Sauvignon blanc

Jefferson Wine and the Atomic Bomb

This strange epic began in the late 80s, when billionaire William Koch bought four bottles of wine for $ 500,000. These bottles were from a collection owned by Hardy Rodenstock (whose name was made in the German music scene of those times), which claimed , which found them in an abandoned Parisian basement. Rodenstock said most bottles were dated in 1787 and allegedly belonged to the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. But after the acquisition, experts in Monticello (who kept the Jefferson archive) said that the ex-president never bought this particular sort of wine.

After that, Koch hired a group of first-class detectives to find out the real origin of the wine. The problem was that the billionaire banned opening bottles. A French physicist named Philip Yureb offered them his help, saying that he could determine whether the wine was produced before or after 1945. When the first atomic bombs were blown up, a completely new radioactive isotope called cesium-137 was released. Until 1945, cesium-137 simply did not exist. The scientist brought the bottles to his laboratory under the Alps and placed them next to a gamma-ray detector specially coated with lead to shield the detector from external radiation. As a result, no trace of cesium-137 was found in the wine, that is, it was bottled before 1945. Nevertheless, the story did not end there.

A team of detectives discovered something strange in the bottles themselves: on each of them were engraved the initials "Th.J", which allegedly testified to their belonging to Thomas Jefferson. After a thorough investigation, the team found that the initials were engraved with the electric instruments of the dentists. With such evidence, Bill Koch filed eight lawsuits against Hardy Rodenstock. The suits cost the billionaire at least $ 25 million, but he managed to compensate for part of his losses when he was awarded $ 12 million in damages.