Bottles from the century the wine was made famous17th century bottles

The oldest vintage officially sold in the famous Fukier cellar. Of the more than 300 bottles of this vintage in the Fukier inventory in total 8 bottles are known today, owned by different unrelated owners in different countries, including one cellar discovery. The 8 bottles have 4 different shapes and sizes, 6 of them share exactly the same labeling/identification pattern (painted) and identical element spectrum of the paint composition. The other two bottles are different but well verified, too. The bottle owners can present documents related to the bottle, including Fukier invoices, postcards, cellar book pages, Wilanow inventory lists, Wehrmacht documents, original documents from the 1927 Dresden auction and even items from the Fukier restaurant.

This is one of the very few Fukier bottles carrying the shelf section label visible on old photographs of the Fukier cellar; the photographs of it now sit in the 1646 article.

A small bottle of about 4 dl, mounted in gilt silver at the neck and on the foot, and carrying its whole history on paper, wax and metal: vintage 1620 — so given in the document of the 1853 Potocki auction — refilled in 1715, label of about 1714, from the cellar of Michal Fuckier.

• The label. Upper left, in Latin: 1715 vina quoq replevimus in quorum repleturam efluxere — we refilled the wines, into whose refilling they ran out, or words to that effect. The timbre stamp of the paper is of about 1714, and reads …par II sols la feuille … gén. de Paris. In French: L’AN MIL SIX CENT VINGT — the year 1620. Below it 1826, and below that MICHAL FUCKIER KAPKA. Above the French inscription, a TOKAY stamp.
• The silver neck. Gilt silver leaves, struck 84 for the silver standard and with the tsarist round assay mark; on another leaf PM — Piotr Müller, goldsmith to the Russian court.
• The foot. A gilt silver foot was waxed to the base of the bottle. It has been repaired: it is re-fixed with a plastic-based adhesive. Struck into the underside: M.K 1826 — Mikhail Karpinski, tsarist goldsmith, in 1826 — with 84, the tsarist assay mark, and PM again.
• The coin. Set into the silver foot, a coin of 1768 bearing the Saxon arms, waxed in place.
• The wax. On top of the wax over the cork, the Pilawa arms — the arms of the Potocki family.

The dates on the object stand in a legible order: the vintage of 1620, carried by the 1853 auction document; the refilling recorded in 1715 on paper stamped about a year earlier; and the silver of 1826, by which time the bottle was being dressed as a treasure rather than stored as wine.

There is more background on this decorated bottle and on its connection to the Russian empire — the court goldsmiths, the assay marks and the route by which a Warsaw cellar bottle came to be mounted in St Petersburg silver — and it will be set out here.

The Australian wine authority Len Evans (1930–2006) bought this bottle at Christie’s in London in 1977 for £300. He described the taste as “extremely rich and of incredible intensity and complexity”, and wrote to me that two large tears came to his eyes as he thought about everything that had happened since the wine was made.

How the bottle was identified as Tokaji, I do not know, and it remains unclear what evidence Christie’s had to authenticate the bottle and its vintage.

A second bottle of the 1646 vintage, and the one that holds a record: according to Guinness World Records it is the oldest wine ever sold at auction.

• Vintage and style. 1646, catalogued as Imperial Tokay.
• Sale. Sotheby’s, Geneva, 16 November 1984.
• Price. SFr 1,250, given as £405, buyer’s premium included.
• Buyers. John A. Chunko of Princeton, New Jersey, and Jay Walker of Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Three bottles of the 1652 vintage from the Fukier cellar are known, numbered here 1 to 3 as they were photographed. All three are hand-blown onion-shaped bottles, sealed with wax over a cloth or leather cap and bound at the neck with hemp cord and a red silk thread. Each carries a paper tag written in ink with cellar numbers, closed with a black wax seal, and a small pasted paper label reading 1652.

The three are close enough in glass, closure, cord and labelling to have come from one cellar and one bottling campaign. Bottles 1 and 2 are full; bottle 3 differs in one important respect, discussed below.

Bottle 1

The tag is the most legible of the three. Under the ink numbers a second, older set of figures shows through, which is consistent with a bottle that was re-inventoried at least once during its time in the cellar.

Bottle 2

The base shows the deep kick-up and rough pontil scar of free-blown seventeenth-century glass. The wax capsule is unbroken and the tag still hangs on its original cord.

Bottle 3, and a glass seal

Bottle 3 shares the closure, the cord and the pasted 1652 label, but carries something the other two do not: an applied glass seal on the shoulder, pressed into the still-hot glass from a metal die. The seal shows a bust in profile within a legible circular legend.

Traced out, the legend reads IOH … GEORG, and the arrangement of bust and circular inscription follows the pattern of Saxon coinage of the period closely enough that the die may well have been cut from a coin or after one.

A squat, thick-walled black glass bottle with a deep kick-up, sealed under red wax over the cork and a band of yellow wax at the base of the neck. The wax capsule carries an armorial seal, and a small paper strip on the body bears the hand-written year 1663.

The bottle form is consistent with the period: mould-blown, uneven in the shoulder, with the heavy pontil-marked base typical of seventeenth-century cellar bottles. The glass surface carries a fine white bloom from long storage.

A square, coin-studded bottle whose markings point in three directions at once: Poland in the coins, Hungary in the handwriting, and England in a paper seal from Bath.

The coins

The silver coins on the bottle are from Poland (Joan Casimir, 1662 to 1667).

The inscriptions

A text on the bottle contains the year number 1931 and the Hungarian text “ZAMOYSKI ÁNGLIÁBÓL HOZVA”. (Zamoyski brought from England). Below the text is a paper seal (a crown) with the word “BATH”. We contacted the post museum in Bath and received the following answer:

“The fact that a machine was produced bearing the name BATH with possibly a crown on it which could be used to emboss items would seem to have come that from the19 th century Bath City Council.”

Another text on the bottle reads in latin: “Aszu szőllő borat.millesimo sexcentesimó sexagosimo octovo.” (= 1668)

The Zamoyski link

Jan Zamoyski was a Great Hetman of the Polish Crown, and this bottle is therefore directly linked to the Hetman Cellar collection mentioned on the Fukier pages (see also Fukier provenance).

A cylindrical bottle in dark green glass, still carrying the heavy cellar dressing it came out with: layers of blackened, mould-encrusted paper wrapped over the shoulder, a wax-sealed cork, and two typewritten paper strips tied to the neck with cord. Where the wrapping has fallen away, the glass shows the smooth, slightly uneven surface of free-blown manufacture, with the deep sea-green tone visible against the light at the neck.

The bottle comes from the Hetman cellar of the Fukier house in Warsaw, the section of the cellar holding the oldest Tokaji, and according to the paper strips it was part of the Tarasiewicz collection.

The paper strips

Two typewritten strips are tied to the neck. The first reads FUKIER xvlll. tokaj ess. piwn. Hetm. — Fukier, Tokaji essence, Hetman cellar. The second reads wino fukier xvlll korolin tarasiewicz, naming the Tarasiewicz collection. The Roman numeral on both strips was typed as a century indication rather than a vintage; the year of the wine itself is not given on the strips.

The dressing and the seal

The cork is capped with a dark sealing compound, worn but unbroken, and the shoulder is wrapped in several layers of paper that have blackened and grown a fine white bloom over decades of cellar humidity. A thin brass tag sits under the cord at the neck, the kind used in the Fukier cellar to mark bins and individual bottles.

For the history of the cellar and the place of the Hetman section within it, see Fukier Cellar and Fukier provenance.

An empty shaft-and-globe bottle in near-black glass, with a parchment label in a German hand, three wax seals on the shoulder and two cords still tied at the neck. Everything on it points away from Poland and Hungary and towards Dresden.

The form

A globular body on a short foot with a long tapering neck and a heavy applied string rim — the shaft-and-globe or onion form, the standard European wine bottle of roughly 1650 to 1700. On the form alone the glass is right for the date on the label, which is not something that can be said of most bottles carrying a seventeenth-century year. The bottle is empty, the mouth open, no cork or capsule remaining; what survives is the labelling apparatus, and that is the interesting part.

The label

Two lines in brown ink on parchment. The second reads clearly „Tockayer 1680“. The first is harder: it appears to begin Altes, old, and the rest of the word resists the photograph. Altes Tockayer would be the ordinary German cellar formula, and if the reading holds, the label was written when the wine was already old — that is, well after 1680.

The spelling is the point. Tockayer, with the ck and the German agent ending, is not how the wine was written in Hungary, Poland or Latin; it is how German court cellars wrote it, and it is the form that appears in the Saxon and Prussian cellar papers. A label in German, on a bottle of Tokaji, in a German hand, places the bottle in a German cellar at the time it was labelled, whatever its origin before that.

The seals, and the Saxon reading

Three seals sit on the shoulder: one in red wax, one in a dark grey-black wax, and a third, lighter one further round the body. The dark one carries an impression, and under raking light it resolves into two crossed diagonal bars — which is the shape of the Kurschwerter, the crossed electoral swords of Saxony, the arch-marshal’s arms borne by the Saxon Electors and later the Kings of Saxony, and the mark familiar from Meissen porcelain.

Taken with the German label, that makes the Dresden court cellar the obvious candidate. The Saxon cellar bought Hungarian wine by the cask for generations, kept it for a very long time, and is documented on this site as having still been describing seventeenth-century Tokaji as drinkable in the early nineteenth century. A bottle labelled Altes Tockayer 1680 in German, sealed with crossed swords, is exactly what a Dresden bottle of that stock should look like.

Open questions

The first word of the label, which needs the parchment in hand under raking light rather than a photograph. A clean impression of the dark seal, ideally by silicone cast, to settle whether the crossed bars are the Kurschwerter and whether an electoral crown or initials sit above them. The paper tag still tied to the neck, which is folded and unread. And the Dresden cellar registers themselves: if this bottle came out of that cellar, its removal ought to have left a trace in the accounts, and the 1927 dispersal of the Saxon cellar is the likeliest moment for it.

Two bottles of this vintage survive. The first is described below and shown in the first six photographs; the second appears in the last.

The paper strip on the body reads 1688, written on the same kind of old laid paper with its characteristic chain lines as on the 1663 bottle.

On the wax seal at the top, the arms of Pál Esterházy are more clearly visible than on the 1663 bottle: in the centre the letter L, on the left the griffin with the sword holding the three roses, and at the bottom the three rose heads side by side. Here they can be made out distinctly.

A gilt tag hangs from the neck on a crimson silk cord, itself impressed with a small device. The neck carries an engraved inscription, now largely worn.

The second bottle carries a fuller strip, reading Tokay 1688 in a cursive hand above the year — one of the earliest written attestations of the wine's name on a bottle in the collection. Its wax capsule is a lighter brick red and the cord beneath it survives as a grey-green remnant.

A very special bottle most probably paying tribute to captain János Garai, whose portrait is depicted on the bottle label. The label is made of anmimal skin/leather. Garai is definitely a name to remember in the history of Tokaji.

• János Garai is mentioned in the oldest known document to contain the word Aszú (1571), a contract about 70 larger and 52 smaller barrels of aszú. Until older evidence is presented we should remember that the first Tokaji Aszú was a Garai wine (and not a wine made by Spepsy Laczkó Máté as popular belief and marketing brochures will tell you.) As Mr. Zelenak points out this 1571 aszú was probably vintage 1566 when the events of the Habsburg-Ottoman war in the Tokaj region delayed the vintage.
• 2 vineyards in Tokaj bear the Garai-name: Garai and Kis-Garai
• János Garais sister Anna, also mentioned in that document, was married to Gáspár Károlyi, the first to provide a complete Hungarian translation of the Bible (1590).

One of the rare bottles with a coin attached, in this case a Saxon coin suggesting that it originates from the Royal Saxon cellar. The “Imperial” category is impossible to define exactly as no description exists, and only a handful of historic bottles of this category are known. Several explanations seem plausible:

• Tokaji of the highest quality (very high sugar content, 6p aszú or eszencia) worthy of Imperial tables
• Tokaji coming from the (top) Tokaji vineyards owned by the Habsburg Emperors. Although I am not sure if the Habsburgs actually owned vineyards in Tokaj in 1690
• Tokaji from the Imperial Cellars in Vienna
• Just a marketing instrument to sell Tokaji for a higher price

This is the only known Tokaji bottle from the Royal Prussian Cellar. An English publication reports a seventeenth-century Tokay taken from the imperial cellar in Berlin in 1918 and sold at Sotheby’s in London in December 1978 for £1,300; Hungarian sources put the sale on 13 December 1978 as lot 678. The buyer, C. S. Chadwick, donated it to Tokaj-Hegyalja through the Hungarian embassy in London, and in 1979 it was brought to Hungary and placed in the wine museum at Tolcsva. From there it passed to the Hungarian Museum of Agriculture in Budapest, and there — inexplicably, in a state museum — it has been considered lost since 2010.

The Hungarian reports agree on this much:

• The bottle. A dark green bottle of less than half a litre, dust-covered, holding a Tokaji aszú of roughly three hundred years.
• A German imperial cellar. It is said to have come out of one of the German emperor’s cellars, and to have reached that cellar at the end of the seventeenth century as a gift from the Habsburg ruler of the day or from a Hungarian aristocrat.
• Sotheby’s, London. After a long and adventurous passage through many hands it came up at Sotheby’s, where after lively bidding the English businessman Chadwick bought it for £1,300 — one paper puts that at about US$2,800.
• The seal. A report from Tolcsva describes the seal on the bottle as bearing the arms of the hereditary Marshal of the Holy Roman Empire, and the custodian of the exhibition telling visitors that the wine still moves in the bottle, standing roughly to the shoulder of the glass.
• The gift. Chadwick did not keep it long. Out of regard for the wines of Tokaj he handed it over at the Hungarian embassy in London to the ambassador, János Lőrincz Nagy, asking that it be brought home to Tokaj, and it was given to the wine museum there. He told the embassy party that he had holidayed in Hungary several times, that he had come to like the people, the warm summers and the sunlit hillsides of Tokaj, and that he had noticed the auction advertisement; having bought the wine, he thought better of drinking it and decided it should stand in a fitting place, where it came from.

From Tolcsva the bottle passed to the Hungarian Museum of Agriculture in Budapest. According to the Hungarian historian Krisztián Ungváry it has been missing since 2010: it could no longer be found there — see his “Egy kutatás kérdőjelei: mikori a legidősebb tokaji aszú címke?” in Zempléni Múzsa.

Reports in Déli Hírlap (29 June 1979), Népszava (29 June 1979), Kisalföld (29 June 1979), Kertészet és Szőlészet (16 August 1979 and 10 January 1980), Esti Hírlap (15 January 1980), Utazási Magazin (1 September 1980), Észak-Magyarország (22 November 1981) and Új Dunántúli Napló (16 December 1997), consulted through Arcanum.