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.

The owners fled south, to join White Russians fighting the Bolsheviks. After appalling privations, they lost. But some of them escaped, possibly via Baku on the Black Sea. During all those travails, someone preserved the Tokay in their luggage. Goodness knows why. Amid the bitter waters of defeat, it might have been a comfort. Perhaps it became a talisman. It would be drunk one day, when justice was done and evil overthrown. Until then, it would serve as a memory of a lost life: a symbol of a blighted world.

From Baku or wherever, family members reached Shanghai, still with the bottle. It was not easy to be a White Russian exile. Hauts bourgeois became taxi drivers. Some ladies sold their jewellery. For others’ sales, see Sonia in Crime and Punishment. It was said of female White Russians that they dressed on credit and undressed for hard cash. Yet the bottle survived.