Wino Wednesday | What would you pay for an old bottle of vinegar?

Better late than never, right?

Today's post was inspired by my latest read, The Billionaire's Vinegar. What a fascinating book! A brief summary for you all... In 1985, a cache of wine was found walled up in a Paris basement. The bottles were old and engraved with "Lafitte, 1787, Th. J."

Now here's some Wine 101. The old spelling "Lafitte" refers to one of the premier crus in Bordeaux, Chateau Lafite. To give you an idea of its value on the market, recent vintages from 2009 or 2010 can go for as high as $4k. Another thing to know about some of these prestigious Bordeaux growths is that they are most often made with the intention to age. Why age a wine? Have you ever had a red that was much to big for your palate to handle. It may be overly strong on the tannins leaving a "furry" feeling on your tongue. Well, over time, the minor amount of oxygen in the bottles will temper the wine giving it a completely different taste and softening out those harsh tannins. In fact, back in the 18th and early 19th centuries, European aristocratic families would constantly be stocking their wine cellars, not for themselves, but for their progeny. The wine you drank was what Dad bought.

The date 1787 on the bottle obviously made this Lafite extremely valuable. The question was - has it exceeded its prime time? Bottles left to age too long will start to lose their flavor. The engraving most important to this bottle was the "Th. J." Can you guess what that indicated? The wine hunters of that day had uncovered a treasure trove of bottles of Lafite, Yquem, Petrus and other prestigious vintages once belonging to Thomas Jefferson, well known for leading the American discovery of fine wine.

To make a long story short, Christies first auctioned one of the Jefferson bottles and sold it for $156,000 to a member of the Forbes family. Wallace narrates the story from there, the history around the bottle, Thomas Jefferson, the elite circles of antique wine collectors, and ultimately the dark mystery of its origins. What I loved most about this book is it takes a complete 180 halfway through - it kept me mesmerized the entire time!