Life — and death — of a Tokay

I was praying for a miracle, but it seemed unlikely. There had been one already: the bottle’s very survival. A second would qualify it for sainthood.

It was an extraordinary story, almost on the scale of The Hare with Amber Eyes. Towards the end of the Napoleonic wars, a barrel of Imperial Tokay was dispatched from Trieste to St James’s St, where it was bottled by Berry Bros, in 1811. From there, a bottle went to St Petersburg, where it rested for more than a century in a well-appointed cellar. In 1917, it ought to have been delicious. Imperial Tokay is an immensely long-lived wine, well capable of making a century. But its possessors forgot the Russian grand duke’s dictum: between the revolution and the firing squad, there is always time for a bottle of champagne. Tokay would be an admirable substitute.

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