Two telling things happened in spring 2008: In March, JP Morgan acquired Bear Stearns for $2 per share, to stabilize a Wall Street giant, and about a month later, a cohort of wine collectors gathered at Cru restaurant in New York for an auction that marked those swaggery days. Laurent Ponsot, proprietor of Domaine Ponsot, one of Burgundy’s most important domaines, appeared at Cru and stopped the sale of bottles from his property, claiming among other things a bottle of 1929 Clos de la Roche was fake, as the domaine didn’t produce the wine until 1934.
