The Billionaire's Vinegar (24 page)

He and Hubert were often in the lab at the same time, and the two hit it off. “Like two guys at a garage,” Medina recalled. “He had a brand-new Lamborghini; I had a beat-up Ferrari. We each needed spare parts.” Over the next few years, the Bordeaux native Medina taught the Brittany native Hubert about wine, and Hubert taught Medina about radioactive physics. As they traded notes, Medina wondered if the germanium detector could help to date wine.

With a bottle of wine, using the detector wasn’t as simple as putting the bottle next to the crystal. The shape of the bottle, the radioactivity in the glass, and the dilution of the datable material in water combined to make it unlikely that gamma rays emitted by the material would be strong enough for the detector to sense. Opening the bottle and reducing the wine to ashes would, on the other hand, yield a workable sample. At the underground facility in Modane, Hubert tested three bottles of wine, from three different vintages, and found that the concentration of cesium-137, a radioactive isotope, varied with each vintage.

He and Medina were surprised, and they decided to expand the experiment. They gathered bottles from various well-known modern vintages—not an easy task, even though they were in Bordeaux, because of the high prices—and tested them. Each of these, too, revealed its own distinctive cesium concentration. Hubert plotted a chart, showing the levels of cesium in these wines from 1950 up to the present.

Like tritium, the element present at 1962 levels in Hans-Peter Frericks’s Jefferson bottle, cesium-137 is man-made. It didn’t exist in nature in significant concentrations prior to the first hydrogen bomb test, in 1952. It then rose rapidly until the 1963 atmospheric test-ban treaty, after which it declined. It spiked again in 1986, following Chernobyl. Hubert now had a yardstick for dating wine, at least wine made since 1952.

In 2001, Medina presented Hubert with a real-world test of the wine-dating technique. In 1999, conveniently just in time for Millennial celebrations, an improbable number of bottles of 100-year-old first growths had flooded the French and Belgian markets. People in Bordeaux were skeptical. The negociant Barton & Guestier tipped off Château Margaux, which went to the fraud office. The fraud office then obtained six bottles each of “Lafite 1900” and “Margaux 1900,” and Hubert administered his cesium test to one of each. He did this in Modane, which took six hours, two planes, and a train to reach. He didn’t destroy the wine, but poured each into a container surrounding the crystal. Within ten minutes, in each case, he knew it was fake, because the distinctive cesium curve on his computerized spectrum revealed it to date from the modern era. The two bottles showed different levels of cesium, though. At this point Hubert sent two more of the bottles to be carbon dated. The results were almost identical, confirming the validity of the cesium test. But the different levels of cesium between the Margaux and the Lafite puzzled Hubert.

He thought it a pity to reduce potentially priceless wine to ashes, and a pity to pour it into a container, as he had been doing. Either way meant opening the bottle. Testing a closed bottle of wine was a less sensitive method, but he and Medina decided to give it a try. To their surprise, it worked. They tested the remaining bottles without opening them. All had different cesium levels. It was clear that the forger was mixing different wines, but for his base wine he had chosen the worst possible vintage from a radioactive standpoint: 1963, the year with the highest concentration of cesium in history. When the man, a Belgian national, was arrested, he claimed he had merely topped up true 1900 wine with younger wine from the same château.

Having solved that crime, Hubert developed something of a reputation for his wine-detection skills. The Bordeaux trade group was concerned at first about all this public talk in which the word
radioactivity
appeared in the same sentence as their sublime product. But ultimately they supported Hubert’s dating work. Hubert was only a year away from retiring, and he enjoyed the new and unexpected sideline he had stumbled into so late in his career. It brought him into contact with a whole new group of people and a whole new subject.

He had lived with the curse of a job that could not be explained to others or, at least, understood by them. Once, with a group of journalists, he was embarking on an explanation of his field by saying that “a neutrino is a particle that—” when someone interrupted to ask what a particle was. Neutrinos might be interesting, people would say, but how useful were they? Wine, on the other hand, everybody understood, and everyone was interested in. It was also a lot easier to get funding for. Commercial interests hinged on this work. And if, along the way, it was a palatable way to introduce people to a little thing called the neutrino, well, Hubert couldn’t argue with that.

W
HEN
J
IM
E
LROY
learned of Hubert’s work, he realized that there was, after all, a way to test Koch’s bottles without opening them. In April of 2005, Elroy contacted Hubert, who leaped at the opportunity. He didn’t ask to be paid, or even want to be paid. A scientist to the core, Hubert welcomed the chance to put his method to such a test. He had never heard of Bill Koch, but if he could prove that the wine in the most famous bottles in the world was actually young, it would be a ringing endorsement of his work.

The following month, Elroy flew to France, changing planes in London, where he quipped to the Heathrow security guards inspecting his luggage: “You just can’t get a good bottle of wine on the airplane.” He arrived at the Saint-Exupéry Airport in Lyon on the afternoon of May 24. It was the same date that Jefferson had arrived in Bordeaux two centuries earlier. Elroy was carrying two small bullet-proof suitcases lined with molded foam, which contained all four of Koch’s Jefferson bottles as well as the 1771 Lafite and 1791 Latour that had come from Rodenstock. Philippe Hubert had driven eight hours from Bordeaux and was there to meet Elroy.

They drove two hours southeast to Modane, going straight to the lab and beginning parallel tests in two germanium detectors. Knowing that the sheer price of the bottles would spook the lab’s administrators, Hubert hadn’t asked for permission to run the measurements. He and Elroy stayed in Modane for the next five days, sleeping at a small hotel nearby, where Hubert was close with the owners. During the day, they were in the lab. Elroy wasn’t interested in doing any tourism, and stayed close at hand as Hubert performed his tests. The other scientists and technicians present in the lab that week all wanted to see the bottles.

To Elroy’s dismay, Hubert’s tests on the bottles were inconclusive. While the wine in them was not modern (or, at least, younger than 1952), it was impossible to say how old it was, as its age fell somewhere in the two-hundred-year gray area (1750–1950) that wouldn’t yield its secrets to carbon dating.

Elroy had intended to fly straight back to the States, but during the week in Modane, he and Hubert noticed that one of the bottles of Lafite was leaking slightly through the wax. Elroy changed his plans, and on Sunday, May 29, he packed the bottle-bearing suitcases in the trunk of Hubert’s car, and together they drove across southern France to Bordeaux to see about getting the bottle recorked. On Monday they went to Lafite, only to be told that the château, because of the fragility, value, and possible historical significance of the bottle, would not recork it for them.

Hubert offered to do a longer test of the Jefferson bottles in the detector in the fraud lab at the University of Bordeaux. While it was a less sensitive device, it offered two advantages: it was big enough to accommodate all four Jefferson bottles at the same time; and it was available for tests of much longer duration. Elroy and Medina agreed, and Elroy left the bottles there for the next two months.

Like many who had crossed paths with the Jefferson bottles, Hubert found himself becoming interested in the Founding Father. He read a book on Jefferson’s European travels. He also read a book about Yquem in which one of Jefferson’s handwritten letters was reproduced in the original French, and was impressed by Jefferson’s command of the language.

The longer test again revealed no significant presence of C-137. Although Hubert wouldn’t send Elroy his official report until October, it was clear that his method, which had seemed so promising, was not going to resolve the mystery. At the end of July, Elroy returned to Bordeaux to pick up the bottles and bring them back to Florida. For their troubles, Hubert and Medina were left with a couple of souvenirs. Koch sent Hubert a book about his America’s Cup victory, and Elroy, who had programmed his cell phone to ring the whistled tune from
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
gave Medina an FBI baseball cap.

T
HE MADDENING INCONCLUSIVENESS
of the tests only caused Elroy’s questions to multiply, and as he learned more about Rodenstock, Elroy ramped up his inquiry into a full-blown investigation. He had a global network to call on, the far-flung fraternity of ex-agents from Scotland Yard, the FBI, and other police and intelligence organizations, and he assigned men to several different areas of research. In California he reached out to an FBI alumnus named Stanley Los, whose claim to fame had occurred when he was off duty and chased a serial killer down his Santa Barbara cul-de-sac. In London, Elroy called on Richard Marston, a thirty-three-year veteran of Scotland Yard with a penchant for flamboyant red bow ties and an expertise in international money laundering and commercial fraud; Marston had previously been stationed in Florida, where he worked with the FBI going after Caribbean con men. In Germany, Elroy used an outfit called Investigations and Forensic Services, a division of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and in Hong Kong he tapped another ex-FBI colleague. Within Koch’s office, publicist Brad Goldstein got into the spirit, too, embracing the chance to revive his former career as an investigative reporter; back then, his journalistic crusades had been directed more at governmental corruption than at the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Stanley Los was tasked with making contact with Rodenstock. On September 2, Los sent Rodenstock a fax, asking him to confirm that Koch’s Jefferson bottles came from Rodenstock’s collection and that they came from a Paris home once occupied by Jefferson, inquiring what steps Rodenstock had taken to authenticate the bottles, and asking for any scientific or other records supporting the attribution. “Based on your knowledge and research,” Los asked, “do you believe that the above bottles were owned by or bottled for Thomas Jefferson?” Los concluded on a wryly ambiguous note, writing: “Your reputation in the wine world is without equal, and your information confirming the authenticity of these bottles would mean much to Mr. Koch.”

Three days later, Rodenstock responded. Though he was “finished with the subject Jefferson bottles,” which had been amply covered by “the press (serious and unfortunately also unserious),” Rodenstock said that because he had “met Mr. Koch about five years ago personally at a fantastic Château Latour tasting and found him very kind and competent, I will answer your questions nevertheless.”

Rodenstock’s letter betrayed a lingering anger: “The nonsense written by many journalists in the matter of Jefferson proved that many scribblers were not really concerned about the matter, but only interested in a primitive gutter press report.” He then laid out Broadbent’s well-worn circumstantial arguments about Jefferson and wine, mentioning Christie’s authentication of the bottle and the engraving, and sharing, unbidden, his opinions about Jefferson. “One can’t pay enough tribute to [him]…,” Rodenstock wrote. “He was a great connoisseur…. Jefferson’s wine knowledge should be recognized much more in the U.S.A.” Rodenstock cited the Zurich/Oxford carbon datings, and said, alluding to the Frericks episode, “in that case, envy, malevolence and intrigues have been at work.”

“I hope,” Rodenstock continued, “that Mr. Koch isn’t one of these wine lovers who collect wines during half their life to compose a great wine cellar and then unfortunately put all the wines up for auction one day. That would be sad (and Mr. Jefferson would surely turn in his grave), since the
Maître du chai
has produced the wine to be drunk. It shouldn’t be a speculative object…. It is always an indescribable experience to drink such old wines. It literally gives you ‘gooseflesh.’ Alone the thought that Jefferson and Washington have also drunk these wines (1784, 1787…) makes you have a minute of silence when drinking these wines. You just drink history! And therefore one shouldn’t only collect, but also draw the cork of the bottles now and then. Mr. Koch has certainly already opened a Jefferson bottle or will do this some day.”

A
LOWER-TECH EXAM,
in the end, was what settled the matter.

After the disappointment of Philippe Hubert’s tests, Jim Elroy had been running his fingers over one of the Jefferson bottles when it occurred to him to have the engraving analyzed. Elroy had the bottles examined by two experts, one an engraver who worked near the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York, the other a former tool-mark specialist with the FBI, who scrutinized the inscriptions much more thoroughly than the Christie’s ceramics and glass department had in 1985. These experts had access to pedal-driven eighteenth-century engraving equipment, and Elroy bought some old bottles to experiment on. They tried to reproduce the engravings.