On the Side: At a wine gathering, wit and wiliness

A crowd of 65 devotees of the winemaking arts (and letters) gathered just after sundown one evening last week in a graffiti-scarred warehouse at the edge of Camden.

The occasion was a special session of the Dead Guys Wine Society. It is called that because the warehouse - now used for temperature-controlled wine storage - got its start as the appraisal site for estate wines, the defining characteristic of which is that they were once owned by the no longer living.

That made it a perfect setting, remarked owner Scot Ziskind, for the night's featured attraction, former Philadelphia Magazine editor Benjamin Wallace, who was to read from his recent book, The Billionaire's Vinegar.

Indeed, two book groups - from Queen Village and Bella Vista - had swelled the usual attendance threefold, diluting the pretense that is unavoidable at a wine-centric event, but not the mischievous pop of its surprise ending.

The Billionaire's Vinegar ostensibly is about cracking "the mystery of the world's most expensive bottle of wine." That would be a bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux said to have been unearthed during renovation in a Paris cellar, and sold at Christie's in 1985 for a high bid of $156,000. It was not simply its extraordinary age that set it apart, though. It was the initials "Th. J." etched in the glass, surely, the auction house suggested, evidence that it had been ordered by founding father Thomas Jefferson.

Still, for all the sumptuous detail about that sale (the shady German purveyor who "discovered" the bottle, the cautions issued from wary Monticello experts, the unintentional roasting of the bottle under an exhibit spotlight by the winning bidder, Kip Forbes), the book's subtext is its most delicious narrative.

It is a chronicle of the richness of human folly, of pomposity and fakery, of the duping of the willing - wealthy trophy hunters so fixated on bagging rare wines that they ignore the hazard lights, and finally even the role of good wine as an accompaniment to good food: "Wine became a soloist," one insider laments.

The crowd at the warehouse was well entertained. Under a basketball hoop and next to the junked ice machines that occupied the anteroom to the wine chambers, they nibbled on potluck pates and Italian wine-bean stew, on a substantial cassoulet and the requisite blocks of cheese. Bottles of Margaux and Mouton and Lafite were uncorked. And when Wallace was finished, the puckish Ziskind offered a rare treat - a '43 Cheval Blanc ("A diamond in the rough," he reported, "in great condition, superior color"), which was much remarked on by the crowd.

The appreciation, among some at least, bordered on adoration, samplers searching for ever-grander superlatives - until, cackling devilishly, Ziskind announced that he'd actually refilled the old bottle with a far younger vintage (1988 Cheval Blanc), replicating the stunt Wallace so meticulously unmasks in the book.

The assembled Dead Guys were good sports. But the message wasn't lost - that suggestibility never goes out of style, that self-delusion is boundless and hard to shake.

Jefferson, the wine sophisticate, had abandoned his practice of specialty orders in the last years of his life, drinking instead cheap, simple, even blended table wines, as Wallace notes, "and very happily so."

In a decrepit warehouse at the edge of Camden one night last week, his example was shining brightly - a declaration of independence from the tyranny of wine snobbery.

In last week's column on James Chan's peanut vinegar chicken, I said (in Step 5) to use 3 tablespoons of cornstarch in the vinegar sauce. It should be 3 teaspoons. My apologies for glopping things up!