Read Online The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace - Free Book Online
Authors: Benjamin Wallace
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years later. “I laugh when someone says, ‘That’s a typical ’82,’ when he has only drunk three.” To really know a château, you had to have tasted its wine over a century of vintages.
To be a great taster also depended on one’s palate sensitivity and palate memory. Some members of the Rodenstock clique had an almost synesthetic reaction to wines; they didn’t merely smell and taste them, they saw them, each with its own shape and structure and character. Wines, for these super-tasters—as a Yale researcher has designated the small percentage of people with an especially high density of taste buds—were as starkly distinct and instantly recognizable as faces. Rodenstock was a good taster. Maybe he wasn’t the virtuoso some friends described (one claimed that given a room of unmarked 1985 Bordeaux, Rodenstock could pick out each château), but he was exceptional.
Even the best palates could be humbled in a blind tasting, in which labels were concealed. Sometimes you caught a wine immediately; sometimes you could sit in front of it for five hours and still not get it. The conventional wisdom held that beginners often performed better at this, because they didn’t know all the exceptions to the exceptions. Harry Waugh, the English wine merchant and writer, was once asked how often he confused Bordeaux with Burgundy. “Not since lunch,” he replied.
Some tasters frowned on blind tasting. It was one thing to know the names of the wines on a table, and simply not know which glass contained which. That was interesting. But purely blind tasting was, they argued, a trivializing parlor game that wowed outsiders but wasn’t a learning exercise.
The art of drinking the very oldest rarities required an extra degree of connoisseurship—almost a kind of necrophilia. The normal sequence when evaluating a wine might be look-smell-taste, but when opening an old wine, Broadbent thought that one should smell first. The color wasn’t going to change, whereas with an old wine, the smell very likely would. An old wine exposed to oxygen normally evolved much more rapidly than a younger wine. The initial bouquet would tell you a lot more than the color, yet it might last only thirty seconds. Then again, an old wine could surprise you. That 1893 Margaux might first merely taste drinkable, merely be
recognizable
as wine, yet two hours later have opened up into something rich with red-berry fruit, with what some connoisseurs poetically called “the sweetness of death.” This was one of the unpredictabilities of old wine that fascinated people like Rodenstock. Opening one of these bottles could be like waking something up gradually, or igniting something that burned brightly before quickly petering out. You never knew which it would be.
E VEN AMONG HIS clique of obsessives, Rodenstock stood out as a monomaniac. He segued from managing bands to collecting music-publishing royalties, and increasingly devoted his time to looking for bottles, networking, and attending auctions. He became engaged to Patricia Woschek, daughter of Heinz-Gert, who owned
Alles über Wein
. It was impossible to talk to him about anything other than wine, and nearly everyone with whom he associated was somehow involved with it. In 1980 he hosted the first of what would become annual tastings.
He chose the restaurant Fuente as the setting. At the time, tastings in Germany tended to be monastic affairs, with bland slices of bread, a few grams of cheese, and wine. Tastings in conjunction with meals were a novelty. Rodenstock supplied the wine, and Otto Jung, who was looking to boost his restaurant’s profile, provided the food and service. The first year, Rodenstock’s guests were a small group—“fifteen freaks,” in Jung’s words. A few were friends from the music business, some were wine people, and some were celebrities—mainly politicians and soccer stars—whom Rodenstock somehow knew. The tasting made the newspapers when
To be a great taster also depended on one’s palate sensitivity and palate memory. Some members of the Rodenstock clique had an almost synesthetic reaction to wines; they didn’t merely smell and taste them, they saw them, each with its own shape and structure and character. Wines, for these super-tasters—as a Yale researcher has designated the small percentage of people with an especially high density of taste buds—were as starkly distinct and instantly recognizable as faces. Rodenstock was a good taster. Maybe he wasn’t the virtuoso some friends described (one claimed that given a room of unmarked 1985 Bordeaux, Rodenstock could pick out each château), but he was exceptional.
Even the best palates could be humbled in a blind tasting, in which labels were concealed. Sometimes you caught a wine immediately; sometimes you could sit in front of it for five hours and still not get it. The conventional wisdom held that beginners often performed better at this, because they didn’t know all the exceptions to the exceptions. Harry Waugh, the English wine merchant and writer, was once asked how often he confused Bordeaux with Burgundy. “Not since lunch,” he replied.
Some tasters frowned on blind tasting. It was one thing to know the names of the wines on a table, and simply not know which glass contained which. That was interesting. But purely blind tasting was, they argued, a trivializing parlor game that wowed outsiders but wasn’t a learning exercise.
The art of drinking the very oldest rarities required an extra degree of connoisseurship—almost a kind of necrophilia. The normal sequence when evaluating a wine might be look-smell-taste, but when opening an old wine, Broadbent thought that one should smell first. The color wasn’t going to change, whereas with an old wine, the smell very likely would. An old wine exposed to oxygen normally evolved much more rapidly than a younger wine. The initial bouquet would tell you a lot more than the color, yet it might last only thirty seconds. Then again, an old wine could surprise you. That 1893 Margaux might first merely taste drinkable, merely be
recognizable
as wine, yet two hours later have opened up into something rich with red-berry fruit, with what some connoisseurs poetically called “the sweetness of death.” This was one of the unpredictabilities of old wine that fascinated people like Rodenstock. Opening one of these bottles could be like waking something up gradually, or igniting something that burned brightly before quickly petering out. You never knew which it would be.
E VEN AMONG HIS clique of obsessives, Rodenstock stood out as a monomaniac. He segued from managing bands to collecting music-publishing royalties, and increasingly devoted his time to looking for bottles, networking, and attending auctions. He became engaged to Patricia Woschek, daughter of Heinz-Gert, who owned
Alles über Wein
. It was impossible to talk to him about anything other than wine, and nearly everyone with whom he associated was somehow involved with it. In 1980 he hosted the first of what would become annual tastings.
He chose the restaurant Fuente as the setting. At the time, tastings in Germany tended to be monastic affairs, with bland slices of bread, a few grams of cheese, and wine. Tastings in conjunction with meals were a novelty. Rodenstock supplied the wine, and Otto Jung, who was looking to boost his restaurant’s profile, provided the food and service. The first year, Rodenstock’s guests were a small group—“fifteen freaks,” in Jung’s words. A few were friends from the music business, some were wine people, and some were celebrities—mainly politicians and soccer stars—whom Rodenstock somehow knew. The tasting made the newspapers when
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