 Every year as the bitter Russian winter receded the Tsars took the imperial family to their summer palace in the Crimea where they relaxed away from the pressures of power and entertained guests on the shores of the Black Sea.
At Livadia, their palace near Yalta, they held extravagant parties, celebrated communion in the imperial chapel and sometimes dined as a family, surrounded only by their personal servants. Wine was an integral part of their daily lives.
The Massandra winery in the Crimea was built in the 19th century to supply the needs of the Tsars' court and became legendary in Russia for its strong, sweet wines with a distinctive full flavour, utterly different from those produced in Western Europe and the New World.
Now some of the wines produced for the Tsars, many in bottles bearing the imperial seal and all of which survived both the Communist revolution and Nazi invasion, are to be auctioned at Sotheby's in London on Dec 3 when they are expected to fetch more than ?500,000.
They will include five bottles of the rich, sweet Seventh Heaven, produced in 1880 by the Tsar's winemaker, Prince Lev Sergervich Golitzin, which should sell for ?1,200 to ?1,600 each.
Four bottles of 1893 Ai Danil red port with the Tsar's seal are expected to sell for ?2,800 to ?3,800 each, half a dozen bottles of Massandra-produced Madeira dating from 1913 are estimated at ?4,000 to ?6,000 apiece, while a single bottle of 1905 Hungarian-style wine could fetch ?3,600. Massandra, now owned by the government of the Ukraine since the latter's split from Russia following the break-up of the Soviet Union, has decided to sell the wine, partly to raise the international profile of its products, which are not widely known in the West and also to get money to buy new machinery for the winery.
"Massandra is almost like a national treasure and they have got stocks of wine going right back into the 19th century but most of what they produce is drunk locally and I think they want to make people elsewhere aware of what they do," said Stephen Mould, senior director of Sotheby's wine department in London.
The Crimea was plunged into civil war after the 1917 Revolution as White Russians, aided by foreign forces, tried to turn back the Communists and the latter did not seize control of Massandra until three years later.
To protect the Tsar's wine from looters it was bricked up in tunnels built in the 1890s by an army of labourers who burrowed deep into a hillside to create some of the world's finest and coolest wine cellars.
The Red Army might have destroyed the collection as an example of imperial high living when they eventually found it but they quickly realised its importance and ensured that it was preserved intact.
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 the entire collection was packed up and taken to three secret locations. Only that year's vintage, which was still in vats, could not be saved and Massandra's director ordered that it be poured away. For perhaps the only time in its history the Black Sea turned red.
|
