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Now in Paperback!
With a new epilogue
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“It
is the fine details—the bouquet, the body, the notes, the finish–that
make this book such a lasting pleasure, to be savored and remembered long
after the last page is turned. Ben Wallace has told a splendid story just
wonderfully, his touch light and deft, his instinct pitch-perfect. Of
all the marvelous legends of the wine trade, this curiously unforgettable
saga most amply deserves the appellation: a classic.”
— SIMON WINCHESTER, author of
The Professor and the Madman and A Crack in the Edge of the
World
. . . . . . .
It was the most expensive bottle of wine
ever sold.
In 1985, at a heated auction by Christie’s
of London, a 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux—unearthed in a Paris cellar
and supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson—went for $156,000 to a
member of the Forbes family. The discoverer of the bottle was Hardy Rodenstock,
a pop-band manager turned wine collector with a knack for finding extremely
old and exquisite wines. But rumors about the bottle soon arose. Why wouldn’t
Rodenstock reveal the exact location where it had been found? Was it part
of a smuggled Nazi hoard? Or did his reticence conceal an even darker
secret? Pursuing the story from London to Zurich to Munich and beyond,
Benjamin Wallace offers a mesmerizing history of wine and of Jefferson’s
wine-soaked days in France. Suspenseful, witty, and thrillingly strange,
this is the vintage tale of what could be the most elaborate con since
the Hitler diaries.
. . . . . . .
“The Billionaire’s Vinegar is the ultimate page-turner.
Written with literary intelligence, it has a cast of characters like something
out of Fawlty Towers meets The Departed. It takes you
into a subculture so deep and delicious, you can almost taste the wine
that turns so many seemingly rational people into madmen. It is superb
nonfiction.”
— BUZZ BISSINGER, author of
Friday Night Lights
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