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years later, Broadbent had to eat crow as Christie’s followed Sotheby’s lead, adopting a buyer’s premium and revamping its catalogs. Grubb then published a mocking poem, which included the lines “Sepulchral hollow laughter is heard in King Street now / Despite all protestations they’ve killed a sacred cow.”
    A few years after that, Broadbent said of Sotheby’s wine department, “The lack of enthusiasm shows.” Sotheby’s wine department, for its part, claimed that while Christie’s did a volume business, Sotheby’s was the quality auctioneer. Sotheby’s competed nearly as avidly in the record-chasing arena, touting, during one season in the early 1980s, its sale of “the largest quantity [of cases of Port] ever sold in any season of wine auctions this century.”
             
    B ROADBENT WAS GETTING wine from his fellow countrymen, but he was selling it to Americans. By the mid-seventies, the spike in prices for first growths seen between 1966 and 1971 had become more dramatic, and the really old bottles had been priced out of reach of many connoisseurs. A magnum of 1864 Lafite that had sold for $225 at the Rosebery sale in 1967 went for $10,000 in 1981. American demand was the chief reason. The strength of the auction market had come to depend on the strength of the dollar.
    American colonists had preferred fortified wines from Spain and Portugal, such as Madeira and Port, and it was Thomas Jefferson who introduced a number of his peers to the less alcoholic pleasures of table wine. Before leaving France in 1789, Jefferson shipped Sauternes, Burgundy, and still Champagne to New York for the cellars of newly elected President George Washington. As secretary of state, Jefferson placed another large order for Washington and himself. He subsequently advised three other presidents—Adams, Madison, and Monroe—on what wines to serve at state dinners. When Monroe was elected, Jefferson’s congratulatory letter spent three sentences on the election and the remainder on what wines the White House cellar should stock.
    Jefferson was steadfast in promoting his favorite beverage. He lobbied for lower tariffs on wine not only for selfish reasons, but ostensibly because he believed in its healthful and even moderating qualities. “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap,” he wrote once, alluding to the rampant abuse of whiskey he saw around him, “and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage.” He made little headway in this campaign with Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who regarded Jefferson as a fop and wine as a luxury.
    Still bent on cultivating wine grapes, Jefferson tried growing them at Monticello after he returned from Europe. Again he didn’t succeed, but he corresponded with John Adlum, father of American viticulture, and remained optimistic that America could rival France as a winemaking country. “We could, in the United States,” Jefferson wrote, “make as great a variety of wines as are made in Europe, not exactly of the same kinds, but doubtless as good.”
    Jefferson claimed, patriotically if not altogether convincingly, that he had tasted wine made in Maryland that rivaled the very best Burgundy. He felt North Carolina had come the furthest in developing as a wine producer, and that its Scuppernong grape had yielded America’s first “exquisite wine, produced in quantity.”
    He was also a proselytizer at the table, and seems to have flirted with the wine enthusiast’s avocational hazard of overestimating others’ interest in the topic. “There was, as usual, the dissertation upon wines, not very edifying,” John Quincy Adams yawned to his diary after one White House dinner hosted by Jefferson. Through his entertaining at Monticello, Jefferson seemed to want to convert Americans, one palate at a time, to wine (as well as to a more broadly defined good life). He drank three to four and a half glasses of wine a day,