1787…was it even a good year? /continued…

Posted on | March 6, 2006

As I was saying…

The news that a bottle of wine had been sold for a staggering $90,000 swept around the world as if it had been poured into a glass and swirled around and around. The original press release which seemed to have gone through a number of mutations on various web sites could still be found on the site of the Antique Wine Company (the seller) the other week complete with its numerous errors of fact. It is so strange to announce to the world something which in itself is so extraordinary and yet not find the time to ensure that the original source of the news is, well, more accurate.

Now, I confess, I had been meaning to explore some of these inaccuracies in more detail in blog au vin but unfortunately despite a lot of time spent in researching this, at the very last minute it was deemed that a conflict of interest might arise between my unimpeachable source of knowledge and current commercial interests which, I might add, had nothing whatsoever to do with me. In fact, if you care to hark back to my first blog on this subject we can all ruminate on the fact that I had not only remarked on the manipulation of opinion on this subject as a matter of historical record but I can also now assert that this is still true today.

Moreover, strange to say, I had no idea where my blogging meanderings would take me. This runs contrary to every kind of journalism practise today where it is required that everyone knows exactly where they are going on a story before they even step out of the office to start an interview. It is more cost-effective. And, in a world driven by profit considerations I can well understand how much more economic this policy may be whilst it may also result in news and stories which are less truthful and less well-researched. But, and this is key, you don’t waste time on stories that go nowhere…

But if you are a wine collector and you have the kind of money to spare which enables you to purchase a bottle of wine for something shy of one hundred thousand dollars you don’t have to rely on the contents of a press release to do so.

I would love to know, however, perhaps like you, what might be the exact details of the provenance of this bottle and how one can be so sure that the provenance is what one is told. Having read what Jim Gabler had to say about the Lafite 1787 and, in particular, the then head of research at Monticello on this self-same subject, I am at a loss to understand why there is so little transparency in these transactions and why we can’t all share in the pleasure of knowing, for sure, that these bottles are exactly what they purport to be? Why must the background be such a closely guarded secret?

Doubtless, they have an answer at Los Alamos for all these things. Why Los Alamos? Because, they must surely have the answer to everything there? I only mention them because I have always been intrigued by the place - somewhere where everyone has a PhD. The only place that has surely discovered the truth of Thomas Beale (well, you’ll have to look him up) must be the place where they know about old bottles of wine. And, where, I discovered, they complain about the lack thereof:

"Wine, wine wine … If they served wine at the Otowi Building Cafeteria we would all be too drunk to really care about the service."

^{[Source: Los Alamos BB]}

By the way, an extraordinary coincidence. Thomas Beale was also known as Thomas JEFFERSON Beale - although, oddly, there is no real evidence for this. Even more of a coincidence? The tie-in between Los Alamos and Beale comes from the book “Archimedes Revenge”. An excellent book on cryptic mathematical puzzles.

It seems that even if the brains at Los Alamos have not actually considered the problem of old bottles of wine they do at least have an interest in them for there on their website are details of the 52nd Annual Western Spectroscopy Conference (2005).

That Spectroscopy has been going for 52 years is also something of a surprise. There in between papers on “Probing Radical Intermediates of Bimolecular Reactions”, “The Importance of Isolated Molecule Dynamics in Solution Phase Vibrational Relaxation”, and “Semiclassical Scattering of Photoexcited Wavepackets on Conical Intersections” [get the picture] was this: “Fruit of the Vine or Pickle Juice: Modern Spectroscopic Solutions to Enological Problems”. [Actually this was a UC Davis solution but I found it on the Los Alamos web site.]

M. P Augustine of the Dept of Chemistry UC Davis has this to say:

"With the emergence of a new technique, the wine industry now has a promising procedure for quantifying the amount of spoilage in unopened bottles of fine and, often, expensive wine. This full bottle NMR method takes advantage of the unique chemical shifts of each of the components of wine to determine the amount of acetic acid, acetaldehyde, and, possibly, trace compounds unique to various wines and leaves the bottle unaltered and unviolated."

Enough said. I want one.

 

 

I wonder…? Did they use this on a bottle of 1787 Yquem? Or, doesn’t it matter what the contents is like inside? But then you still can’t differentiate between the original and whether it is simply drinkable. Oh well, back to square one and I’ve cancelled my order.

I still can’t help wondering whether it was a good year or not..?

FC.

PS Who knows what this bottle of wine is in the picture?

Comments