Benjamin Wallace’s new book, The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine explores the debate behind the Jefferson wine bottles. As someone who never followed the Jefferson wine bottles this book includes enough of the history for someone without much knowledge bring the reader up to speed.

For a wine book, is a page turner. It’s fact filled and an interesting read covering everything from history, science and the love of wine. The complaint I have is Wallace clearly has various people type casted into certain roles. He does just about everything to make readers love or hate, mostly hate certain people in the wine world. The only thing else he could have done to seal the deal was giving these people a black top hat, cape, and skinny mustache. Specifically, he does this treatment to Michael Broadbent and Hardy Rodenstock. I’m not saying either person was innocent in the affair, but Wallace was overly attempting to manipulate the reader’s opinion.

The other interesting opinion Wallace added was in discussing anything that was expensive, from the highly exclusive tasting held around the world for various cult wines to even just the purchasing of these Jefferson bottles all seemed to have a tone of disgust to amount of money spent. If the author was annoyed by the “rich man’s problem” in the wine world, than why did he write a book on it?

If you can filter out Wallace’s opinions, the book is an interesting read about forgery with bottles and what wineries and auction houses are doing to authentic bottles and the new science available in the lab to verify the wine.