It was the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold.<br><br>In 1985, at a heated auction by Christie&#8217;s of London, a 1787 bottle of Ch&#226;teau Lafite Bordeaux&#8212;one of a cache of bottles unearthed in a bricked-up Paris cellar and supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson&#8212;went for $156,000 to a member of the Forbes family. The discoverer of the bottle was pop-band manager turned wine collector Hardy Rodenstock, who had a knack for finding extremely old and exquisite wines. But rumors about the bottle soon arose. Why wouldn&#8217;t Rodenstock reveal the exact location where it had been found? Was it part of a smuggled Nazi hoard? Or did his reticence conceal an even darker secret?<br><br>It would take more than two decades for those questions to be answered and involve a gallery of intriguing players&#8212;among them Michael Broadbent, the bicycle-riding British auctioneer who speaks of wines as if they are women and staked his reputation on the record-setting sale; Serena Sutcliffe, Broadbent&#8217;s elegant archrival, whose palate is covered by a hefty insurance policy; and Bill Koch, the extravagant Florida tycoon bent on exposing the truth about Rodenstock. <br><br>Pursuing the story from Monticello to London to Zurich to Munich and beyond, Benjamin Wallace also offers a mesmerizing history of wine, complete with vivid accounts of subterranean European laboratories where old vintages are dated and of Jefferson&#8217;s colorful, wine-soaked days in France, where he literally drank up the culture.<br><br>Suspenseful, witty, and thrillingly strange, <i>The Billionaire&#8217;s Vinegar</i> is the vintage tale of what could be the most elaborate con since the Hitler diaries. It is also the debut of an exceptionally powerful new voice in narrative non-fiction.