QRW | Summer 2008 | All Things Grape and Small

Billionaire William Koch’s effort to sue the man who allegedly sold him phony Thomas Jefferson wines is about to get the full Hollywood treatment. Two production groups, HBO Films and a team headed by “Forrest Gump” producer Steve Tisch, are preparing to bring the story to film. Koch, as you may remember, made an auction purchase several years ago of four bottles of wine engraved “Th.J.,” which were certified by their German seller, Hardy Rodenstock, as having once been owned by Thomas Jefferson. However, an investigator hired by Koch later proved that the etching on the bottles had been made using a modern, 20th-century tool, whereupon Koch cried “Foul” and sued Rodenstock for fraud. Although the suit was recently thrown out of court on procedural grounds, Koch says he has every intention of pursuing it.

Philippe Cuvelier, owner of the Saint-Emilion First Growth Clos Fourtet, has acquired Château Poujeaux, a well-regarded cru bourgeois property in the Haut Médoc commune of Moulis. Cuvelier reportedly paid around $40 million for Poujeaux, which has over 125 acres of vines — 50 percent in Cabernet Sauvignon, 40 percent in Merlot and five percent each Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot — and produces 30,000 cases of wine annually.

Things are looking up — way up! — for Oregon wine. The 2007 grape crush was the largest in the State’s history, assuring a third consecutive year of increased wine production.

The more expensive the wine, the better the perception. So say researchers at Stanford Business School and Cal Tech. They assembled 20 adult test subjects, hooked them up to brain scanners, and had them sample five bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon, which were identified only by price. What the tasters didn’t know was that two wines appeared in the sampling twice, once with a low price and once with a high price. When the tasters sipped the higher priced of the same wine, they displayed more neural activity in their medial orbitofrontal cortex, the area of the brain related to pleasures of taste and smell, than when they sampled the lower priced twin. In other words, they preferred the more expensive to the less expensive bottle — even though they were tasting the same wine. “What this study shows,” says Professor Antonio Rangel of Cal Tech, “is that the brain’s rewards center takes into account subjective beliefs about the quality of an experience. If you believe the experience is better, ... the rewards center of the brain encodes it as feeling better.” But hasn’t Madison Avenue known this all along?

France’s Champagne region is about to get bigger. The Institut National des Appellations d’Origine (INAO), the government agency which oversees French wine appellations, has approved in principle a plan that would add 40 new villages and about 2,500 acres to the current Champagne production zone. And Champagne certainly has good reason to expand. Worldwide sales of its famed fizz are soaring and, last year, hit 338.7 million bottles, an all-time high.

Discovering wine later in life can lead to a healthier heart. This is the conclusion of a new study (“Adopting Moderate Alcohol Consumption in Middle Age: Subsequent Cardiovascular Events”) published in the March issue of The American Journal of Medicine. The ten-year study followed 7,697 middle-aged (45 to 64) persons — none of whom were drinkers at the beginning of the study — and found that those who started drinking moderate daily amounts of wine lowered their risk of heart attack by up to 68 percent.

Amazon, the world’s biggest online retailer, is planning to enter the wine business and, according to the Financial Times, “is looking to recruit a senior wine buyer, whom it says will be responsible for ‘the acquisition of a massive new product selection’ for its site.” This is not Amazon’s first foray into online wine sales. In 1999, they spent $30 million to buy 45 percent of Wineshopper.com, a venture that went bust after only a year. Hopefully they learned from that experience. But maybe not.

William Foley is on a buying spree. Over the past year, the former insurance mogul turned vintner has purchased Santa Barbara County’s Firestone Vineyards, Santa Barbara County’s Ashley’s Vineyard (a 620-acre property formerly owned by Fess Parker), Napa Valley’s Merus winery and, most recently, Walla Walla, Washington’s Three Rivers winery. Nor will it stop there. Foley also has his sights set on Oregon, where a deal, he says, is pending. Stay tuned.

Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH), the vast French luxury goods company, has acquired Numanthia-Termes, the marquee winery in Spain’s Toro region. In the deal, LVMH gets the winemaking facility and some 100 acres of vineyards, including the famed 2.5 acre “Termanthia” parcel. Numanthia-Termes will be in good company at LVMH, which also owns the Champagne houses Veuve Clicquot, Moët et Chandon and Krug, as well as the nonpareil Sauternes producer Château d’Yquem.

The wine world lost four luminaries last winter. Valentino Migliorini, the charismatic owner of Rocche dei Manzoni, one of Barolo’s top wine estates, died in December. A one-time Emilia-Romagna restaurateur, Migliorini purchased Rocche dei Manzoni in 1974 and quickly turned it into one of Piedmont’s cutting-edge producers. His son Rodolfo, a talented winemaker in his own right, carries on the tradition. Charles Lill, the Czech-born co-founder in 1992 of DeLille Cellars, one of Washington state’s top wineries, died in early January. A true Horatio Alger story, Lill worked in a Soviet labor camp at the end of World War II and came to North America with only $20 in his pocket. He went on to build a successful insurance career, first in Vancouver, B.C. and later in Tacoma, Washington. Peter Newton, a British-born paper company executive, who founded Napa’s Sterling Vineyards in 1964, and after selling it to Coca Cola in 1977, started another renowned Napa winery, Newton Vineyards, died in early February. A noted designer of flower gardens as well, he is mentioned frequently in the Oxford Companion to Gardens. Jamie Davies, who in 1965 — with her late husband Jack — co-founded Napa’s Schramsberg Vineyards, arguably California’s finest producer of méthode champenoise sparkling wine, died in mid-February. Although the Davies struggled early on at Schramsberg, their diligence was rewarded in 1972, when President Richard Nixon served their 1969 Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs to Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai at an historic state dinner in Beijing. After that, there was no looking back.

Michael Aaron stepped down May 1 as Chairman of Sherry-Lehman, the iconic New York City wine shop founded in 1934 by his father, Jack. The 68-year-old Aaron is not going completely away, however, but will hold the title Chairman Emeritus and serve as an éminence grise to Sherry’s new head man, Chris Adams.

Champagne Piper-Heidsieck has moved out of its historic Boulevard Vasnier cellars in downtown Reims and into gleaming new digs on the city’s outskirts. The new facility has over five times the vat capacity of the old one. As for the latter, it was sold to the construction behemoth Bouygues, who will build luxury apartments on the site. Pity ...

Kistler Vineyards, the legendary Sonoma producer of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, has sold a minority portion of its business to investment executive Bill Price. Price, who owns one of Kistler’s top grape sources, Durell Vineyards in Sonoma, is also a managing partner of Texas Pacific Group, the equity firm that in 1995 bought Beringer from Nestle for $350 million and five years later sold it to Foster’s for a cool $1.5 billion. Price’s skill at making a buck will no doubt serve Kistler well.

Constellation Brands has sold its Almaden, Inglenook and Paul Masson wine lines to the Wine Group (Franzia, Big House, Glen Ellen, Corbett Canyon, et al.) for $134 million.

Bernard Magrez, owner of the Bordeaux Grand Cru Château Pape Clement and some two-and-a-half dozen other French wine estates, has purchased a 500-acre property in Chile’s Colchagua Valley and plans to produce 10,000 cases of wine annually there under the “Hacienda Serenidad” label. To facilitate the purchase, Magrez sold three of his lesser Bordeaux estates — Bois Pursuit, Bois Chant and Haut Mouldered — to the large-scale wine producer Grands Chais de France.

Last year was a banner one for Spanish wine exports, as out-of-country sales topped $2.7 billion, a 12.4 percent increase over the previous year.

What’s the world’s largest Cognac-consuming country? It’s the U.S., which last year imported a record 4.5 million cases of that wondrous, wine-based French spirit.

It appears that wine has finally gone to the dogs. Muttropolis Dog and Cat Boutiques in Solana Beach, California is selling an eco-friendly “Whiner Diner Feeder” for canines that, according to Marketing Director Dana Humphrey, “is artfully crafted from authentic reclaimed natural wood wine crates” from France, Italy and California. Moreover, says Humphrey, “each ... feeder is unique,” and “all pieces are Made in the U.S.A.” Prices range from $169 to $199. To learn more, visit the Muttropolis website: www.muttropolis.com.

Italian producers of sparkling Prosecco are furious at a new Australian Prosecco being promoted by hotel heiress Paris Hilton. Distributed under the brand-name Rich, the Oz Prosecco comes in cans and uses beefcake images of Ms. Hilton in its advertising. “Paris Hilton is sensationalism,” a spokesman for Italian Prosecco told Reuters. “It’s not good. It’s not adequate for Prosecco.” Could this be the end of civilization as we know it?

Randy Sheahan