jefferson bottles." He added, "he must be careful
with such untrue statements as he or his publishers can get into a lot
of legal trouble."
Mr. Koch sent his investigators across Europe, interviewing wine
makers in France and collectors in Germany and searching their cellars
for fakes. At one point, an agent of the fraud-control office of the
French Ministry of Finance accompanied Mr. Koch's team. A French
government official declined to comment on whether the ministry is
investigating the matter.
Mr. Koch also went to extraordinary lengths to conduct physical tests
of his Jefferson bottles. A nuclear scientist in a top French
government laboratory in Bordeaux, Philippe Hubert, agreed to test for
levels of radioactive cesium in the bottle. His method is based on the
fact that any wine made after 1945 contains traces of fallout from
atmospheric nuclear tests.
Mr. Koch's 1787 Lafite was brought to a special laboratory deep under
a mountain on the Italian border, says Dr. Hubert, director of the
Centre d'Etudes Nucleaires de Bordeaux. The lab's depth minimizes the
level of naturally occurring gamma radiation; additionally, the
detector was shielded by "archeological lead," prized by scientists
for its low radiation, retrieved from a Roman cargo ship that sank on
its way to Brittany nearly 2,000 years ago.
After a month of testing the wine inside a nitrogen supercooled
gamma-ray spectrometer, results were inconclusive. They showed the
wine was made before 1945, but couldn't answer the question of
authenticity.
With that setback, the Koch team focused on the bottles
themselves. They purchased hand-blown antique bottles and worked to
re-create etchings similar to the initials "Th. J." and other script
that appeared on Mr. Koch's bottles, using copper engraving wheels
spun by foot pedals as in Jefferson's time. And they worked with a
Corning Glass Museum expert and a former FBI glass-forensics
specialist to study the bottle engravings under a microscope.
Their conclusion: The chāteau, vintage and "Th. J." initials on the
bottles were engraved using a high-speed diamond drill with a movable
head -- an instrument that obviously didn't exist in the 1700s.
"At that point," says Mr. Koch, "we knew we had him."
Mr. Koch's investigators also reached out to some of the top wine
makers in Bordeaux, including Count Alexandre de Lur-Saluces, whose
family owned Ch. d'Yquem for four centuries before its sale to LVMH
Moėt Hennessy-Louis Vuitton in 1996. Jefferson corresponded with a
Count Lur-Saluces in 1788, seeking the chāteau's sought-after
Sauternes, a sweet white wine whose older vintages sell for $1,000 or
more per bottle.
In an interview, Mr. de Lur-Saluces, who is still affiliated with the
chāteau, said "there is almost no way to prove whether these bottles
are genuine or not, but I am very skeptical." He said that several
years ago, Mr. Rodenstock brought a Jefferson bottle to the chāteau
for a tasting. He was not convinced.
Others who drank the Jefferson d'Yquems at tastings held by
Mr. Rodenstock raved about them. A 1998 Los Angeles Times profile of
Mr. Rodenstock said the 1787 d'Yquem evoked "autumnal aromas of burnt
sugar and undergrowth," while the oldest, the 1784, stood out,
"strange as it seemed, for youthfulness."
Mr. Rodenstock has long been a colorful and mysterious figure in the
wine-auction world, a self-described expert in "pre-phylloxera" wines,
referring to wines made before vine lice devastated Europe's wine
industry by 1945. For years, he has staged annual blind tastings in a
Munich hotel of the world's rarest wines, inviting luminaries such as
Christie's Mr. Broadbent, Robert Parker and the publisher of Wine
Spectator.
Mr. Koch discovered that Mr. Rodenstock had been sued once before for
alleged counterfeiting. A German collector, Hans-Peter Frericks,
accused Mr. Rodenstock in a Munich state court, which found in favor
of Mr. Frericks on Dec. 14, 1992, saying "the defendant adulterated
the wine or knowingly offered adulterated wine." Mr. Rodenstock
appealed, and the men also filed criminal complaints against each
other for defamation. The charges were dropped and the cases
eventually were settled in 1995. The details of the settlement are
confidential.
The German court files, which had been under seal and were obtained by
Mr. Koch, reveal correspondence between Sotheby's and Mr. Frericks in
which the auction house declined to sell his Jefferson wine and other
bottles, including Petrus and Mouton Rothschild, given concern about
authenticity.
"My worst fears were confirmed following the recent sensational annual
tasting by Hardy Rodenstock," a 1989 letter from Sotheby's to
Mr. Frericks said. "None tasted like Petrus of those years," Sotheby's
said, and many bottles supplied by Mr. Rodenstock "had been obviously
re-corked."
David Molyneux-Berry, who wrote the Sotheby's letters and is now an
independent cellar consultant, has been retained by Mr. Koch to
identify other fakes in his collection. Mr. Molyneux-Berry says he is
also working to get the major chāteaus in Bordeaux to take a unified
stand against Mr. Rodenstock and other alleged counterfeiters, "since
the chāteaus are the real victims of this fraud, with their enormous
cellars."
The German court file also contains correspondence between the Thomas
Jefferson Memorial Foundation and Mr. Rodenstock, in which the wine
merchant is firmly told, only months after the Christie's sale to
Mr. Forbes, that there is likely "no connection" between Jefferson and
his wine.
Christie's did not share Sotheby's reservations, and earned a
commission on its sale of the Jefferson wine to Mr. Forbes.
"Looking back, more questions could have been asked," says Richard
Brierley, who is head of Christie's U.S. wine sales but wasn't
involved in the 1985 auction. At the time, Mr. Broadbent, the renowned
wine author and Christie's board member, had vouched for the bottles
and backed Mr. Rodenstock. "When more Jefferson bottles surfaced
later, that cast a cloud on them," Mr. Brierley says. Mr. Broadbent,
who is 79 years old and still consults for Christie's, wasn't
available for comment, a spokesman said.
Christie's is extremely vigilant about the wine it sells today,
Mr. Brierley says, "to protect not just our clients but the
marketplace itself."
Despite his many business interests, Mr. Koch's greatest passions have
long been his vast collections of art, wine and maritime
memorabilia. The lush, heavily guarded grounds of his Palm Beach
estate -- which is a few doors down from Donald Trump -- feature the
monumental bronzes of sculptor Fernando Botero. Inside, every room
offers a new theme, from Monet and Picasso to Remington, Rodin and a
soaring Western room, featuring Gen. George Custer's rifle, among
other artifacts.
In the cavernous wine cellar below, the Jefferson bottles are
displayed behind a wrought-iron gate in a brick alcove. Walking among
the thousands of bottles, Mr. Koch says he has a century of Latour
vintages and 150 years of Lafite. He estimates that out of his
35,000-bottle collection, including a cellar at his summer estate on
Cape Cod, perhaps 200 are fake.
After Mr. Koch has found the evening's wine, he scans bar codes into a
computer that tracks each bottle. With a doctorate in chemical
engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Koch
treats his wines like rare elements. When he chooses an older vintage
to drink, he filters it in his kitchen into a glass beaker kept under
constant pressure supplied by vacuum pumps built into the pantry
cabinet. This protects delicate wines while filtering out
sediment. "Wine experts might consider this a heresy, but I just do it
because it tastes better," he says.
Fears of counterfeiting are now buzzing through the wine world. On a
Saturday morning in June in Beverly Hills, Christie's sold a 1961
Petrus magnum, described in the catalog as "pure perfection...crammed
with viscous, over-ripe black cherry, mocha-tinged fruit flavors," for
$13,000 to an undisclosed European bidder. But a second 1961 Petrus,
from another seller that Christie's didn't identify, was withdrawn
just before bidding.
The auctioneer, Mr. Brierley, says his experts doubted the provenance
of the wine and pulled it from the sale. "It's a heavily counterfeited
wine."
In the San Francisco lawsuit yesterday, Mr. Frye lists several alleged
counterfeit wines more recent than the Jefferson bottles. The suit
cites an 1811 Ch. d'Yquem, said to have been found in the cellars of
Czar Nicholas II -- another celebrated discovery by Mr. Rodenstock --
and a 1961 Petrus, among many others.
Mr. Frye, who started collecting wine after he sold his software
company in 1995, said he was "shocked" when Sotheby's experts told him
some of the bottles he planned to auction were fake. Weeding them out
"cost me millions of dollars" in lost sales, he said. The auction took
place in May, bringing in $7.8 million for such rarities as a double
magnum of Lafite Rothschild 1865, which fetched $111,625. "We want
other collectors to come forward if they think they've been cheated,"
Mr. Frye said in an interview yesterday. "This is an attempt to
restore integrity to the wine industry."
Mr. Brierley of Christie's said counterfeiting has risen sharply in
recent years, given the soaring value of older vintages and the ease
with which digital scanners can knock off labels. "In 10 years in the
business, I have seen more suspicious bottles in the past year or two
than ever before," Mr. Brierley said. But he said these instances are
rarely publicized. "Such things are usually settled privately" because
most buyers don't want to be identified.
Some wealthy collectors contacted by Mr. Koch have already settled
quietly with distributors or auctioneers after they questioned wines
supplied by Mr. Rodenstock. Others would just like the whole thing to
go away.
The late Malcolm Forbes apparently was among those with misgivings
about his 1787 Lafite, whose cork dried out in its display case and
dropped into the bottle. His comment: "I wish Jefferson had bloody
drunk the thing."
Write to John R. Wilke at john....@wsj.com
Don Lancaster
The whole thing sounds like sour grapes.
--
Many thanks,
Don Lancaster voice phone: (928)428-4073
Synergetics 3860 West First Street Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552
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Angrie.Woman
> Wall Street Journal
>
> Sour Note
> Wine Lover's Nose
> For Fakery Leads
> To Famed Bottles
<snipped the longest wine article I've ever read>
Wow - basically saying that the engraving proves they're fake? I'm not
sure that would be enough for me.
Ignoramus28957
I think that that is correct, yes, engraving was one of the main contentions.
i