Sour Grapes Page #3

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This is my crazy... This is my crazy spot.

I get nervous

and my blood pressure goes up.

It's the ultimate existential art form.

It's living in a bottle. It's alive.

And then you drink it

and you absorb it into your body.

It's art that becomes

part of you, literally.

Well, that's Ponsot,

who's a great producer.

-Hey, Carl.

-Hello!

How you doing, babe?

I'm good.

A lot of good sh*t here.

You have a few drinks and then you come

here and spend 100 grand on wine.

This is the place.

This is the place, yeah.

They're very, very reasonably priced.

Where can you get a '61 white

for 600 bucks?

From 1961?

This is crazy time.

-Jef?

-Yeah.

1990 Romane-Conti.

This is maybe one of the greatest bottles

ever made of wine.

Right here.

-20 grand maybe?

-20 grand.

-He knows his prices.

-20 grand for the bottle.

And you want this.

If you like wine, you need this,

you want this.

But you have to decide,

do you want this or do you want a Prius?

Yes, exactly! Trade it for a Prius.

When we drink wine we don't look

at the price value, you know.

We look at what we get from the wine.

The excitement, you know.

The passion, the way they make

the wine and everything.

It's not about the price of the wine,

you know. Some people...

Rudy was very generous with everybody.

I had some of the greatest

Romane-Contis with him, you know,

I will ever have.

Put on your best Burgundy face.

Who wants to drink wine?

At the time when all this was happening,

there was a huge demand for old fine wine.

As a whole, Burgundy very quickly went

from affordable to unobtainable.

I guess you can call it the Rudy era.

It's very fine sediment, so stand them up

and then put the ice.

The economy was booming back then.

...standing up, not leaning down.

There was such tiny quantities

of Burgundy worldwide.

There wasn't enough to satisfy the thirst.

It was all about liquidity

and it continues to be.

Any time there's tremendous

volatility in a market,

and all asset classes move the same.

Dave, your go-to cellar's pretty good.

You've got some good stuff in here.

So many of my friends

in finance collect wine

because when you watch stocks

all day on Bloomberg, right,

and then you can see auction prices move,

there's a certain pride

to getting a good buy.

Today there is no relation between

the prices and what is in the bottle.

When I sell a bottle at 100,

I see this bottle when it's released

at 1,000.

How come?

At $2,600, I ask the bidder

against the room.

-Sold at...

-Dude, I just opened a bottle on Thursday.

-Yeah?

-Now I feel bad about opening it.

It's a 1,000 a bottle.

Can I refill it and put the cork back?

It was clear to me in very short order

that he had revolutionised

the wine market.

Prices were skyrocketing.

I thought it was

a pretty smart little racket.

He was cornering the market

in a lot of these wines.

What a clever thing to do.

If you have a lot of money,

go in, buy up a lot of wine,

drive up the prices, and then

start selling at the new high price.

There was one other guy there who was

always bidding furiously against Rudy

and that guy was the representative

for Bill Koch.

Collecting has to have

an emotional meaning to me.

Part of it is the detective story

of tracking it all down.

I've collected impressionistic art,

I've collected samurai swords,

silver coins from Greece,

have some antiquities,

have some sculpture.

And I've collected wine.

Do you want to see my wine bathroom?

The bathroom is generally a bathroom,

but I thought I'd be more fun

to make it interesting,

so we put wine crates here, wine labels,

corks on the ceiling,

and then if you look over there,

there are wine bottles on that wall.

My secret wine opener. Wine opener.

Not wine opener, cellar opener.

Come on in.

I've been a little bit obsessive

about buying wine in the past.

I have in total 43,000 bottles.

With super fine wines you can taste

the love the vintner had in making it.

And that to me is almost

a religious experience.

You know, we collectors

like precious things.

Love is extremely precious.

What price can you put

on the love of your wife?

What price... Well, if you're getting

a divorce, you can, but...

Here's one bottle of Jefferson wine.

1787 Lafite, Th.J.

I'll set it down on the table.

We'll line them up.

The reason I wanted to buy four bottles

of Thomas Jefferson wine is very simple.

The mere fact that Thomas Jefferson

owned it

and held it in his hand, et cetera,

et cetera, that's part of history.

Here's another one.

1787 Mouton, again Th.J.

Look at this bottle.

Isn't it beautiful in and of itself?

1737 Lafite, Chteau Rothschild.

The faker didn't know

his wine history very well

because the Rothschilds

didn't own Lafite in 1737.

Unfortunately, I paid $100,000 per bottle.

The rogues' gallery.

Well, the first time I think

I found a fake wine

it was because of the weight

of the bottle.

There was a bottle of Petrus

on the back of the table

and I reached to grab it,

and when I lifted it up I almost threw it

on the ceiling 'cause it was so light.

-This has a '75 seal on it.

-Yeah.

-But it's a 1929.

-Yeah.

That only started with the 1930 vintage.

You're looking for anomalies.

Is it in the right glass?

Does the cork have the right stamp?

Is the cork properly aged?

Is the paper correct?

Yeah, everything's pixelated here.

I wonder what the sediment in here is?

If these things have allegedly been

together for the last 60 years,

they need to look like it.

That is one hot mess.

If the capsule looks like hell,

and the label looks pristine,

that doesn't work.

You know, that's got a 95-year-old's face

on a teenager's body.

You know, you always want to be careful

with these online auctions

because you never know the provenance.

They just want to sell.

Really it's hard.

This bottle's corked, man.

No, I'm just kidding.

I love doing that sh*t.

At the time fake wine was just

starting to be talked about,

Rudy was quite the expert on fake wine

and when I asked him about it, he said

that he bought so much fake wine

that he'd had to become an expert on it.

No, they won't tell you

if there's something wrong with it,

but sometimes if they doubt

the bottle, they put the picture of it,

-so you be the judge.

-Okay.

Look at the picture, you want it,

you take it, you know.

Is there anybody out there looking

at conditions and...

Tell them about Acker auctions.

Acker's great man, we love John.

He and John Kapon were meticulously

going through all of his wines

to catalogue everything and sell some off.

John Kapon was the son of a very nice

family-run wine store in Manhattan.

Shopping for anything during the holidays

can be simply maddening,

and shopping for wine is no exception.

I'm here at Acker Merrall and Condit,

the oldest wine store in America,

located in New York City.

Acker Merrall wasn't a big house,

they were a store that got

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