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The hammer goes down (gently) on some fine wine this week when international art auction house Bonhams sells off historic stock linked to tragic Russian Tsar, Nicolas II.
Wine from the Tsar's cellar (left) and vineyard at Massandra in the Crimea, where the Tsar and the Romanov family had a summer palace, are being sold in London and San Francisco.
Some bottles are embossed with the Imperial seal, which is impressive enough - but boy, this wine's survived enough to deserve a toast.
Let's start with the years following the Russian Revolution. When the Red Army captured the Crimea in 1920, Stalin was so impressed with the wines at Massandra, he spared the cellar, and added to it bottles from the Tsar's Palaces in Moscow and St.Petersburg.
When the the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union during World War Two, the Massandra wines were taken to three different locations to keep them safe. Even more desperate measures were employed in 1941, when the whole vintage was poured into the Black Sea to save it getting into enemy hands. Or throats.
In 1944, the wines came back to the cellar. And all was calm until Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign, when the vines at Massandra were ripped out and production halted. It eventually resumed and continues today.
So what price such history? Well, a bottle of
Livadia Red Liqueur Wine 1891, embossed with the Tsar's seal, is estimated at $5000 - $6000.
Prince Golitzin's Seventh Heaven, produced in 1880, is expected to fetch $3000 - $4000, likewise a bottle of Honey of Altae Pastures from 1886. The label alone harks back to the age evoked in this photograph of Tsar Nicholas (on the right) strolling in his vineyard. The Tsar's personal tipple was the Livadia Red Port which, say Bonham's, he used to decant into a small hip flask and keep hidden in the top of his boot.
The London sale is tomorrow, the one in San Francisco on Saturday.
