Czechia – Eight bottles of nineteenth-century Château d’Yquem have been restored after spending decades hidden beneath the floor of a Czech castle chapel. The wine, part of a 136-bottle collection left behind by a noble family fleeing Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War, will go on public display for the first time following a fundraising campaign by the castle.
Château d’Yquem found beneath a Czech castle floor
The castle of Běcov nad Teplou, in the forested hills of western Bohemia, is best known the gilded Shrine of St Maurus, said to hold the bones of St John the Baptist. The object spent the better part of the twentieth century hidden beneath the floorboards of the castle chapel, concealed along with much else as the old order collapsed at the end of the Second World War. The shrine was eventually recovered, restored, and returned to Běcov in 2002, where it now draws visitors from across Europe.
What took longer to surface were some very unique bottles of wine.
One of the world’s most prized sweet white wines
The bottles of Château d’Yquem, one of the world’s most prized sweet white wines, form part of a collection of 136 bottles discovered at Běcov in the 1980s. The collection once belonged to the noble Beaufort-Spontin family, who left Czechoslovakia hastily at the end of the war when they were suspected of having collaborated with the Nazis. They appear to have left in a hurry, taking little. The wine stayed behind.
A noble family, a war, and a collection left behind
While the shrine was taken to Prague at once to begin its long restoration, the wine was simply left where it was, beneath the chapel floor. It remained there, unattended, until a routine stock-take roughly a decade ago brought it back to attention.
A painstaking rescue operation then began. Château d’Yquem, from the Sauternes region of Bordeaux, took charge of their eight bottles, made in 1892 and 1896. The task of assessing them fell to Toni El Khawand, the winery’s cellar master. A small quantity was tasted to verify that the wine still corresponded, aromatically and in terms of balance, to a Château d’Yquem of that age. It did. Laboratory tests confirmed the wine’s authenticity, and the winery was able to replace the corks and fit the original bottles with protective capsules.
How 130-Year-Old wine survives
Not all eight bottles made the return journey intact. As the wine had gradually yielded to oxygen over the decades, only five full original bottles could be returned to Běcov. The rest had to be re-bottled: the contents preserved, but the vessel changed.
El Khawand described tasting the wine as a magical experience and spoke of opening such a bottle as unveiling a time capsule. There is something apt in that phrase for Běcov. The castle has always been a place where things were put away for safekeeping, and where they eventually, against some odds, came back to light.
Běcov nad Teplou plans a new exhibition of historic wines
No sale is planned. Instead, Běcov intends to put the full collection on display, including an 1899 Pedro Ximénez sherry and an 1892 port, and has launched a fundraising campaign for the new exhibition. The Czech National Heritage Institute has valued the entire collection at around five million dollars were it ever to go to auction. It will not. These bottles are, as they always have been, for keeping.
Sources: CBS News, The Local, Inkl/AFP
