Michael Broadbent
Oenophile who brought wine auctions back to Christie’s and became a leading figure in the industry
MICHAEL BROADBENT, who has died aged 92, was one of the world’s great authorities on wine; he entered the wine trade in 1952, restarted Christie’s wine auctions in the 1960s and was a leading figure in the development of the international fine-wine market in the second half of the 20th century.
By the time he retired Broadbent had tasted, on average, five different wines every day for 51 years and kept careful notes on every one. He wrote more than 400 tasting notes columns in the wine buff ’s journal Decanter as well as a series of seminal books including Wine Tasting (1968), The Great Vintage Wine Book (1980), in which he brought together thousands of tasting notes and personal experiences, and Vintage Wine (2002), an account of 50 years of tastings.
The quintessential English gentleman, Broadbent became a familiar figure in the streets around St James’s riding an old-fashioned “sit-up-and beg” bicycle with basket and handlebars. At Christie’s he commanded his oenophiles from a Regency desk with information stored in an old-fashioned system of card indices.
Eschewing the Jilly Goolden school of florid populism, Broadbent spoke straightforward English, disdaining wines that were “coarse” or “common” and once observing of a supermarket vin ordinaire that it was “an ordinary, straightforward red colour and smells vaguely of wine”.
Nor did he go in for complicated rating systems. He used stars, awarding five of them only to the very best wines.
Broadbent allowed his prose to loosen up a little when describing wines with “breeding” or “nobility”. No follower of political correctness, he contrasted “feminine” wines with big, manly wines “well-endowed with vital elements”.
Famously, there was little love lost between Broadbent and his rival at Sotheby’s from 1991, Serena Sutcliffe, who in 1997 stole a march over Christie’s by bringing in Andrew Lloyd-webber’s wine collection when the composer had a cellar clear-out, celebrating the coup with a flourish of adjectival fireworks.
The following year Broadbent was interviewed by Jancis Robinson in a television documentary Vintner’s Tales, and when asked why he refused to go to the same tastings as Serena Sutcliffe, replied: “I find her, really, if you want to know the truth, haughty and rather nose-in-the-air. The word, if you really want it, is pretentious.”
She, however, was more circumspect when Broadbent found himself caught up in a vintage whodunnit relating to the sale at Christie’s in 1985 of a 1787 bottle of Château Lafite for a then record $156,000. The buyer was Christopher Forbes, son of the billionaire Malcolm
Forbes, with Broadbent handling the gavel at the auction.
The bottle, engraved “Th: J.”, was part of a cache allegedly found by Hardy Rodenstock, a mysterious German industrialist, in the walled-up cellar of a Paris home once occupied by Thomas Jefferson when he was ambassador to France.
Before auctioning the wine Broadbent consulted glass experts, who confirmed that both the bottle and the engraving were in the 18th century French style.
In addition he sampled two other bottles from the collection, pronouncing a
1784 “Th. J” Yquem “perfect in every sense: colour, bouquet, taste.”
After the auction, other serious collectors sought out Jefferson bottles including, in late 1988, the American tycoon and art collector Bill Koch, who bought four bottles from other retailers for around half a million dollars.
But rumours that the Jefferson wines might not be what they claimed began to circulate. One article, in Wine Spectator in 1991, was headlined “Authentic Old Bottles, But Were They Jefferson’s?”
In 2005, when the Boston Museum of Fine Arts prepared an exhibition of many of Koch’s possessions, his staff began tracking down the provenance of his Jefferson bottles, and found nothing on file. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello doubted that the bottles had ever belonged to Jefferson.
A subsequent investigation unearthed the fact that Hardy Rodenstock’s real name was Meinhard Görke; professional engravers concluded that the “Th. J” engraving had been done using modern dental equipment; chemical analysis suggested the wine in Koch’s bottles had been produced in the early 1960s.
In 2006 Koch filed a civil lawsuit in the US against Rodenstock, claiming that he had been the victim of fraud. Rodenstock refused to answer the summons and in 2010 a default judgment was entered against him.
In 2009, meanwhile, Random House agreed to settle a defamation suit brought by Broadbent over the publication of The
Billionaire’s Vinegar, Benjamin Wallace’s account of the Jefferson wine affair.
The publishers apologised for several passages in the book, issued a statement accepting that they were not true, paid an undisclosed amount of damages to Broadbent and agreed not to distribute the book in the United Kingdom.
The following year Koch sued Christie’s on the grounds that it had auctioned off, and thus vouchsafed for, the credentials of the Rodenstock “find”, claiming that Christie’s and Broadbent sold the Jefferson bottles knowing there were doubts about their provenance. The case was dismissed in 2011 after a judge ruled that Koch was too late in filing his court action.
The scandal over the Jefferson wines was an embarrassment, but no one who knew Broadbent believed he had acted in anything other than good faith.
John Michael Broadbent was born on May 2 1927 in Greenfield, near Saddleworth, Lancashire, to John Broadbent and Hilary, née Batty. After education at Rishworth School near Halifax, and National Service in the Royal Artillery, he began training as an architect, but finding that he was “too idle to open any books on drainage and sanitation” he decided not to pursue it as a career.
His mother suggested that he apply for a wine trade job, and in 1952 he joined the London wine merchant Tommy Layton, where he began by sweeping the floors.
Subsequently he moved to Saccone and Speed, then Harveys of Bristol. In 1957 he began lecturing on wine and wrote his first wine column, for Cheshire Life, for which he was paid £5. In 1960 he passed the master of wine exam, only the 24th candidate to do so.
In 1966 Broadbent was invited to revive the wine auctions at Christie’s which had been suspended since the outbreak of war. In 1967 he was made a director.
As wealthy collectors began to compete for trophy vintages Broadbent was responsible for a series of important “finds” including a cache of 41 magnums of 1870 Château Lafite in the cellars of Glamis Castle, the late Queen Mother’s childhood home. They went in a celebrated sale in 1971.
Broadbent received every wine award going and was appointed Chevalier dans l’ordre Nationale du Mérite. He officially retired as head of Christie’s wine department in 1992 but remained a senior consultant with the auction house for years afterwards.
In 1954 Michael Broadbent married Daphne Joste, who shared her husband’s love of wine. In 2003 he described to the Daily Mail’s Robert Hardman the routine of an average Broadbent weekend: “I suppose we might start with an Auslese at around 11, when Daphne gets a craving. Then we would move on to a Bloody Mary, or a Pimms in summer, and then a glass or two of claret over lunch with a small glass of tawny port afterwards.
“In the early evening, Daphne will have a whisky and soda while I might have champagne or a sherry – always Tio Pepe. Then we might have two or three glasses of claret.
“After that, Daphne might have a small 1969 vintage Calvados. And, if it’s a proper dinner, I’ll have a vintage port.”
His tip for a long life of happy drinking was a mid-afternoon nap.
Daphne died in 2015, and in 2019 Broadbent married Valerie Smallwood. She survives him with a son and daughter from his marriage to Daphne.
Michael Broadbent, born May 2 1927, died March 17 2020