Lafite-Rothschild 1787

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A Piece of History

BY JOHN BAINBRIDGE

Assuming our occasional role as an eyewitness of historic events, we recently made a point, on a visit to London, of attending an auction, at Christie’s, of “Finest and Rarest Wines,” the crowning feature of which was a hand-blown amber-green bottle engraved “1787 LAFITTE TH. J.” and believed by a number of distinguished wine experts to have been part of an order placed in 1790 by Thomas Jefferson, who managed, among his not inconsiderable other accomplishments, to become America’s first wine connoisseur. The wines were offered for sale by Hardy Rodenstock, a West German music publisher who is also well known in the upper echelons of wine fanciers as a connoisseur and ardent collector of fine old wines. How he came into possession of the 1787 Lafite (to give the wine its present spelling) is something of a mystery. All that Mr. Rodenstock has been willing to disclose is that the Lafite was among a cache of a dozen or so ancient bottles of wine that were discovered not long ago in a very old, bricked-up cellar in Paris. The trove also included two more bottles of 1787 Lafite, three bottles of 1787 Château Margaux, three bottles of 1787 Château Brane-Mouton (now Mouton-Rothschild), and six bottles of Château d’Yquem—three from 1787 and three from 1784. One of the bottles of 1784 Yquem was the centerpiece of a wine tasting organized last year by Mr. Rodenstock for an international circle of wine connoisseurs and collectors, including Michael Broadbent, the director of Christie’s wine department.

“The 1784 that I tasted was soft, still sweet, and without fault,” Mr. Broadbent told us when we visited him in his office the day before the sale. His tasting note, made at the time, is more lyrical: “Color is perfect old amber, bright and lively; bouquet perfect! Unbelievable. Scented vanilla and blancmange. On the palate, still sweet, with perfect weight, balance, and acidity. Dry finish. Flavor of peaches and cream.” How well the 1787 Yquem has stood up over two centuries will become known next year, when Mr. Rodenstock plans to open a bottle of it at a tasting that he has arranged to put on at Monticello.

Jefferson was not only very fond of wine, Mr. Broadbent told us, but a great believer in its social value. “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap,” Jefferson wrote to a friend, and throughout his life he argued consistently for low tariffs on wine, on the ground that “it is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.” His knowledge of wine was significantly broadened during the four years he spent as Minister to France, though he hardly went there as an oenological novice. Jefferson fell in love with France—its culture, its political philosophy, its cuisine, and its wines, which for the first time he was able to taste at their best. In 1787, he made a tour of the French wine regions and, with typical thoroughness, classified the various growths; those he named as being of the first quality were (in modern spelling) Margaux, Latour, Haut-Brion, Lafite, and Yquem. During his visits to the vineyards, Jefferson made it his business to become acquainted with the proprietors and to arrange to buy directly from them rather than from wine merchants.

After returning to America and accepting the post of Secretary of State in President Washington’s Cabinet, Jefferson continued to buy wine directly from French vineyards, employing as his shipping agents Fenwick Mason & Company, in Bordeaux. (Joseph Fenwick was United States Consul there.) In September, 1790, Jefferson sent off letters to a number of château owners for a considerable amount of wine for Washington and for him, the lots to be identified with the initials “G.W.” and “T.J.,” respectively. According to an impressive amount of written evidence (Jefferson saved the letters he received and copies of those he wrote) collected by Mr. Broadbent, the “1787 Lafitte Th. J.” coming up for sale was part of the September, 1790, order. “Of course, there is no proof,” Mr. Broadbent said. “What we can say with certainty, on the advice of Hugo Morley-Fletcher, who is our glass expert here, is that the bottle is of the correct age. Also that the lettering and wheel engraving on the bottle are absolutely right for the period. The cork appears to be original, and the cork of a bottle of 1787 Yquem found in the same cellar has been analyzed in a German laboratory and proved to be original. Furthermore, we have circumstantial evidence—masses of it—supporting the ordering of this wine and its identification. That’s about it.”

Lot 337, the “1787 Lafitte Th. J.,” was the first item in the afternoon sale, scheduled to begin, in Christie’s West Room, at two-thirty. Some time before that, television crews began setting up cameras and lights, which turned the West Room into something resembling a film set. Newspaper photographers were taking pictures of the 1787 Lafite, displayed on green felt in a glass case near the rostrum. All the seats had been occupied, standees were lined up at the back and sides, and each potential bidder had been issued a bidding board—a device, somewhat larger than a Ping-Pong paddle, bearing the number that had been assigned to the prospective bidder when he or she registered for the sale. Shortly before the auction was scheduled to begin, the 1787 Lafite was removed from the case and handed to a secretary from Mr. Broadbent’s office, who held it, with remarkable nonchalance, at the front of the room during the bidding.

At two-thirty precisely, Mr. Broadbent—silver-haired, slender, in a three-piece pin-striped blue suit, a light-blue shirt, and a subtly figured tie, a white handkerchief in his breast pocket—ascended the rostrum. After making a few preliminary remarks and a little joke (“This is one time when the buyer will get something back on the bottle”), he proceeded briskly to Lot 337. The bidding opened at ten thousand pounds, and rose steadily, by two-thousand-pound increments, to forty-thousand. A slight pause. “Forty thousand. Forty thousand pounds,” Mr. Broadbent repeated. Bidding at once resumed, and ascended without interruption to fifty thousand pounds. Thereafter, the number of active bidders, of whom there had been seven (all but one, we learned later, connected with the wine business), began to thin out, but the bidding did not falter. The only sound in the room was the voice of Mr. Broadbent announcing the bids, which, after another fleeting pause, at sixty-eight thousand pounds, spiralled upward without hesitation through the seventies and eighties. The bidding had now narrowed down to a contest between a man at the back of the room and a man in the middle. As it continued, they quickly pushed the price by two-thousand-pound segments to a hundred thousand. “One hundred thousand pounds, at the back,” Mr. Broadbent said. In the same breath he continued, “A hundred and five. One hundred and five thousand pounds, in the middle. At one hundred and five thousand pounds. Going at one hundred and five. Any more? One hundred and five thousand.” He brought the gavel down. Almost instantly, the room resounded with applause. From start to finish, the bidding had taken a minute and thirty-nine seconds.

The successful bidder turned out to be Christopher Forbes, a vice-president of the magazine Forbes and a son of the magazine’s wealthy and colorful publisher, Malcolm Forbes. (The underbidder was Marvin Shanken, who is the editor and publisher of a number of periodicals, including The Wine Spectator, a semi-monthly newspaper for the trade.) As photographers and reporters gathered around Mr. Forbes, he said that he planned to depart for New York late that afternoon in his company’s plane with his purchase, which would be displayed in the Forbes office, on a dining-room table that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson. (The Forbes family collects Presidential memorabilia, among many other things.) When a reporter observed that a hundred and five thousand pounds (or a hundred and fifty thousand dollars) was a lot of money for one bottle of wine, Mr. Forbes smiled, and said, “It’s more than a bottle of wine. It’s a piece of history.” Soon afterward, he walked out of Christie’s carrying the piece of history in a tote bag that bore the Forbes logo and its advertising slogan, “Capitalist Tool.”

Later, we had a word with Mr. Broadbent in his office about the sale. Over a glass of champagne (his favorite drink), he said that a hundred and five thousand pounds was far and away the most that had ever been paid for a bottle of wine. The previous record was thirty-eight thousand dollars, for a jeroboam of 1870 Mouton-Rothschild sold at an auction in Dallas in 1984. He said that he had telephoned the news of the new record to the seller, Mr. Rodenstock, in Germany. “He’s staggered,” Mr. Broadbent said. “His reserve was five thousand pounds.” Mr. Broadbent was not a little surprised himself. “I had thought it might bring twenty-five or thirty thousand pounds. Somebody had said it might fetch fifty thousand. That, I thought, frankly, was in the realm of fiction.”

How did he feel, we asked, when the bidding went soaring far beyond that figure.

“I will tell you a curious thing about that,” he replied. “I first noticed it when I was doing the Heublein auctions in America. During a sale, I found that I was conscious of only three things: the lot number, the step numbers in the bidding, and the number of people with paddles. Just a series of numbers. Afterward, people would say, ‘What did you think of the prices?’ I really didn’t know what they had been at all.” After a pause, he added, “However, I realize now that one hundred and five thousand pounds is a very good price indeed.” He smiled, and took another sip of champagne. ♦

The Château Lafite estate run by the Rothschilds is, with its 100 hectares of cultivated land, the largest of the main Pauillac vineyards.

It is located in the highest part of the area and the view from its château, with its conical towers that appear on the label, takes in the banks of the River Gironde, which flows nearby. The wines are a blend of four different varieties of grape – Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petite Verdot and Cabernet Franc. Lafite matures slightly earlier than other Premier Cru wines in the region on account of the generous amounts of Merlot used, and it is this that also makes the wine more delicate and subtle than those wines which are completely dominated by Cabernet Sauvignon.

“Lafite has a soul, a beautiful, generous, kindly soul. Lafite turns bare earth into heaven. Lafite is harmony, a harmony between man and nature, because without our magnificent winegrowers, nothing would be accomplished.”
Baron Eric de Rothschild 

Of the five Premier Cru wines in the region, Château Lafite to my mind has managed to produce the year’s best wine in many of the top years in 1900th centrury. The times I have spent in the company of a 1934, 1953, 1959, 1982 and 1986 have been unforgettable. And it was then that I always remembered how many wine critics fondly describe Lafite as ‘the perfection of elegance’.

Vineyard soil: fine gravel mixed with aeolien sands on a bedrock of tertiary limestone
Production area: 103 ha
Grape varieties: Cabernet Sauvignon (71%), Merlot (25%), Cabernet Franc (3%) and Petit Verdot (1%)
Average age of vines: 30 years
Harvest method: hand picked
Winemaking: the vinification is nowadays done with all the sophisticated instruments which modern oenology has created. Fermentation takes place in large oak vats in which the musts remain for 18 to 25 days.
Ageing: the wines are aged entirely in new barrels for 18 to 24 months. During this time,the wine is racked 7 times and is fined with the whites of 6 eggs per barrel. Only certain vats are selected to make the Grand Vin, Lafite. The others are used to make the second wine of Lafite, the “Carruades de Lafite”.