Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Wow, now that's some expensive salad dressing

A pop band manager with an eerie ability to unearth exotic wines, a foppish auctioneer with an uncanny knack for fetching astronomical prices for the goods under his gavel and a gullible, pseudo-oenophile with a fat wallet. Ah, I smell the musty aroma of chicanery wafting into my nostrils just like the bouquet of this ten dollar Claret I am sipping as I write this.

Wine lovers beware. Think you paid a lot for that venerable bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape you bought at the wine store. Well, get ready for some jaw-dropping prices, a bit of wine history and a genuine passion for the grape when you pick up Benjamin Wallace’s, The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine.

With an excellent look at the world of wine snobbery and a clever turn of the phrase, Wallace takes you through the saga of how a member of the Forbes family paid 156,000 dollars for a bottle of Chateau-Lafite Bordeaux supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson. Or was it? Read it and find out.

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