I am just about done with The Billionaire’s Vinegar
In The Billionaire’s Vinegar, there is skepticism regarding the provenance of a bottle of 1787 Yquem that was said to be owned by Thomas Jefferson at one time. Bottle owner Bill Koch has former FBI agent Jim Elroy dig into the background of this priceless bottle.
Elroy was drifting straight toward the same morass of subjectivity that had bedeviled all previous challenges to the bottles – the arguments of bottle variation, the blind street of Rodenstock’s reticence, the how-would-you-know-what-it’s-supposed-to-taste-like posture, Monticello’s skepticism versus the impossibility of proving a negative, the inadequacy of existing radio-dating methods, the sensory validations by such luminaries as Broadbent and Jancis Robinson, not to mention the disincentive for Koch to sacrifice a bottle that had cost tens of thousands of dollars for a test that might not be definitive. The odds were against his coming to any more certain a conclusion than had the few people before him who had questioned their bottles.
Talk about a lose-lose. The only real way to truly find out if your suspected-to-be-fake bottle is real, would be to open it and test its contents in a lab. But opening the bottle for testing, immediately makes the bottle worthless if it does in fact happen to be legit.
Now this particular bottle was said to be Yquem, which is no slouch of a Chateau. From Wikipedia:
Château d’Yquem is a Premier Cru Supérieur (Fr: “Great First Growth” or “Great First Vintage”) wine from the Sauternes, Gironde region in the southern part of the Bordeaux vineyards known as Graves.
In the Bordeaux Wine Official Classification of 1855, Château d’Yquem was the only Sauternes given this rating, indicating its perceived superiority and higher prices over all other wines of its type. Wines from Château d’Yquem are characterised by their complexity, concentration and sweetness. A relatively high acidity helps to balance the sweetness. Another characteristic for which Château d’Yquem wines are known is their longevity. In a good year, a bottle will only begin to show its qualities after a decade or two of cellaring and, with proper care, will keep for a century or more, gradually adding layers of taste and hitherto undetected fruity overtones.
But don’t be intimidated by the flowery language regarding “fruity overtones” and “layers of taste”. Turns out it could all be B.S. According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, wine ratings and experts are about as reliable as a coin flip.
To test that idea, Mr. Hodgson restricted his attention to wines entering a certain number of competitions, say five. Then he made a bar graph of the number of wines winning 0, 1, 2, etc. gold medals in those competitions. The graph was nearly identical to the one you’d get if you simply made five flips of a coin weighted to land on heads with a probability of 9%. The distribution of medals, he wrote, “mirrors what might be expected should a gold medal be awarded by chance alone.”