I belong to a wine club called the “Dead Guys,” founded about ten years ago by Scot “Zippy” Ziskind , a builder/consultant of high-end wine cellars, and the owner of a wine storage facility with a “I’d have to kill you if I told you” address. The wines we drink were made before you were born, owned by guys that are dead, winemakers not here anymore, you get the picture. Anyway, we had a special “Drinking,” as we call them, Wednesday night.
For a little background, a wine collector named Hardy Rodenstock supposedly found a hidden cache of rare wine behind a brick wall in a house in Paris in the spring of 1985. Thomas Jefferson lived in Paris from 1784 to 1789 and purchased Chateau Lafite Rothschild from the Chateau. Some of the rare wines Hardy discovered were purported to be some of these bottles with the initials THJ etched into them. Later that year, one of these Thomas Jefferson Lafite’s went up for auction at Christie’s. Marvin Shanken–publisher of the Wine Spectator and Kip Forbes, Malcolm Forbes son were in a bidding war for the bottle. Kip won the bidding at a record $156,000! Unfortunately it ended up being counterfeit, Christie’s had egg on their face, and Hardy Rodenstock had a lot of explaining to do.
Ben Wallace wrote a book called “Billionaires Vinegar” about this saga and other Thomas Jefferson Lafite bottles sold to different collectors. In a word, buy the book and you will not put it down. We were lucky enough to have Ben come and speak about his research on the “Jefferson” bottles and techniques counterfeiters use to create a fake. Really fascinating stuff in a stranger than fiction sense.
Admission into the event was a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, their second label, Carruades de Lafite, Chateau d’Quem, or another first or second growth Bordeaux.
