The 1815 Bottle
Cases unlock in order, like levels. This is case 56 of 100.
Sampaio Cellar, Vila Nova de Gaia, 8:10 am. The 1815 bottle of port, the 'Waterloo wine', was to be the headline lot of the 3:00 pm auction. At 7:50 am, the auctioneer opened the vault to pack it: the bottle inside is a fake.
The vault keypad logged an opening at 12:14 am, with the cellar master's personal code. The cellar door stayed locked all night, and the owner, Henrique Sampaio, has been in hospital since Tuesday.
Three people were in the cellar yesterday. One of them swapped the bottle.
The cellar office, among oak casks, smelling of wine and damp wood.
Suspects
Abílio FerrazCellar master, 66
Beatrice HollowayEnglish auctioneer, 45
Duarte SampaioThe owner's nephew, 29
The real case
Hardy Rodenstock's "Jefferson" bottles
Germany and United States, 1985 to 2010
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
In 1985, German collector Hardy Rodenstock announced that he had found bottles of 1787 Bordeaux in Paris engraved with the initials "Th.J.", said to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson. One of them sold at Christie's for 105,000 pounds, a record at the time. Others were sold to collectors, among them American billionaire Bill Koch.
Koch hired investigators, who found no record of the bottles in Jefferson's papers and concluded that the engraving had been made with a modern power tool. Rodenstock always denied the fraud; an American court ruled against him by default, and the case became the book "The Billionaire's Vinegar".
The game borrows the historic auction bottle whose authenticity falls apart over a detail of the seal or the engraving. Characters, crime and outcome are fiction.
Sources
Case glossary
Words from this case you might not know.
- cellar master
- The person in charge of the cellar, who looks after the ageing, blending and stock of the wines.