• A 200 Year Old Bottle of Wine

    Date: 2009.12.17 | Category: Pop Culture | Tags:

    I’m reading The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine, by Benjamin Wallace. The synopsis of the book is this (from the back cover):

    The Billionaire’s Vinegar tells the true story of the 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux — supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson — that sold for $156,000 at auction and of the eccentrics whose lives intersected with it. Was it truly entombed in a Paris cellar for two hundred years? Or did it come from a secret Nazi bunker? Or from the moldy basement of a devilishly brilliant con artist? As Benjamin Wallace unravels the mystery, we meet a gallery of intriguing players — from the bicycling-riding British auctioneer who speaks of wines as if they are women to the obsessive wine collector who discovered the bottle. Suspenseful and thrillingly strange, this is the vintage tale of what could be the most elaborate con since the Hitler diaries.

    I started this book in the fall, but put it down for some reason and just recently picked it back up. I’m stunned by what I’m reading, not only about Thomas Jefferson, but also about how this particular bottle of wine was handled.

    If you’ve read it, or know the ending, don’t tell me!

    © 2009 – 2010, Outside My Head. All rights reserved.