The Juice (27 page)

Jeff Levy, an L.A.-based film and television director and philanthropist, who bankrolled his wife’s company, Juicy Couture, and sold it a few years ago to Liz Claiborne, is in the process of dropping about $250,000 on vintage Champagne and Burgundy, including a case of 1962 Rousseau Chambertin Clos de Bèze for $80,000. Jeff has a distinctly Goth look—he’s in his customary head-to-toe black, from his shades, formerly owned by Elvis, to his bespoke British crocodile shoes—and when he really wants an auction lot, he keeps his paddle in the air until Kapon tells him
he’s bidding against himself. Also in from L.A. is thirty-two-year-old Rudy Kurniawan, who vies with Rosania for the MDC title (Man with the Deepest Cellar) and who’s alleged to spend more than $1 million a month on wine. Kurniawan is supposedly from a fabulously wealthy Chinese family, although his father gave him an Indonesian name in order to protect his privacy. Rudy is widely believed to have had a major impact on the escalating prices of the fine-wine market, and the Rosania auction includes some of his overstock, bottles of Rousseau, Ponsot, and Roumier Burgundies that would constitute the crown jewels of any other collection.

At one of the back booths sits a tall, almost gaunt, middle-aged man whose long hair is tied back in a ponytail and who seems conspicuously out of place, although a few of the cognoscenti recognize Laurent Ponsot, proprietor of one of the most revered domaines in Burgundy. Among the highlights of the auction are some twenty-two lots of old and rare Ponsot from Kurniawan’s cellar. If Kapon were to announce his presence, the group would probably give him a boisterous ovation, but he remains relatively unnoticed and curiously subdued, not to say mournful, reminding at least one observer of Banquo’s ghost. I forget about him until Kapon announces the withdrawal of all the Ponsot lots from the auction, at which point Jeff Levy says “Fuck!” and some of the company turn to observe the man whose grandfather founded the domaine, inscrutable in the back corner. The next time I look he’s no longer in his seat.

While these kinds of multimillion-dollar auctions happen every other week in New York, what made this one unusual was the preponderance of old Champagne, a backwater category until Rosania began collecting with a vengeance after tasting a bottle of 1937 Krug he’d bought as part of a mixed-case auction lot. Tonight’s climax came early, when two bottles of 1959 Dom Pérignon rosé—the never commercially released debut vintage—provoked
a telephone duel between two European bidders that quickly escalated from the opening price of $6,000. When Kapon slammed his hammer down three minutes and $64,000 later, a new record had been set for Champagne. With the so-called buyer’s premium (which goes to the auction house) tacked onto the $70,000 hammer price, someone had just paid $84,000 for two forty-nine-year-old bottles of pink bubbly that very few people besides Rosania had ever tasted. The room erupted in cheers and applause. Bear Stearns had collapsed the month before, and the subprime crisis accelerated as the dollar continued its precipitous slide, but this, and several other spring auctions, proved that the market for fine vintage wine remained buoyant.

The celebration lasts until well after two, when the exhausted Kapon slips away. More wine is ordered from Cru’s encyclopedic list, and Robert Bohr, the restaurant’s manager, glides around the room like Jeeves, serenely presiding over the chaos. It has been five hours since we finished a three-course meal from the chef Shea Gallante, so Big Boy has six pizzas and six dozen hot dogs delivered, which are washed down with several bottles of 1990 Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle.

When Kapon joined the firm in 1996, after a brief foray into the music business, Acker was a somewhat sleepy operation grossing about four million a year. Sotheby’s and Christie’s pretty much had the fine-wine auction market to themselves, and Rob Rosania and Rudy Kurniawan had yet to become disciples of Bacchus. Like most wine geeks of his generation, Kapon’s first love as a wine drinker was California Cabernets. The Napa Valley was undergoing a renaissance in the nineties, and the big ripe, voluptuous fruit-driven Cabs were easy to love, the vinous equivalent of
Seinfeld
-era Teri Hatcher. (“They’re real and they’re
spectacular
.”) So-called cult Cabernets, small-production super-extracted wines
like Harlan, Colgin, and Bryant Family, were garnering 100-point scores from über-critic Robert Parker and selling for as much as first-growth Bordeaux. Rosania and Kurniawan also cut their teeth on these Cabs—Kurniawan’s epiphany wine being a 1995 Opus One Cabernet. For many serious collectors, Napa Cabs were the gateway drug that led them to the hard-core, super-addictive stuff, first Bordeaux, the motherland of Cabernet Sauvignon, which provided the inspiration for Napa, and then on to the secret kingdom known as Burgundy. (Kapon and his inner circle, like most true geeks, are Burgundy nuts; at the Rosania auction, several people booed when he announced the Bordeaux portion of the sale.)

In 1997, Acker sponsored an auction with Phillips de Pury. This and several subsequent auctions, according to Kapon, were disasters. But he persisted, even as his taste was beginning to shift toward older wines. Then, sometime in late 2000 or in 2001, Rob Rosania walked into the store on West Seventy-Second Street. Neither man can recall the moment very precisely, but their meeting would eventually prove to be a fine-wine milestone akin to Paul Allen meeting Bill Gates. Both were still in their twenties. Rosania was a partner in a real estate investment firm, a self-made mogul who was ready to spend some of his growing fortune.

Largely by cultivating young collectors like Rosania and Kurniawan—along with established collectors like the real estate baron Ed Milstein and Roy Welland, an options trader and bridge champ who also owns Cru—Kapon has made Acker Merrall the leading vendor of fine wines in America. “John has worked at it,” says Peter Meltzer, author of
Keys to the Cellar
, who covers the auction scene for
Wine Spectator
. “I’m very impressed with him. He’s really out there. The traditional houses have not been as aggressive.” Kapon, Rosania, and Kurniawan, all in their thirties, have had a major impact on the international wine market. “You’d think they’d just be buying the best labels to show off,”
says Meltzer. “But they really know what they’re doing. They’ve learned empirically. They will be able to tell you the best vintage of La Tâche tasted in the last five years.”

A few years before the Rosania auction, I started receiving e-mails detailing bacchanalian gatherings with elaborate tasting notes about wines that most mortals could only dream about, sometimes dozens of them: 1959 Krugs washed down with 1945 Romanée-Contis. Wine-porn spam that had somehow escaped my spam filter, the notes were studded with references to Big Boy and King Angry and Hollywood Jef. Who the hell were these guys? I wondered. And why were they drinking so much better than I was? The author of the e-mails, I finally learned, was one John Kapon of Acker Merrall & Condit, and his fellow Dionysians were members of his tasting group, the Angry Men. The way they drink, you’d think they’d be the fucking Merry Men.

Having helped to fuel the collecting boom in this country as well as Europe, Kapon has set his sights on Asia. After selling off part of Rosania’s Champagne collection, he presided over three more auctions in the space of five weeks, culminating with a May 31 auction at the Island Shangri-La Ballroom in Hong Kong that brought in $8.2 million, including $242,000 for a case of 1990 Romanée-Conti. That sale put Kapon in a good position to become a leader in the exploding Chinese market. (Acker has since become the top auction house for wine in Hong Kong.) A few years back the Chinese dropped the tax on wine sales from 80 percent to 0, and the center of the rare-wine trade, which shifted from London to New York in recent years, has moved to Hong Kong. In 2010, Acker’s Hong Kong auctions outearned New York by $10 million.

Kapon scored another coup a few weeks after the rowdy Cru sale with an auction featuring wine from the cellar of Bipin Desai, a University of California particle physicist, who is one of the world’s most famous collectors, in large part because of the elaborate
tastings he organizes. Desai has been popping great corks since Kapon and his posse were in diapers, and he scooped up cases of Romanée-Conti and Petrus back when they were selling for the price of a room at the Ramada. Desai’s sale of half of his cellar seems to be a case of acknowledging his own mortality.
So many wines, so little time
. As for the younger collectors who are selling, it’s hard to say whether they are locking in profits, hedging against a possible decline, or just editing their holdings so they can buy even more. Probably all of the above. “All I can say is I’ve only seen prices go one way,” says Kapon, as he noses a glass of 1971 Roumier Morey St. Denis Clos de la Bussière. (In fact, prices collapsed in 2009, but they’ve rebounded since, making the 2008 auctions look like bargain fests.)

“Tighter than a fourteen-year-old virgin,” says Big Boy of one of the Champagnes he has brought to the table, and everybody seems to know what he means. By the standards of this group, a forty-four-year-old magnum like this 1964 Salon is still young and not yet fully developed. Most of these collectors are under forty themselves, but they like their wines older. It’s the night before the auction, and we’re seated in the private dining room at Cru, which has become the inner sanctum for New York’s high-rolling wine community. Some of Kapon’s biggest bidders have been invited to preview the wines at tomorrow’s auction, along with select members of the Angry Men—the tasting group that he founded, which includes some of the biggest collectors in town. When I ask about the name, Kapon shrugs and says, “We’re New York guys, and we don’t tolerate bullshit. We’re all busting balls and cracking on each other.”

“Stinky as the crack of a ninety-year-old nun,” says one of the Angry Men, nosing a red Burgundy that is exactly half that age. Curiously, this is intended as a compliment. There are murmurs of agreement and approval around the room. Old Burgundy is
supposed to be funky, even fecal, but also elegant. Based on the following night’s hammer price, the bottle in question, a 1962 Rousseau Chambertin Clos de Bèze, is worth $8,000, and it is by no means the most expensive of the wines we will taste that night, some forty in all. We follow it up with several from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, perhaps the single most resonant name in the world of wine worship, including a 1955 Romanée-Conti and a 1971 Richebourg, which is showing brilliantly. John Kapon’s note on the wine, compiled at an earlier tasting, is a tad more formal than some of the Angry Men commentary: “incredible nose of sweet cherry, roses, wet earth, truffles, candied fruit … solid spice still … catnip, dognip—might as well call it whale bait (forgive me for that one).” He continues for another fifty words, finally concluding with the word “Stellar” and a score of 98 points. No one who tasted it that night was inclined to downgrade it.

Kapon can talk trash as well as the next guy, but he’s also a serious taster who, at this point, has probably sampled—and written about—more rare old wines than almost anyone his age on the entire planet, with the possible exception of Kurniawan and Rosania, and he has the notes to prove it—thousands of them. He knows all the traditional terminology, but he’s added some terms of his own, like “whips and chains,” as he wrote recently of a powerful young Champagne. “T and A” is a frequently used term, and he often invokes the taste of vitamins. Robert Parker is widely considered the world’s most influential wine critic, while Allen Meadows—author of the newsletter
Burghound.com
and a friend of Kapon’s—is the Pope of Burgundy, but neither of them has tasted some of the rare and old bottles that the Angry Men routinely open at their gatherings.

Unlike some collectors, this group is drinking rather than hoarding. When I dined with the director Jeff Levy on a recent trip to Los Angeles, he invited four other friends along to Spago so we could open more bottles, seventeen in all, ranging from a
1937 Ausone to a 1999 La Tâche from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, with a flight of Petrus—1955, 1971, and 1985—in between. The next night, at Cut, Wolfgang Puck’s Beverly Hills steakhouse, we limited ourselves to a mere twelve bottles, going back to the 1929 Haut-Brion.

“The young collectors today are consumers of wine,” Rosania tells me later over an alfresco lunch at San Pietro, the chic and expensive Upper East Side trattoria. He’s clearly at home here, chatting in Italian with the waiter, and with the owner of the Kiton boutique next door. “Life is short,” he says. “You’ve got to drink it.” When I ask him how many bottles he has in his cellar, he says he has no idea. When I venture a guess of fifty thousand bottles, he says, “Hell, I have fifty thousand bottles of ’96 Champagne.” (The 1996 vintage was a great one, and by all accounts Rosania bought hundreds of cases of the rarest Champagnes as they were released, including most of the 1996 Salon that came to these shores.) When I tell him that one estimate places the value of his cellar at fifty million, he shrugs.

Having grown up in modest circumstances, Rosania clearly loves the good life, but his swaggering manner is tempered by frequent professions of noblesse oblige. “With privilege comes responsibility,” he says. In fact, I’ve heard him say it four or five times. After his father died of prostate cancer, he helped found the Mount Sinai Hospital Wine Auction. And you can’t swirl a glass at a Manhattan wine event without hearing testimonials to his generosity, not just from fellow collectors, but also from sommeliers and waiters and wine writers. “I have the privilege of owning these amazing wines,” Rosania says. “To keep them to myself would be unimaginable. Wine is meant to be shared.” It’s a refreshing attitude, particularly if you are on the receiving end of it. The night before the auction I personally consumed, by my best estimate, over $20,000 worth of his wine—including the 1945 Mouton and the 1947 Cheval Blanc—and I was one of fourteen drinkers.

Having probably tasted more old Champagne than any of the alleged experts, Rosania has definitely formed his own opinions. Who else could tell you that the 1914 Pol Roger is one of the greatest ever made, much less prove it by pulling it from his cellar and serving it, as he did, the night before the auction? For once, the Angry Men seemed stunned nearly to silence.