A crowd of 65 devotees of the winemaking arts (and letters) gathered just after sundown one evening last week in a graffiti-scarred warehouse at the edge of Camden.
The occasion was a special session of the Dead Guys Wine Society. It is called that because the warehouse - now used for temperature-controlled wine storage - got its start as the appraisal site for estate wines, the defining characteristic of which is that they were once owned by the no longer living.
That made it a perfect setting, remarked owner Scot Ziskind, for the night's featured attraction, former Philadelphia Magazine editor Benjamin Wallace, who was to read from his recent book, The Billionaire's Vinegar.
Indeed, two book groups - from Queen Village and Bella Vista - had swelled the usual attendance threefold, diluting the pretense that is unavoidable at a wine-centric event, but not the mischievous pop of its surprise ending.
The Billionaire's Vinegar ostensibly is about cracking "the mystery of the world's most expensive bottle of wine." That would be a bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux said to have been unearthed during renovation in a Paris cellar, and sold at Christie's in 1985 for a high bid of $156,000. It was not simply its extraordinary age that set it apart, though. It was the initials "Th. J." etched in the glass, surely, the auction house suggested, evidence that it had been ordered by founding father Thomas Jefferson.
Still, for all the sumptuous detail about that sale (the shady German purveyor who "discovered" the bottle, the cautions issued from wary Monticello experts, the unintentional roasting of the bottle under an exhibit spotlight by the winning bidder, Kip Forbes), the book's subtext is its most delicious narrative.
It is a chronicle of the richness of human folly, of pomposity and fakery, of the duping of the willing - wealthy trophy hunters so fixated on bagging rare wines that they ignore the hazard lights, and finally even the role of good wine as an accompaniment to good food: "Wine became a soloist," one insider laments.
