1/ A bottle of 1787 Château Lafite Rothschild

Supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson

Was at the heart of an international scandal.

Buckle up for part mystery, part wine history,

And one big juicy story.

2/ Thomas Jefferson was America’s first famous wine buff.

He traveled to French wine regions and studied viticulture.

He even had 20,000 bottles of wine at the White House.

3/ In 1788, Jefferson ordered 125 bottles from France,

But they never arrived.

Fast forward to 1985, a mysterious bottle marked “Th. J.” appears at a Christie’s auction...

The winning bid?

$156,000, the highest price ever at the time for a bottle of wine

4/ The Th. J. wine came from Hardy Rodenstock (remember this name.)

He’s the Sherlock Holmes of finding old and rare wines.

The problem:

No one could authenticate the Th. J. bottle.

(Cue dramatic music)

5/ The wine had been discovered in a bricked-up cellar in Paris.

At least that was the rumor.

Some say it was from a secret Nazi bunker.

Others say it was from a con artist’s basement.

Speculation was rampant.

6/ The head of Christie’s Auctions wine department, Michael Broadbent, claimed the bottle and engravings were legit, saying:

“[They’re] perfect in every sense: color, bouquet, taste.”

7/ After the sale, other serious collectors wanted Thomas Jefferson wines.

Bill Koch bought four bottles of wine dating back to the late 1700s.

Side Note: Koch’s wine collection is worth $20+ million today. Here's him looking like a kid in a candy store.

8/ Fast forward to 2005.

Koch is going to show his collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

This requires tracking down the Jefferson bottles’ provenance.

Apart from Broadbent’s authentication, though,

They find nothing.

9/ The Koch estate calls the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

This is the response they get:

“We don’t believe [your] bottles ever belonged to Thomas Jefferson.”

(Dun-dun-duuuun)

Bill Koch's reaction after hearing that:

10/ At the time, wine fraud was basically unheard of.

So, Koch hires a former FBI agent to track down Rodenstock.

When he asked Rodenstock where he bought the wine, he’s mum.

11/ Evidence starts mounting that the Jefferson bottle might be fake.

For instance:

Jefferson’s daily record had no wines from 1787
Jefferson tended to use "Th:J” with a colon, instead of “Th. J.” for engravings.

12/ A different collector with a Th. J. bottle, Hans-Peter Fredricks, gets suspicious.

He sends his Th. J. wine to a forensics lab. They determined:

The bottle was from 1962, not 1787.
The engravings were made with a power tool.

Forgery = confirmed
Rodenstock = in trouble

13/ Investigators believed Rodenstock perpetrated a multi-million wine fraud.

No one knew how many bottles of wine he sold, real or fake.

He even was able to fool legendary critic Robert Parker with a fake 1921 Petrus (that’s a future story)

14/ Why did Rodenstock make fake wine as well as sell real wine?

Part of the reason was money, but most of it was hubris. He thought he was smarter than anyone in the world.

He was never formally charged, and continued hosting mysterious wine dinners until his death in 2018.

15/ TL;DR
Hardy Rodenstock “finds” fake Thomas Jefferson wines,

Sells them and other rare fakes for millions of dollars.

People catch on.

This was the first high-profile wine fraud, but certainly not the last.

16/ This story comes from Benjamin Wallace’s book Billionaire’s Vinegar.

Rumors are it’s going to be a movie with Matthew McConaughey

And to that, I say:

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Every week I’ll be uncovering fascinating stories in the world of wine