Skip to main content

The Emperor's new bottles

I have just finished reading a book I received as a birthday present that's rather outside my usual span of reading. Okay, there were a couple of brief mentions of science, but the topic here was wine, and specifically the selling of very old wine.

Like many people, I enjoy a glass of wine with a meal, though I usually go for the house plonk. (To be honest I often prefer a good pint of beer, but it's rare that you can get one of these in restaurants.) However I have bought nicer wine for home consumption and special occasions. We've occasionally partaken of the likes of Chateau Beychevelle or Chateau Talbot, or the second wines of some the top names like Margaux and Latour. And there is no doubt they taste a bit different from the ordinary stuff - more complex for sure.

However this book concerns wine collectors and their quest for bottles dating back as far as the 18th century. When I first heard of wine collectors, I assumed they were like stamp collectors. I don't think many stamp collectors will take their most precious mint stamp and use it on an envelope, and I thought the same applied to wine collectors. But no, a lot of them, after paying maybe $10,000 or $50,000 or in extreme cases over $100,000 for a bottle tend to open the bottle and drink it.

At this point they will sometimes come up with much praise for the wine. It's always praise 'considering', but even so the experts can get quite ecstatic, though as the book points out there is fairly good evidence they are likely to be fooling themselves.

However the main thread of this fascinating book is not the tasting self-deception of wine enthusiasts, it's some downright dirty dealings. Over the years various ancient bottles turned up with the initials Th. J. engraved on them. It was known that Thomas Jefferson had been a wine enthusiast and lived in Paris at roughly the right time, so they were sold as being his bottles, even though the Jefferson experts were doubtful that this incredibly detailed record keeper would omit to mention these specific purchases.

It was these 'Jefferson' bottles that sold for the biggest cash values. But we become increasingly aware that they may well be fakes. After all, even more than art, appreciation of the difference between a good wine and a great one, or a real bottle and a fake one, is subjective.

All in all an excellent read in a non-fiction-as-narrative style. Like some wines, the ending is perhaps a slight let-down, but the journey is well worth it. Take a look at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you  

Comments

  1. What an interesting topic! I do find wine a very interesting substance - although I do think some of these tasters go a bit over the top with their cherries and roughly-turned-cut-grass similes. All it ever tastes like to me is... wine.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope