The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine by Benjamin Wallace
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This book is about a fraud perpetrated in the wine world that many people knowingly or unknowingly participated in. Benjamin Wallace’s writing follows the apparent “discovery” and sale/auction of a cache of wines purportedly belonging to Thomas Jefferson. He tries to tie this together over multiple decades from the 18th century with Thomas Jefferson and the late 20th century into the 21st with all these rare vintages that were found and sold. It delves into the wine world on both sides of the Atlantic and references many players in this space. It was an aggravating read as people can suck and consequences be damned. I cannot believe the lack of caring by the people in this book regarding provenance, especially the auction houses. Everyone just wants to make a buck and doesn’t care about authenticity. That is what hurt me most about this book. The lack of veracity in historical artifacts. At first The Billionaire’s Vinegar started off boringly. There were tons of people, vintages, and vineyards rattled off that they lost all meaning and contributed very little to the story. This somewhat continued throughout the book, and it was hard to work out the connections or refer back to who exactly a person was. I wish the structure of it was more cohesive. There would be times a person would be mentioned who was conducting a test or some other random person and suddenly, we would be delving into their backstory. We would be given a history that contributed nothing. It was exhausting and dull. It would just around between different timelines and there did not seem to be a connecting thread that was being followed. The ending was also horrible. I was so hopeful for this book as I like historical, intriguing, and sudden find type themes. There were pockets of intrigue but there were too many deviations into uninteresting topics to help hold this one up. Ultimately, I would skip this one but looking into wine and its history especially the rare ones, would be interesting in and of itself.
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