Pieter Colpaert
speaker
122 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Pieter Colpaert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And he spent a lot of his time visiting the vineyards of Bordeaux, of Burgundy, buying up wine for his collection.
I think he kind of finagled a dream job for himself. But then in 1985, supposedly, someone discovers this like bricked up cellar wall in Paris and they find a wine cellar that's more than 150 years old. Several bottles in there have Thomas Jefferson's initials, TH and J. So those bottles, they end up in the hands of this famous German guy, wine collector, music producer, Hardy Rodenstock.
He works together with Christie's, the auction house. They authenticate the bottles, they auction off several of them, and then in 1989, a bottle of 1869 Chateau Lafite, supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson, sold for more than $150,000. So this is 35 years ago at the time, the most expensive wine ever sold. Now, guess what?
Yep. I mean, listen, there had always been suspicions around the authenticity of these wines. So in 2005, billionaire wine collector Bill Koch, he had some of his so-called Jefferson bottles tested by a team of experts. And these experts, they found that the bottles contained wine from the 1960s, not from the 18th century.
So Jefferson, he kept really good records of his wine purchases, but very few of his bottles are still around. And even fewer can be proven to have belonged to him. Though one of those fake bottles actually ended up being one of the most expensive bottles never sold. What do you mean never sold? Okay, this is another one of my favorite stories.
William Socolan, he's this famous New York wine merchant. He had a bottle of Chateau Margaux from 1787. It had Jefferson's initials. Slash 1965, but okay, yep. And he had this bottle on consignment from its English owner. So he was going around New York trying to sell it for half a million dollars. People were kind of laughing at him.
No one thought that he would actually be able to sell a bottle of wine for half a million dollars. But as part of his whole PR blitz, he went to this very fancy Chateau Margaux dinner at this very fancy Four Seasons restaurant in New York. And then at the end of that night, I don't know how many glasses of wine deep, he walks into a metal tray table carrying that wine and he breaks the bottle.
Well, I mean, he actually didn't because it was literally in his obituary that was published in the New York Times.
Funny thing about that story, some of the attendees, they immediately started dipping their fingers into whatever drops that they could salvage so that they could at least get a taste of this wine. The wine had chemically deteriorated and the restaurant manager said it was completely undrinkable.
Well... So Colin, he did have the foresight to insure the wine. So he received a $225,000 insurance payout, which he says he shared with the owner. And to this day, I think it still holds the record for the world's most expensive broken bottle of wine.
Yeah. I mean, in fact, I do, because I think, you know, we've been talking about wine age and space. What about wine aged on the bottom of the ocean? There's an interesting little subset in the world of fine wines that they call shipwreck wines.
Yeah, in 2010, for example, 47 bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne were recovered from a 19th century shipwreck in the Baltic Sea. And, you know, wildly enough, these were still drinkable. They'd spent 170 years underwater. Wow. Yeah, so some people got to taste them and they said they were sweet, but balanced by a dry acidity.
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people agreed because those bottles sold for around like $43,000 a bottle at auction. Wow. And this gave Viv Clicquot, the Champagne House, they gave it an idea. Yeah. Oh, no.
A little less drastic, but they just started experimenting with storing bottles deep in the ocean. They've submerged 350 bottles of their champagne in that same area of the Baltic Sea where the shipwreck had been found. They say this is some kind of experiment. They want to better understand the behavior of wine under extreme aging conditions.
And that's an experiment they're going to be running for about 40 years. Every couple of years they go, they surface a few of those bottles and then they taste and they compare them with bottles that have just been aged in like a regular cellar.
I mean, listen, up to you. Joe Bastianich, maybe you know him. He was on MasterChef. He's a famous restaurant owner. He's a winemaker. He wrote this memoir called Restaurant Man in 2012. And there he writes, no wine should cost more than a hundred bucks. And I think it's a little ironic because he has this restaurant. I live here in New York. He has a restaurant called Babbo.
Very fancy, Michelin-starred Italian restaurant. A lot of bottles on his list are selling for more than $1,000. So this is the guy telling you no wine should cost more than $100. But I think... You know, he makes a good point in the book because in the end, we're talking about fermented grape juice. Take into account the farming and the labor and the storage, what have you.
There's a real limit to what it costs to actually produce 750 milliliters of fermented grape juice. So that's exactly where capitalism, market forces, and then especially marketing come into play.
There's obviously, you'll find some like exceptional expensive wines, but I just don't think that a higher price guarantees you a better taste or a better experience. I mean, listen, any wine expert is going to tell you there's lots of high quality wines that are available at affordable price points.
I'd say maybe $20 to $30 a bottle is like the sweet spot, but then past a certain price point, whether that's $50, $100, you're really no longer paying for quality. You're paying for name, for reputation, for scarcity.
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