Taste3 2008
Benjamin Wallace: The price of happiness
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Readability: 3.9
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Can happiness be bought? To find out, author Benjamin Wallace sampled the world's most expensive products, including a bottle of 1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc, 8 ounces of Kobe beef and the fabled (notorious) Kopi Luwak coffee. His critique may surprise you.
Benjamin Wallace - Author
Benjamin Wallace is a journalist and author of The Billionaire's Vinegar, the true story of the world's most expensive bottle of (possibly phony?) wine. He's been a contributor to GQ, Details, Salon and The Washington Post. Full bio
Benjamin Wallace is a journalist and author of The Billionaire's Vinegar, the true story of the world's most expensive bottle of (possibly phony?) wine. He's been a contributor to GQ, Details, Salon and The Washington Post. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
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I'm just going to play a brief video clip.
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On the fifth of December 1985, a bottle of 1787 Lafitte was sold
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for 105,000 pounds -- nine times the previous world record.
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The buyer
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was Kip Forbes,
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son of one of the most flamboyant millionaires of the 20th century.
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The original owner of the bottle turned out to be
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one of the most enthusiastic wine buffs of the 18th century.
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Château Lafitte is one of the greatest wines in the world,
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the prince of any wine cellar.
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Benjamin Wallace: Now, that's about all the videotape that remains of an event
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that set off the longest-running mystery in the modern wine world.
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And the mystery existed because of a gentleman named Hardy Rodenstock.
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In 1985, he announced to his friends in the wine world
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that he had made this incredible discovery.
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Some workmen in Paris had broken through a brick wall,
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and happened upon this hidden cache of wines --
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apparently the property of Thomas Jefferson. 1787, 1784.
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He wouldn't reveal the exact number of bottles,
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he would not reveal
exactly where the building was
exactly where the building was
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and he would not reveal exactly who owned the building.
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The mystery persisted for about 20 years.
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It finally began to get resolved in 2005 because of this guy.
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Bill Koch is a Florida billionaire who owns four of the Jefferson bottles,
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and he became suspicious.
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And he ended up spending over a million dollars and hiring ex-FBI
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and ex-Scotland Yard agents to try to get to the bottom of this.
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There's now ample evidence that Hardy Rodenstock is a con man,
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and that the Jefferson bottles were fakes.
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But for those 20 years,
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an unbelievable number of really eminent and accomplished figures
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in the wine world were sort of drawn into the orbit of these bottles.
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I think they wanted to believe that the most expensive bottle of wine
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in the world must be the best bottle of wine in the world,
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must be the rarest bottle of wine in the world.
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I became increasingly, kind of voyeuristically interested in the question of
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you know, why do people spend these crazy amounts of money,
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not only on wine but on lots of things,
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and are they living a better life than me?
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So, I decided to embark on a quest.
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With the generous backing of a magazine I write for sometimes,
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I decided to sample the very best, or most expensive, or most coveted item
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in about a dozen categories,
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which was a very grueling quest,
as you can imagine.
as you can imagine.
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(Laughter)
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This was the first one.
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A lot of the Kobe beef that you see in the U.S. is not the real thing.
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It may come from Wagyu cattle,
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but it's not from the original, Appalachian Hyogo Prefecture in Japan.
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There are very few places in the U.S. where you can try real Kobe,
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and one of them is Wolfgang Puck's restaurant, Cut, in Los Angeles.
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I went there, and I ordered the eight-ounce rib eye for 160 dollars.
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And it arrived, and it was tiny.
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And I was outraged.
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It was like, 160 dollars for this?
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And then I took a bite,
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and I wished that it was tinier, because Kobe beef is so rich.
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It's like foie gras -- it's not even like steak.
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I almost couldn't finish it.
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I was really happy when I was done.
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(Laughter)
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Now, the photographer who took the pictures for this project
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for some reason posed his dog in a lot of them,
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so that's why you're going to see this recurring character.
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Which, I guess, you know, communicates to you
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that I did not think that one was really worth the price.
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White truffles.
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One of the most expensive luxury foods by weight in the world.
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To try this, I went to a Mario Batali restaurant
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in Manhattan -- Del Posto.
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The waiter, you know, came out with the white truffle knob
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and his shaver, and he shaved it onto my pasta and he said, you know,
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"Would Signore like the truffles?"
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And the charm of white truffles is in their aroma.
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It's not in their taste, really. It's not in their texture.
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It's in the smell.
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These white pearlescent flakes hit the noodles,
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this haunting, wonderful, nutty, mushroomy smell wafted up.
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10 seconds passed and it was gone.
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And then I was left with these little ugly flakes on my pasta that,
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you know, their purpose had been served,
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and so I'm afraid to say that this was also a disappointment to me.
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There were several -- several of these items were disappointments.
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(Laughter)
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Yeah.
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The magazine wouldn't pay for me to go there.
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(Laughter)
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They did give me a tour, though.
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And this hotel suite is 4,300 square feet.
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It has 360-degree views.
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It has four balconies.
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It was designed by the architect I.M. Pei.
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It comes with its own Rolls Royce and driver.
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It comes with its own wine cellar that you can draw freely from.
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When I took the tour, it actually included some Opus One, I was glad to see.
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30,000 dollars for a night in a hotel.
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This is soap that's made from silver nanoparticles,
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which have antibacterial properties.
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I washed my face with this this morning in preparation for this.
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And it, you know, tickled a little bit and it smelled good,
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but I have to say that nobody here
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has complimented me on the cleanliness of my face today.
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(Laughter)
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But then again, nobody has complimented me on the jeans I'm wearing.
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These ones GQ did spring for -- I own these -- but I will tell you,
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not only did I not get a compliment from any of you,
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I have not gotten a compliment from anybody
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in the months that I have owned and worn these.
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I don't think that whether or not you're getting a compliment
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should be the test of something's value,
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but I think in the case of a fashion item, an article of clothing,
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that's a reasonable benchmark.
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That said, a lot of work goes into these.
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They are made from handpicked organic Zimbabwean cotton
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that has been shuttle loomed
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and then hand-dipped in natural indigo 24 times.
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But no compliments.
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(Laughter)
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Thank you.
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Armando Manni is a former filmmaker who makes this olive oil
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from an olive that grows on a single slope in Tuscany.
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And he goes to great lengths to protect the olive oil from oxygen and light.
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He uses tiny bottles, the glass is tinted,
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he tops the olive oil off with an inert gas.
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And he actually -- once he releases a batch of it,
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he regularly conducts molecular analyses and posts the results online,
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so you can go online and look at your batch number
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and see how the phenolics are developing,
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and, you know, gauge its freshness.
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I did a blind taste test of this with 20 people and five other olive oils.
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It tasted fine. It tasted interesting.
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It was very green, it was very peppery.
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But in the blind taste test, it came in last.
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The olive oil that came in first was actually a bottle of
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Whole Foods 365 olive oil which had been oxidizing next to my stove
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for six months.
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(Laughter)
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A recurring theme is that a lot of these things are from Japan --
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you'll start to notice.
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I don't play golf, so I couldn't actually road test these,
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but I did interview a guy who owns them.
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Even the people who market these clubs -- I mean, they'll say
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these have four axis shafts which minimize loss of club speed
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and thereby drive the ball farther -- but they'll say, look, you know,
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you're not getting 57,000 dollars worth of performance from these clubs.
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You're paying for the bling,
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that they're encrusted with gold and platinum.
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The guy who I interviewed who owns them did say
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that he's gotten a lot of pleasure out of them, so ...
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Oh, yeah, you know this one?
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This is a coffee made from a very unusual process.
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The luwak is an Asian Palm Civet.
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It's a cat that lives in trees,
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and at night it comes down and it prowls the coffee plantations.
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And apparently it's a very picky eater and it, you know,
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hones in on only the ripest coffee cherries.
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And then an enzyme in its digestive tract leeches into the beans,
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and people with the unenviable job of collecting these cats' leavings
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then go through the forest collecting the, you know, results
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and processing it into coffee -- although you actually can buy it
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in the unprocessed form.
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That's right.
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Unrelatedly --
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(Laughter)
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Japan is doing crazy things with toilets.
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(Laughter)
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There is now a toilet that has an MP3 player in it.
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There's one with a fragrance dispenser.
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There's one that actually analyzes the contents of the bowl
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and transmits the results via email to your doctor.
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It's almost like a home medical center --
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and that is the direction that Japanese toilet technology is heading in.
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This one does not have those bells and whistles,
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but for pure functionality it's pretty much the best -- the Neorest 600.
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And to try this -- I couldn't get a loaner,
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but I did go into the Manhattan showroom of the manufacturer, Toto,
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and they have a bathroom off of the showroom that you can use, which I used.
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It's fully automated -- you walk towards it, and the seat lifts.
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The seat is preheated.
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There's a water jet that cleans you.
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There's an air jet that dries you.
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You get up, it flushes by itself.
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The lid closes, it self-cleans.
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Not only is it a technological leap forward,
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but I really do believe it's a bit of a cultural leap forward.
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I mean, a no hands, no toilet paper toilet.
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And I want to get one of these.
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(Laughter)
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This was another one I could not get a loaner of.
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Tom Cruise supposedly owns this bed.
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There's a little plaque on the end that, you know,
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each buyer gets their name engraved on it.
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(Laughter)
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To try this one, the maker of it let me and my wife
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spend the night in the Manhattan showroom.
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Lights glaring in off the street,
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and we had to hire a security guard and all these things.
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But anyway, we had a great night's sleep.
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And you spend a third of your life in bed.
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I don't think it's that bad of a deal.
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(Laughter)
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This was a fun one.
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This is the fastest street-legal car in the world
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and the most expensive production car.
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I got to drive this with a chaperone from the company,
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a professional race car driver,
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and we drove around the canyons outside of Los Angeles
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and down on the Pacific Coast Highway.
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And, you know, when we pulled up to a stoplight
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the people in the adjacent cars kind of gave us respectful nods.
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And it was really amazing.
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It was such a smooth ride.
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Most of the cars that I drive, if I get up to 80 they start to rattle.
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I switched lanes on the highway and the driver, this chaperone, said,
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"You know, you were just going 110 miles an hour."
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And I had no idea that I was one of those obnoxious people
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you occasionally see weaving in and out of traffic,
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because it was just that smooth.
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And if I was a billionaire, I would get one.
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(Laughter)
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This is a completely gratuitous video I'm just going to show
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of one of the pitfalls of advanced technology.
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This is Tom Cruise arriving at the "Mission: Impossible III" premiere.
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When he tries to open the door,
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you could call it "Mission: Impossible IV."
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There was one object that I could not get my hands on,
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and that was the 1947 Cheval Blanc.
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The '47 Cheval Blanc is probably the most mythologized wine of the 20th century.
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And Cheval Blanc is kind of an unusual wine for Bordeaux
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in having a significant percentage of the Cabernet Franc grape.
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And 1947 was a legendary vintage,
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especially in the right bank of Bordeaux.
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And just together, that vintage and that chateau took on this aura
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that eventually kind of gave it this cultish following.
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But it's 60 years old.
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There's not much of it left.
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What there is of it left you don't know if it's real --
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it's considered to be the most faked wine in the world.
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Not that many people are looking to pop open
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their one remaining bottle for a journalist.
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So, I'd about given up trying to get my hands on one of these.
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I'd put out feelers to retailers, to auctioneers,
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and it was coming up empty.
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And then I got an email from a guy named Bipin Desai.
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Bipin Desai is a U.C. Riverside theoretical physicist
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who also happens to be the preeminent organizer of rare wine tastings,
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and he said, "I've got a tasting coming up
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where we're going to serve the '47 Cheval Blanc."
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And it was going to be a double vertical --
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it was going to be 30 vintages of Cheval Blanc,
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and 30 vintages of Yquem.
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And it was an invitation you do not refuse.
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I went.
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It was three days, four meals.
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And at lunch on Saturday, we opened the '47.
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And you know, it had this fragrant softness,
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and it smelled a little bit of linseed oil.
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And then I tasted it, and it,
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you know, had this kind of unctuous, porty richness,
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which is characteristic of that wine --
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that it sort of resembles port in a lot of ways.
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There were people at my table who thought it was, you know, fantastic.
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There were some people who were a little less impressed.
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And I wasn't that impressed.
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And I don't -- call my palate a philistine palate --
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so it doesn't necessarily mean something that I wasn't impressed,
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but I was not the only one there who had that reaction.
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And it wasn't just to that wine.
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Any one of the wines served at this tasting,
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if I'd been served it at a dinner party, it would have been, you know,
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the wine experience of my lifetime, and incredibly memorable.
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But drinking 60 great wines over three days,
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they all just blurred together,
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and it became almost a grueling experience.
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And I just wanted to finish by mentioning a very interesting study
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which came out earlier this year from some researchers at Stanford and Caltech.
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And they gave subjects the same wine,
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labeled with different price tags.
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A lot of people, you know,
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said that they liked the more expensive wine more --
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it was the same wine, but they thought it was a different one
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that was more expensive.
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But what was unexpected was that these researchers did
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MRI brain imaging while the people were drinking the wine,
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and not only did they say they enjoyed the more expensively labeled wine more --
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their brain actually registered as experiencing more pleasure
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from the same wine when it was labeled with a higher price tag.
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Thank you.
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Benjamin Wallace - AuthorBenjamin Wallace is a journalist and author of The Billionaire's Vinegar, the true story of the world's most expensive bottle of (possibly phony?) wine. He's been a contributor to GQ, Details, Salon and The Washington Post.
Why you should listen
A Washington D.C. native and a current Brooklynite, Benjamin Wallace is fast establishing himself a master of the brainy nonfiction thriller, rooting up feuds and controversies in pop and less-than-pop culture while buddying up with their embattled and larger-than-life personalities (whom he sometimes meets on their way down). He profiled conserative mouthpiece Glenn Beck for GQ in 2007 shortly after the pundit landed a controversial slot on CNN, and in 2002 looked at chef Georges Perrier of Philidelphia's then-five-star restaurant, Le Bec-Fin.
Wallace's orderly, deadpan writing style hints at one of his secrets: his love (and talent) for playing the straight man to the once-mighty in downfall, right as they go aflame in tragicomic hubris. (The Billionaire's Vinegar is simply a pleasure, not least to schadenfreude junkies.) It's easy to imagine him, the bespectacled wallflower, watching as brouhaha over a wine bottle once valued at $165,000 -- the highest price fetched for a bottle, ever -- culimates in a court trial that reveals at least two of its main characters, a wine collector and a wine expert, to be frauds. Or at least emperors with no clothes.
Benjamin Wallace | Speaker | TED.com