It had been the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold.

In 1985, at a heated auction by Christie’s of London, a 1787 bottle of Château Lafite Bordeaux-one of the cache of bottles unearthed in a bricked-up Paris cellar and supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson-went for $156,000 to a member from the Forbes family. The discoverer from the bottle was pop-band manager turned wine collector Hardy Rodenstock, who experienced a knack for obtaining extremely older and beautiful wines. But gossips about the bottle soon arose..READING MORE on the subject of The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Secret from the World’s PRICIEST Bottle of Wine Why wouldn’t Rodenstock reveal the precise location where it turned out found? Was it component of a smuggled Nazi hoard? Or do his reticence conceal an even darker secret?

It could take more than 2 decades for those queries to become answered and involve a gallery of intriguing players-among them Michael Broadbent, the bicycle-riding British auctioneer who speaks of wines as though they are ladies and staked his reputation on the record-setting sale; Serena Sutcliffe, Broadbent’s elegant archrival, whose palate is usually covered by a hefty insurance policy; and Bill Koch, the extravagant Florida tycoon bent on exposing the reality about Rodenstock.

Pursuing the storyplot from Monticello to London to Zurich to Munich and beyond, Benjamin Wallace also offers a mesmerizing history of wines, complete with vivid accounts of subterranean European laboratories where old vintages are dated and of Jefferson’s colorful, wine-soaked days in France, where he literally drank in the culture.

Suspenseful, witty, and thrillingly unusual, The Billionaire’s Vinegar is the vintage tale of what may be the most elaborate con since the Hitler diaries. It is also the debut of an exceptionally powerful new tone of voice in narrative nonfiction.