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Baron Philippe de Rothschild persuaded the French government to take the unprecedented step of elevating the estate from second to first growth.
    As Broadbent’s auctions gained in popularity, the price of old wines bounded upward. In the first five years of the new auctions, Latour 1949 and Mouton-Rothschild 1945 more than quadrupled in price. Lesser wines jumped 200 and 300 percent. Rising values led more people to wonder whether granddad’s old bottles, which had been gathering dust in the cellar for years, might be worth something, and perhaps this Christie’s chap might like to come and take a look. It
was
usually the Christie’s chap. Sotheby’s wine department, having launched four years after Christie’s, had been playing catch-up ever since.
    Broadbent was a natural at auction-house hyperbole, and seemed to wring a new record out of every sale. There was always a particular wine or vintage or combination of wines and vintages that, defined in just the right way, had achieved a never-before-seen price or volume record. There was, for instance, the Christie’s sale featuring one hundred dozen bottles of the 1967 vintage of Yquem, “certainly the largest quantity of any one vintage of any fine mature white wine ever to appear at auction.” It was all in how narrowly you sliced the numbers, and Broadbent was a master with the knife. The only thing that attracted more press coverage than price records was especially old and rare wines, and Broadbent excelled at producing these, too.
    He had made London into the center of the international auction market for fine wine, and his dominance was undisputed. As befitted a top auctioneer, he effortlessly melded the hustle of a barrow boy and the self-deprecating charm of a courtier. He delighted in rummaging through the Christie’s archives and reading aloud from leather-bound catalogs of its earliest auctions, like the sale on March 18, 1771, which featured “upwards of 100 loads of Good Hay, 6 stacks of Beans…a quantity of Dung…Four Heffers, two cows, a Ram, Swan, Poultry,” and, in the wine department, “a Cask of Elderwine” and “a Firkin with some old Verjuice.” In his own writing, he rendered the dross of wine description into something wicked, marshaling one randy image after another to describe the fermented grape juice he was selling: “a sexy
demi-mondaine
of uncertain age but opulent charm”…“a light, easy, charming middle-aged lady with her slip showing”…and, of course, those “schoolgirls’ uniforms.” Normally his wife typed up his tasting notes, but when he had written an especially salacious one, he would give the job to his secretary instead.
    Broadbent was intensely competitive, and he could be defensive and catty on the topic of the rival auction house. The old saw held that Christie’s was made up of gentlemen trying to be auctioneers, and Sotheby’s of auctioneers trying to be gentlemen, yet there was nothing particularly genteel about Broadbent’s approach to competition. “Despite the strenuous efforts of our competitors,” Broadbent crowed to Christie’s clients in 1979, “we continue to dominate the international fine wine market.” Another time, he denounced Sotheby’s “extravagant claims and misleading statements” as “pure propaganda.”
    The largely one-sided feud became strident in 1984, when Sotheby’s wine department introduced a 10-percent buyer’s commission. Broadbent was instantly scornful. “It is not a very healthy step,” he told
Decanter
. “We have always strenuously opposed any buyer’s premium on wine.” His counterpart at Sotheby’s, Patrick Grubb, retorted that Sotheby’s catalogs were “of infinitely better quality than those of our rivals!” Broadbent came back with, “Maybe his buyers are happy for part of their extra 10 percent to be devoted to the glamorization of what is essentially a piece of ephemera? The Bible has a phrase for this: ‘a whited sepulchre’!” Two