The legendary Tokaji collection ofThe Fukier Cellar

The Polish Fukier family is believed to be a side branch of the Fugger dynasty of Augsburg — in the sixteenth century among the wealthiest houses in Europe, and, through the Fugger–Thurzó partnership, already deeply entangled with Hungary. Two of the family settled in Poland — Jerzy in Warsaw in 1515, Bartłomiej in Kraków in 1564 — though how they were related to the Augsburg house is unestablished. The wine store dates from 1610; the family does not. The family began writing itself Fukier towards the end of the eighteenth century.

Real fame as a wine trading house and wine bar begins with Florian Fukier (1772–1837), who in 1805 bought the wine bar on the Old Town Market Square that became known as the Winiarnia Fukierowska. He and his successors Teofil, Henryk and Henryk Maria built and maintained a collection of old Tokaji that had no commercial equivalent anywhere, and a house that played a considerable part in the social and political life of Warsaw.

In 1927 the company went bankrupt under Henryk Maria Fukier and was sold to Edward Krzemiński, who in turn ran into financial difficulty. The building was almost completely destroyed in the Second World War, rebuilt, and reopened on 22 July 1953 as the state-owned Winiarnia Fukierowska; today, privately owned, it trades as U Fukiera. The state house took up the prewar interior, kept Hungarian wines on the list, continued the guest book, and hung the walls with wine ex-libris from the collection of Norbert Lipóczy, a Tokaj vintner whose family had traded with the Fukiers since the first half of the nineteenth century. Henryk Maria Fukier worked closely with the state owner of the winiarnia and of the cellars under his old house, and marked the fiftieth anniversary of his working life there. Henryk Maria Fukier, the last of the line, died childless in Warsaw on 27 April 1959. His memoir Wspomnienia staromiejskie remains one of the most valuable single sources on the cellar — and, for the events of 1939, very nearly the only one.

The history and legacy of the family itself has been researched in depth by Gabriel Kurczewski, whose publications I recommend without reservation. That leaves me free to concentrate here on what this site is about: the Tokaji.

The Fukier cellar was not famous for being large. It was famous because it was the one place in the world where a private buyer could walk in and purchase a bottle of Tokaji older than most of the buildings around him. The house traded on that, and the record of who came to drink there reads like a register of Central European power.

• In 1754 Antoni Fukier sent Tokaji then already 150 years old to the coronation festivities of Stanisław Poniatowski.
• Legend has Napoleon in the cellar in 1812, on the march to Moscow. It is a good story and I have never been able to document it.
• In 1867 Teofil Fukier sent wine of the same vintage to the Hungarian coronation of Franz Joseph — a gift made on Fukier’s own initiative, as both Henryk Maria Fukier and Maksymilian Baruch state, not a purchase by Hungarians short of old wine; Kurczewski reads it the other way round, as an attempt to draw Hungarian attention to the Warsaw cellars.
• In 1877 Don Carlos, Duke of Madrid, the Carlist claimant to the Spanish throne, was shown the cellar and stopped at the hetman wines of 1606 and 1652.
• In 1915, days after the German entry into Warsaw, Prince Leopold of Bavaria — brother of King Ludwig III and commander of the 9th Army — visited the house with his entourage and signed the guest book.
• In 1916 three bottles of the 1606 went to the coronation of Karl I at Budapest, as “the oldest Hungarian wine in the world”. The memoir gives the logistics: the case was packed by Baron Adrian and carried by Rotmistrz Count Beniowski, and the wine was served at the end of the reception, in tiny glasses, at the principal table only. To find three bottles still sound, seven had to be opened.
• In 1916 King Ludwig III of Bavaria himself came. His signature stood at the head of a page of the guest book, where Willem van de Poll photographed it in 1934.
• On 22 May 1919 Achille Ratti, Apostolic Visitor to Poland, signed the guest book with his secretary Ermenegildo Pellegrinetti. Three years later he was elected pope as Pius XI.
• Thomas Mann was photographed in the cellar in 1927.
• Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös bought two bottles as a gift for Regent Horthy.

One qualification belongs with that list. For most of the house's history the very oldest bottles were not really for sale: they were shown, poured to guests of consequence, and sent out as gifts on occasions of state. The oldest Tokaji probably became freely purchasable only after the insolvency of the Fukier company in 1927, when Krzemiński took over the running of the business and the reserves that had been treated as heirlooms started to be traded as stock. Most of the old bottles that survive in private hands today left the cellar in those last eleven years, not in the two centuries before them.

A second measure of the reputation is the guest book, and a third is the price list — of which more below. For scale: the Kempinski list of 1912 in Berlin offered twenty-five different Tokaji, and an 1876 report on another Warsaw cellar mentions vintages of 1590 and 1634. Old Tokaji was not unknown in the trade. Fukier simply had more of it, and older.

A note on the guest book, and what the surviving leaves show

There were five large volumes, and all five burned. „Dziś żal mi tych spalonych pięciu ogromnych tomów” — today I grieve for those five huge burned volumes — with a single small autograph leaf surviving in the hands of his nephew Schuch (p. 153). The idea had been Teofil’s, modelled on visitors’ books he had signed on his travels in Germany: Schiller’s house, Goethe’s and Dürer’s, and in Gdańsk the Artus Court and the Uphagen house. Signatures were entered with the visitor’s city and country, “as if a register of visitors, material for statistics”; the aphorisms, impressions and drawings came later (p. 152). The books were consulted as a historical source in their own right — a commission came from Paris hunting for Balzac’s signature, from his journey to Mme Hańska (p. 110). One further trace is worth chasing: before the 1963 book, Zrębowicz had worked the volumes up as a series in a Warsaw daily “long ago, in the years 1923–27” (p. 153). That series would be the fullest surviving description of their contents. What survives are photographs, and Gabriel Kurczewski has identified what is on three of them, all held in the photographic collection of the Dutch Nationaal Archief: the autograph of a King Ludwig of Bavaria; the signature of Achille Ratti, apostolic visitor and nuncio in Warsaw 1918–1920 and from 1922 Pope Pius XI, signing on 22 May 1919 with his secretary on the Polish mission, Ermenegildo Pellegrinetti, later nuncio to Yugoslavia and created cardinal by Ratti himself in 1937; and the autograph of Marshal Foch. Henryk Maria Fukier preserved the Bavarian's remark: “I have heard that your wines are the older the better. I will gladly try — but what will my personal physician say?”

The archival description of the first reads “Guestbook of winery Fukier, with a contribution from King Ludwig of Bavaria”, and the word Ludwig is legible at the top of the page. The Bavarian in question is Ludwig III, the last king of Bavaria — not Ludwig I, who died in 1868 and for whom no journey to Poland has ever been documented. The occupation years put the Bavarian court within reach of Warsaw for the first time, and the leaf belongs to that period rather than to the 1918–1920 window suggested by the neighbouring Ratti and Foch autographs.

A second Bavarian, and a documented one. German troops entered Warsaw at dawn on 5 August 1915, immediately after the Russians blew the Vistula bridges. The 9th Army was commanded by Prince Leopold of Bavaria, brother of King Ludwig III. In his memoirs Wspomnienia staromiejskie Henryk Maria Fukier records that a few days after the entry the prince came to the house with his entourage, toured the old cellar, asked about the firm's history and about the family's own Bavarian descent from the Augsburg Fuggers, and that at the end he and his whole suite signed the guest book. Beseler, appointed Governor-General on 26 August 1915, followed soon after with his entire staff, and then nearly the whole civil administration. Everything checkable in that passage — the dawn entry, the prince as the king's brother, Beseler's arrival — matches the independent record; the visits themselves rest on Fukier's testimony alone.

The prince's visit was followed the next year by the king's own. Willem van de Poll photographed the album in 1934 with the signature Ludwig at the head of the page, which is the archival caption's Bavarian contribution.

Roy's own sentence corroborates it. Writing of what he was handed to sign in April 1919, he records that the album already contained the autographs of “all the most important soldiers, politicians and rulers of the Central Powers”. Bavaria was a Central Power, and its king from 1913 until his abdication in November 1918 was Ludwig III. That is also the route by which a Bavarian king's signature could reach a Warsaw cellar at all: the German occupation of Warsaw, 1915–18, when the rulers and commanders of the Central Powers passed through the city, and when an elderly king joking about what his personal physician would say fits exactly.

A fuller account of the book, made from the volume itself before its loss, was published by Roman Zrębowicz, “U Fukiera”, in Spotkania z czasem (Wydawnictwo Łódzkie, 1963). For 1919 he lists drawings by Wojciech Kossak, Tadeusz Pruszkowski, Szczepan Felsztyński and Józef Ryszkiewicz, and singles out a pencil sketch by Zofia Stryjeńska of a nobleman with a karabela holding a candle over a barrel in a hand unsteady with wine, captioned in verse: “Świetna była wina kapka…” — “Splendid was the drop of wine, the paintress's paw is trembling…”. The word kapka is the same one the 1853 Potocki auction catalogue used for Tokaji essence.

Most of what we know about the cellar comes from the family, from Polish journalists, or from Bókay's visit of 1934. There is one account by a foreigner with no stake in the story at all, and Gabriel Kurczewski found it: James A. Roy, sent to Poland in 1919 on the inter-Allied commission that was to ease the Polish–Czechoslovak quarrel over Cieszyn, published his recollections the following year as Pole and Czech in Silesia (London, 1920). He went down into the Fukier cellar in April 1919.

What he reports is worth having almost line by line. He drank, he says, Tokaji seventy years old — a wine of about 1849, drunk in the spring of 1919. He was shown older bottles still: “strange, cobweb-wrapped bottles resembling crinolines in shape, filled with wine still in the times of James I”. He was told he could not buy any of it at any price. And he was walked from chamber to chamber through passages cut in solid rock, by the light of a single candle carried by Monsieur Fukier himself.

He also describes the guest book, and his sentence about it turns out to be the most useful thing he wrote. The album Fukier handed the commission to sign, he says, held not only pencil and ink sketches by the foremost living Polish artists but the signatures of all the most important soldiers, politicians and rulers of the Central Powers. See the note in article 02 for what that does to the “Ludwig” leaf.

What the James I remark tells us about “1606”

James I reigned from 1603 to 1625, and 1606 falls inside that reign. Roy is therefore recording the house's own account of its oldest wine as given to an English visitor in 1919 — not as a vintage year but as a reign, which is exactly how a guide would localise 1606 for an Englishman. This does not corroborate the vintage. What it does is fix the claim at a datable moment, in a foreign language, from a witness with nothing invested in the Polish tradition. For the historiography of the 1606 date that is a useful, independent data point.

The word crinoline is worth as much again. It is a bottle-form description — a wide, low-shouldered, spreading body — and it gives us something to measure surviving candidates against.

Not for sale at any price

The most valuable single sentence Roy wrote is about the market, and it complicates the picture the price lists give: “It is impossible for an outsider to obtain any of these wines, since all the bottles are divided among the Polish aristocracy and released from the cellar only on the occasion of especially important family events.”

In other words the oldest bottles were allocated, not sold. Access ran by birth plus occasion rather than by price, and the recorded sales — Don Carlos in 1877, James Allison between the wars — are exceptions rather than a market. Henryk Maria Fukier says much the same in Wspomnienia staromiejskie, though writing in the 1950s he no longer advertised the aristocracy's privileges. What he stressed instead is that the old Fukier wines were famous for their medicinal power and were never refused to anyone who came asking for medicine for the gravely ill.

And a note on the decline

The same article carries a detail that belongs in any assessment of an interwar Fukier bottle. After Henryk Maria Fukier's bankruptcy in 1927 the house passed to Edward Krzemiński, and Wiesław Wiernicki — working from the manuscript of Władysław Płachciński — records that “under Krzemiński's management the fame of good wines at Fukier's came to an end, because he bought cheap French wines from importers and sold them at a high price.” The photographs of the guest-book leaves point the same way: by the 1930s the historic autographs had been crowded round with the signatures of ordinary visitors wanting to sign beside the famous — and Kurczewski reads that permissiveness itself as a symptom of the house's fall after 1927. A Fukier provenance resting on the 1930s is not the same claim as one resting on the nineteenth century.

Płachciński's manuscript preserves one scene from those years, and it is worth keeping because it fixes the register of the place better than any assessment could. Around midnight General Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski came in with his party, in uniform. The room was already rowdy; drunken women began shouting at him to sing them Sambre et Meuse, the French march of the Great War. He did not care for it, and left at once, taking his whole company with him.

Tokaji arrived in Warsaw mostly in barrel, and was bottled by the house into whatever bottles were to hand. This is the single most important fact for anyone authenticating a Fukier bottle today: very old Fukier Tokaji is routinely found in bottles produced far later than the vintage. Glass age and wine age do not have to agree. The house also bought finished bottles when the opportunity arose, so the reverse occurs too.

The mechanics are documented. Everything but champagne came in okseft casks of about 225 litres and was bottled on the premises, sometimes only after several years of pielęgnacja — nurturing in wood; the cheapest wines went straight into demijohns or bottles immediately before sale. Gerson's plates of 1868 show the working side of that: the cellarman's tools, the contents of each cask written on its head, and small bowls of milk set out on the floor for the cellar cat. They also settle one point of practice at a stroke — in the piwnica butelkowa the bottles stand upright, on narrow shelves, in single rows, in 1868. Upright storage at Fukier's is not an inference from the 1930s photographs; it is drawn from life seventy years earlier.

When the claims appear, and what they were before

The two dates this house is known by — 1610 for the firm and 1606 for the wine — are not of equal age, and neither is as old as the collection. The evidence for that is the earliest substantial publication about the place: “Kamienica Teofila Fukiera, z piwnicami win węgierskich”, in Kłosy VI, no. 135, 1868, signed (W.) and identifiable from the volume's contents list as Kazimierz Władysław Wóycicki (1807–1879), historian of Warsaw and the man on whose initiative Kłosy was founded. It is illustrated after drawings by Wojciech Gerson, which are probably the oldest images of the interiors. Gabriel Kurczewski found it, and reads it as an early document — and instrument — of the making of the legend, well before the house entered Prus, Sienkiewicz, Gomulicki, Oppman and Kozłowski.

What Wóycicki writes is this: “Fukier's cellars preserve to this day Hungarian wines pressed from the berries more than three centuries ago.” More than three centuries before 1868 is before about 1568. The oldest wine in the house is being dated to the later sixteenth century — not to 1606, which in 1868 would have been two hundred and sixty-two years, and which nobody yet mentions. The Kurier Warszawski notice of 1866 says the same. And 1610 does not appear in Wóycicki at all, which suggests the firm was not yet using it to advertise itself; Kurczewski has separately shown, in Almanach Muszyny 2012, that the tradition tying the beginning of Fukier wine trading to 1610 has no support in the sources.

The furthest any source goes is Wiktor Czajewski, Warszawa illustrowana: stara Warszawa, vol. 3 (Warsaw, 1895), pp. 113–117, who reprints Wóycicki and then adds that the late Teofil had bought the Potocki cellar of 1606, and that from it “the Tokajis and Hungarian wines reached the first half of the sixteenth century”. That is the maximum claim ever made for this cellar — pre-1550 Tokaji — and Czajewski gives no document, no vintage and no bottle for it.

The 1930 advertisement matters because of who was not there to check it. Henryk Maria Fukier had lost the firm in 1927, the descriptions of visits in his memoir stop with the 1920s, and he is not on the winery's list of employees drawn up in 1935. Kurczewski does not believe that text passed through his hands, and the internal evidence supports him: a house that had been saying “founded 1610” for decades does not suddenly also mean 1610 as a vintage unless somebody outside the tradition is writing the copy — and that somebody can now be identified. The conflation is already in the Associated Press dispatch from Warsaw of 11 June 1927, printed in the New York Times the following day under the headline “Wine Firm of 1610 Fails”: “The wine, which dates back to 1610, when the firm was founded.” That is a wire reporter compressing two facts into one sentence at the moment of the bankruptcy, three years before the Polish advertisement — and the same copy was still circulating in American papers in 1931 and 1934. The dating of the oldest wine therefore moved twice — from an unspecified sixteenth century in the 1860s, to a precise 1606 by the interwar years, to an impossible 1610 that entered through a news agency in 1927 and came home into Polish advertising by 1930 — and only the middle one has ever been treated as a fact.

As for where the old wine came from, one documented purchase accounts for most of the named vintages, and it is the earliest acquisition of old Tokaji by this firm for which there is any evidence at all.

Florian’s purchase books, 1786–1837

Kurczewski’s study of the earlier winery — Winiarnia Floriana Fukiera — works from the purchase and debtor books, and it settles the question of where the old wine was aged. Florian bought young wine, overwhelmingly of one or two years, and twice — in the autumn of 1812 and again in 1816 — wine from the harvest just finished. Purchases of wine more than ten years old were rare; the oldest cask he ever bought was 21 years old, an 1788 described merely as “old”. He also noted that in the trade “old” could mean a wine of two, three or four years. So the old wines that made the house famous were, with few exceptions, raised in the Warsaw cellars from young stock — which is the documentary substance behind Hungariae natum, Poloniae educatum, and worth more than anything the later Fukiers said about it.

The scale is documented too. The Killiani stock Florian took over in 1805 was worth 1,687 talars — 10,068 zł — including furniture and cellar requisites; the wine his heirs found in 1837 was valued at 134,268 zł 20 gr. Supply ran through relatives and acquaintances at Lubowla and Gniazda on the Spisz, above all Florian’s younger brother Sylwester (1780–1830), succeeded as chief supplier by his son-in-law Jan Lacko — the same Lacko who supplied Teofil until 1864, so the chain runs unbroken from about 1820 into the 1860s. The wine came down the Poprad to the Dunajec and the Vistula, or overland; Kurczewski’s study of the Muszyna customs registers records some 2,000 casks of Hungarian wine a year in the 1760s.

Retail, for scale at the counter: the cheapest Hungarian at 4 zł a bottle, the popular węgrzyn at 6, the dearer Hungarians from 18 zł up “bought rarely, for instance as medicine in illness”. Anastazy Walewski bought four bottles of old Hungarian at 2½ ducats — 45 zł — each while his wife awaited Napoleon’s child at Walewice; Bishop Gutkowski’s bottle at 72 zł in 1827 is the dearest single item in the debtor books. In 1837 the shop averaged 251 zł of wine a day, peaked at 2,181 zł on Holy Saturday, and did not close even on the day Florian died.

The Raabe purchase, 1808

In 1808 Florian Fukier bought from Jakub Raabe — the owner of the tenement in which the Killiani & Fukier business was then trading, that is, from his own landlord — a parcel of old wine:

Note that the essence is measured two ways, in bottles and in garnce. Essence was traded as a liquid commodity by volume, not only as a finished bottle, which is exactly what one would expect of a wine used for topping up and for blending — and it is a small corroboration of the recorking practice the house was still following a century later.

The transaction sits inside a sequence worth having whole. 1791: Florian Fukier enters partnership with Florian Killiani. 1805: Killiani dies and Fukier becomes sole owner of the firm. 1808: he buys Raabe's wine. 1810: he buys Raabe's house, jointly with his wife Wiktoria née Killiani. 1828: after her death he buys out their daughter Elżbieta Schuch and becomes sole owner of the building. He died in 1837. The tenant bought the landlord's cellar two years before he bought the landlord's roof.

What was actually in there

Surprisingly little is confirmed. Cellar books and inventories have not survived. What we have are historic price lists and journalists describing the rooms in general terms. A German list said to name the cellar has been set aside pending examination — see article 09. The most useful quantification comes from János Bókay's 1934 article in Borászati Lapok:

• 700 very old bottles, of which 328 of the 1606 vintage. Between 1914 and 1934, twelve bottles of that vintage were sold or given away as gifts, and five were drunk.
• About 4,000 bottles in the 100–200-year age band — which, counted from 1934, means 1734 or younger.
• Alongside these, a large general stock of Hungarian wine and a considerable collection of mead (met).

Roughly 5,500 bottles of Tokaji in total. Bókay also writes of 27 cellar rooms, which seems a great many; Gabriel Kurczewski has attempted a reconstruction of the cellar's size, location and topology from all available evidence, since no plan survives.

Vintages and their 1934 prices

The price list is the clearest surviving statement of how the house itself ranked its stock. Figures in Złoty per bottle, 1934:

On the facing page of the same list sit the Bordeaux. The dearest is an 1867 Mouton-Rothschild at 60 zł; a 1924 Brane-Cantenac fetches 27 zł and a 1924 Lafite-Rothschild 26 zł. The 1606 Tokaji was priced at roughly seventeen times a ten-year-old Premier Grand Cru. Whatever else the twentieth century did to the reputation of Hungarian wine, in 1934 the market had not yet forgotten what old Tokaji was.

Cellar management

Fukier cellar practice was unusual, consistent, and well enough documented that it now serves as an examination test.

• Bottles stood upright, as one does with Tokaji, in a dedicated cellar section. This is visible in the surviving photographs and in the film footage.
• Recorking ran on a six-year cycle. According to Henryk Fukier's memoir the secret of preserving the wine lay in soaking each new cork for a full day in a special liquid before use — the composition of which was a house secret and, as far as I know, never written down.
• Where a bottle was topped up during recorking, wine of a near-matching vintage was used.
• Cellar records were kept in detail: the wine, the vintage, the date of acquisition, the seller, and — a very Fukier touch — with whom the proprietor had drunk each bottle.

Where the old bottles came from

The house bought steadily and, in all probability, sold on as well. Polish aristocratic cellars were the prime source: we know of Zamoyski, Radziwiłł, Lubomirski and Poletyłło. The memoir is more specific than the firm’s later advertising and adds two names to that list. Fukier itemises the treasury wines as “of our own rearing, or else bought from the Zamoyskis, Lubomirskis and Potockis, and from the cellars of Franciszek Poletyło, then from Dubno, from Równe and other places — wherever we heard of old wines or meads coming from private magnate cellars” (p. 88). He also explains why such wine could be bought at all: in the houses that held it, it had been inherited as a rarity of secondary value. That is the mechanism behind the whole collection. The Fukiers were buying, cheaply, what families with older claims to grandeur regarded as lumber.

Fukier almost certainly also bought at the 1927 Dresden auction of the Royal Saxon cellar — a surprisingly high proportion of all Fukier bottles known today can be traced back to Dresden, which is hard to explain any other way.

A caveat on Dresden, since this page has treated the 1927 sale of the Royal Saxon cellar as a likely Fukier source. The memoir gives it no support. Dresden appears twice in the book and neither time as wine: once as one of the cities — with Paris, London and Stockholm — where Fukier bought engravings for the winiarnia’s Varsaviana collection, and once because his grandfather Teofil was schooled at Leschnitzgrund near Dresden. That is not a refutation; the memoir is silent on a great deal. But the Dresden connection rests on the profile of the surviving bottles, not on the family’s own record.

Tasting comments

Very few people have left a note on a Fukier bottle. Bókay's 1934 description of the 1606 is the most important, and the most extravagant: he writes of an unforgettable, never-before-met aroma, of a taste he cannot put into words, of a mystical thousandfoldness — ambrosia, the drink of the gods, the noblest of the noble. It is not analysis. It is a man describing something he did not expect to survive.

[Insert the full Bókay passage in Hungarian, followed by your translation.]

János Bókay, “300 éves tokaji bor Varsóban”, Borászati Lapok, 1934

For calibration, three notes on comparable bottles from outside the Fukier cellar. Len Evans on a 1646: “no hint of oxidation … incredible intensity and complexity”. Mario Scheuermann on a 1649: “remarkably rich”. Michael Broadbent on an 1811 found the fragrance and flavour beyond anything in his experience, and recorded it as the only wine he had ever tasted that had no finish at all — it simply continued. A 1746 Tokaji was served at the Royal Saxon table as late as 1910.

The oldest and most prestigious part of the Fukier collection was not originally Fukier's at all. It was the Hetman cellar — Piwnica Hetmańska — and it came into the house at a single stroke, at auction, in 1853.

Hetman was the title of the highest-ranking commanders of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and those men kept serious Tokaji.

Gabriel Kurczewski has shown convincingly how the Hetman holding entered the Fukier cellar. In 1853, on the death of Franciszek Potocki (1788–1853) — several of whose ancestors had been hetmans — 700 old Tokaji bottles of the vintages 1624 to 1794 were put up for auction. The catalogue, preserved in AGAD, titles them “kapka hetmańska” and advertises them in French, under the heading 17 Cathégorie — Vins de Hongrie, as “vins de Tokaj … dont beaucoup datent de 150 et même 200 ans” — kapka being the Polish word for Tokaji essence. Three Warsaw wine merchants divided the lot between them: Dobrycz, Fukier and Kamelski. From that point the house had a block of seventeenth-century Tokaji that nobody else in the trade could match, and it kept it as a distinct, marked section of the cellar for the next eighty-six years.

The photograph reproduced on many Fukier documents carries the house's own claim in Polish across the top: the Hetman cellar, with its three-hundred-year-old Tokaji wines. That is the section this article is about, and it is the section that matters most for identifying surviving bottles.

The oldest picture of it, and where the name comes from

Gerson's plate for Kłosy in 1868 is captioned “piwnica win hetmańskich” — the cellar of the hetman wines — and shows Teofil Fukier among them. It is, so far as is known, the oldest image of the Hetman cellar, and it settles the etymology: the room is named after the wines that were already in it in the 1860s, not the other way round. It also explains why the room is so thinly photographed. Cask cellars were photographed often; access to this one was restricted, and its pictures are correspondingly few. On the top shelf of the plate the bottles look, as Kurczewski puts it, as though dressed in ball gowns made of cobweb, dust and mould — which is the same observation Henryk Maria Fukier made in naming the house's own bottle form krynolinki fukierowskie, and the same one James A. Roy made independently in 1919 when he compared the bottles to crinolines.

• The same article names the vintages standing in the house in 1868: 1734, 1754, 1768, 1781, 1783, 1788, 1806, 1811 (“an excellent harvest”), 1818, 1827, 1834 — the hetman wines themselves being described only as “from the end of the sixteenth century”.
• To that list Russkoje Słowo adds, in 1915, a hetman bottle of 1612, “po hetmanie Potockim”, at 75 roubles.

Where it actually was

Until 2014 the Hetman cellar was a legend without an address. People said “in the Fukier cellars”; nobody could point to the room. Gabriel Kurczewski located it, and the method is worth setting out because anyone can repeat it. His own summary of what the chamber held — several thousand bottles, among them over three hundred of the 1606 and about a thousand of seventeenth-century wine altogether — sits close to Bókay's count of 1934 without being derived from it.

He began from two surviving general views taken from opposite ends of the chamber, which together fix its form: a rectangular, elongated room under a barrel vault, with a single doorway set centrally in one of the short walls, both long walls filled with six-shelf racks. From the racks, the door, the human figures, and Wojciech Gerson's engraving of Teofil Fukier in the cellar published in Kłosy, he puts the crown of the vault at about three metres. A rack held twenty bottles side by side; four racks of about two metres would make the room some eight metres long.

He then set that against two sets of measured drawings, both consulted in the archive of the Narodowy Instytut Dziedzictwa: the survey made in 1936–37 at the Institute of Polish Architecture of Warsaw Polytechnic under Professor Oskar Sosnowski, and the conservation inventory of 1973 by the architects Władysław Łukawski and Jerzy Ostrowski. The plans show that today's cellars consist of the same rooms as the prewar ones, the differences amounting to a few connections and details. Exactly one room answers to the photographs — and the identification is clinched by a detail: the vertical brick pier standing proud of the wall facing the entrance, visible in the photograph and drawn on the prewar plan.

The address is Rynek Starego Miasta 27 — the Fukier house itself — on the courtyard side, against the party wall with no. 25. That agrees with the prewar written walks through the cellars, one of which begins and another of which ends at the Hetman cellar, implying a position close to the stairs from the ground floor: the account in the weekly Świat of 18 April 1908, and Henryk Maria Fukier's own chapter “Winiarnia i jej dzieje” in Wspomnienia staromiejskie. The cellars had grown to meet it: originally under no. 27 alone, they were joined from 1849 to those under no. 29, the Giza house, and no. 31, the House of the Dukes of Mazovia, so that the underground estate reached the corner of the Market Square and ulica Wąski Dunaj and comprised more than a dozen chambers with different functions.

• Until 1849 the overflow stock lay in the larger cellars at ul. Jezuicka 72, the property of the Metropolitan Suffragan See.
• In 1849 Edward Belke, Teofil Fukier's partner, bought the neighbouring house and the two cellars were joined; breaking the party wall exposed a door-frame proving they had been connected a century earlier, with traces that a third house's cellars had belonged to the same Hungarian-wine store. A hundred gold ducats were found walled up.

The capacity problem

There is an arithmetic difficulty inside the room, and it constrains every quantity claim made about the collection. Two walls, four six-shelf racks on each, twenty bottles to a rack: about 960 bottles visible to somebody standing in the doorway. But the accounts put 5,500 to 7,000 bottles in the cellar. More than four-fifths of the wine therefore stood behind what the camera saw — and the photographs show the topmost shelves are shallow, too shallow to take bottles in rows. The lower shelves must have been very deep, which is what Henryk Maria Fukier says twice of the racks in rooms of the same construction. The 1973 section shows the vault springing low, so the chamber widens almost to the floor. Kurczewski's conclusion, which the measurements support, is that the true capacity was several times the visible 960.

One of the most interesting threads Gabriel Kurczewski has published concerns Kordian Tarasiewicz, who in 1940 bought 400 bottles from the Hetman cellar for 28,000 Złoty. The seller was not Edward Krzemiński — he had already gone under — but the tax office. The background is not clear, but this much is: these bottles were not confiscated. They were sold, legally, in occupied Warsaw, months after the cellar was supposed to have been emptied.

Tarasiewicz records that Fukier himself sorted and reviewed the whole batch, recorking where necessary, working through it with visible excitement and recalling the individual vintages as he went, and labelling and describing each type correctly. Several bottles, he writes, went back to the time of Jan Sobieski — the king who relieved Vienna in 1683.

“In 1940 one could buy about 400 bottles of wines and meads originating from the ‘hetman cellar’, placed under sequestration by the tax office.”

“After consultation with Henryk Fukier, who confirmed the authenticity of the wines and meads, the whole lot was bought for the sum of 28,000 złoty. At Grzybowska, where these precious bottles went, Mr Fukier sorted and went through the entire lot; in certain cases the corks had to be replaced. He set about the operation greatly moved, recalling the individual vintages as he went. Each type received its proper certificate and description. Several bottles came from the times of Jan Sobieski!”

Kordian Tarasiewicz, Cały wiek w Warszawie (2005; 2nd ed. 2010), pp. 161–162, published by Gabriel Kurczewski

How the tax office came to be selling it

Four hundred bottles is roughly eight per cent of the collection, and the question of how so much of it came to be in the hands of the revenue is the crux of this article. Kurczewski offers a reconstruction, and labels it as one. Henryk Maria Fukier went bankrupt in 1927; the new proprietor of the firm — which kept the name Skład Win i Winiarnia T. Fukier — was the engineer Edward Krzemiński. On the evidence of Władysław Płachciński's notes, used in Wiesław Wiernicki's writing on Warsaw catering, Krzemiński soon fell into financial trouble himself, ran up debts and had to close the premises before the war. If that is right, the tax office may have taken the valuable wines as security against arrears. The dates fit: Krzemiński's firm was struck off the commercial register in 1940, which is precisely when the office put the Hetman-cellar wines up for sale.

The purchase was not a speculation. Tarasiewicz ran Pluton, the family coffee-roasting business, and had been looking before the war for a way to broaden it; during the occupation he decided the firm should trade in wine afterwards. He commissioned Polish translations of the French technical literature on tasting, bought a quantity of French wine from the Germans, and had on his staff Professor Tadeusz Chrząszcz, a distinguished food-technology specialist and a serious taster. In the meantime the firm roasted grain coffee, distributed ration food and ran the café Fregata.

Walled up, and what survived

Before the Uprising of 1944 the Fukier wines were divided and walled into two cellars. After the capitulation Tarasiewicz obtained German permission to return to the city in October 1944, ostensibly to remove fruit pulp from his works for a marmalade factory being set up near Grodzisk Mazowiecki, and checked the hiding places.

“Under the stairs, where we had walled up the Fukier wines, the wall broken open and full of smashed bottles — but beside it the second walled-up part of the wines, untouched.”

“In the lorry was coal, the official purpose of the trip to Warsaw. On the way back we take from Grzybowska about two hundred bottles of wine and the Wyspiański paintings. Unfortunately the unavoidable ransom, and breakages, reduced our stock to a little over a hundred bottles.”

Kordian Tarasiewicz, Cały wiek w Warszawie, pp. 209 and 212

So of four hundred bottles bought in 1940, one wall was broken open and looted, the other was not; about two hundred left Warsaw by lorry under a load of coal, and bribes and breakage on the road reduced them to a little over a hundred. Tarasiewicz later told Kurczewski that all of the survivors were drunk. Kurczewski, reading the memoir closely, found nothing after that and allowed himself to hope that part of the Fukier collection became the Tarasiewicz collection. He died on 16 December 2013.

This is the least romantic chapter in the history of the cellar and, for anyone hoping a bottle survives, the most encouraging. Gabriel Kurczewski assembled it from the interwar press, and titled his account Nieszczęście, które daje nadzieję — the misfortune that gives hope.

The bankruptcy

On 2 June 1927 the District Court in Warsaw declared the bankruptcy of the firm Skład win T. Fukier of Stare Miasto 27, appointing advocate T. Michalski curator of the estate. The debts came to about one and a half million złoty. How they were incurred is not established. One trade paper set the collapse against a general crisis and noted how much the manufacture wholesalers had lost on Fukier's bills of exchange; another expressed frank disbelief that an ordinary wine business, even in hard times, could run up such a sum. Władysław Płachciński's manuscript suggests currency speculation, though a quality-wine importer needing dollars was doing nothing unusual — the memoir itself records buying Hungarian wine for dollars.

The firm was rescued, and the rescuer was the engineer Edward Krzemiński, himself a wine merchant. Płachciński's verdict on him is savage — a man who lent dollars at three or four per cent a month and “simply stripped Fukier of his property”. The trade press of December 1928 took precisely the opposite view: Krzemiński had covered every debt and lifted the bankruptcy from civic and national motives, being already provided for and childless, on the principle that “there is no Warsaw without the Old Town, and no Old Town without Fukier.” The same notice repeats the house's claim to have existed since 1610 and adds a new one — that it was, by seniority, the third-oldest firm in Europe and the oldest winery. Łowiec Polski, reporting the opening of the Gospoda in 1931, is a third voice on the same side: Warsaw owes him its gratitude, the writer says, for founding the place at considerable expense in difficult times, and the idea was a noble one. Kurczewski does not adjudicate between the devil and the angel, and neither will this page.

What is certain is that the two men fell out badly. Krzemiński had obtained a loan from the Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego against his own property to buy out the debts, undertaking in exchange to hand the historic tenement to the Society for the Care of Monuments of the Past. Fukier then declined to sell the house and demanded a transfer fee of 95,000 złoty that had not been declared in the bankruptcy. Krzemiński went to the prosecutor. Henryk Maria Fukier stood trial for fraud, and in February 1931 the court acquitted him. After that, on Kurczewski's reading and mine, he had nothing further to do with the running of the winery.

A later notice in the Korotyński file retells the affair with different dates — bankruptcy declared in 1933 against “the oldest firm in Poland”, the oldest hereditary establishment in the country and third-oldest in Europe, settled by Krzemiński, who bought the winery outright and left Henryk Fukier as manager. The press dates and the court dates do not agree; on either version the Fukiers no longer owned the stock, which is the point any provenance claim on a bottle “ex-Fukier” has to carry.

How it looked from New York

The failure was reported abroad. An Associated Press dispatch from Warsaw of 11 June 1927 ran in the New York Times the next day as “Wine Firm of 1610 Fails — Warsaw Concern Has Vintages 300 Years Old in Its Vaults”, and it carries three things no Polish source in this file supplies.

The first is a cause. “Henry Fukier joined the Royalist Party and is reported to have become so interested in politics that his business suffered.” Set that beside the Polish trade press blaming a branch crisis and Płachciński blaming currency speculation, and there are now three explanations and no adjudication between them — but the monarchist involvement is checkable, and nobody has checked it.

The second is a shipment. Fukier had been supplying the Polish government with wine for state occasions, and when the Polish Legation in Stockholm gave a dinner in honour of King Gustav, he sent wines of the eighteenth century. That is a named destination, a named occasion and a datable consignment of very old Fukier Tokaji leaving Poland in the mid-1920s — the earliest documented export in this file, and one that should have left a trace in the records of the Polish foreign ministry.

The change that matters

Krzemiński took the first floor for a restaurant — the Gospoda Towarzyska, later advertised as the Komnaty Fukiera, said to have been set up with the Foreign Ministry for diplomatic use but open to everyone, serving breakfasts, lunches and dinners, with a Hungarian Gypsy orchestra under the primás Bánda Márczi and its own telephone number. It opened in 1931, and the account of the opening in Łowiec Polski sets out how the house was then divided: the ground floor kept the old winiarnia and the cellars beneath it kept what the writer calls the oldest wines in the world, while the first floor became the reception rooms, the Lampi frescoes already on their walls seven years before the 1938 feuilleton described them. Old Tokaji was poured to the guests that evening, and the piece is printed in Polish and French in parallel columns, which is itself evidence of who the house was now addressing. That is atmosphere. The substantive change was in the cellar.

Under the Fukiers the oldest wines had not been on sale. James A. Roy was told in 1919 that no outsider could obtain them at any price, and the memoir describes them as rationed out for grave occasions. Krzemiński put the Hetman cellar on the open market. Advertisements began to stress price reductions, and a complete price list including the oldest wines was printed — which is the only reason we can now read the house's own valuation of its own treasure, vintage by vintage.

Two things fall out of that sheet. The 1606 stood at eighteen times the house price of Lafite and three hundred times a glass at the counter. And the vintages the house itself advertised were 1606, 1652, 1668, 1734, 1754, 1783, 1788, 1811 and 1866 — which is the series any later document about this cellar should be measured against.

The bailiff, and America

Krzemiński was in trouble almost at once. In September 1932 the bailiff advertised an auction, in the house itself, of wine belonging to the firm valued at 13,900 złoty; Kurczewski found comparable notices for 1935 and 1939. Then came 1934, and the reports turn explicit.

• 4 January 1934. The firm has contracted with the New York house Brass Rail for a large delivery of very old Hungarian wines and Polish meads, all over two hundred years old and the oldest reaching 326 years; it has in effect sold its entire Hetman cellar, about 7,000 bottles, for 1,100,000 złoty, to be retailed in New York at 75 dollars a bottle.
• 22 May 1934. The bailiff has seized about 2,000 bottles of seventeenth-century wine against debts of some ten-odd thousand złoty, with an auction set for the 26th; efforts are being made to save the oldest wines in Warsaw from the hammer. The arithmetic does not work — either cheaper wine was actually secured or the debt was far larger — and Kurczewski doubts the sale took place.
• 2 June 1934. With prohibition repealed, negotiations are under way to sell part of the Hetman cellar to the United States; George Butcher, president of an American drinks trust, has come to Warsaw to close it: 2,000 bottles for nearly 600,000 złoty. Another paper put the stock offered at over a million złoty and reported that an English aristocratic club was interested too.
• 30 October 1934. An American paper, the Jefferson City Post-Tribune, tells its readers that Tokaji “made in 1610” can be had at Fukier's in Warsaw for 55 dollars a quart — the same copy having circulated since 1931.

Krzemiński's own end was of a piece with the rest. According to Płachciński he lost everything to the bank before the war — the winery, the Fukier house, and his landed estate as well.

Germany and the Soviet Union attacked Poland on 1 September 1939. Warsaw capitulated on 27 September, the Wehrmacht occupied the city centre on 1 October, and the German victory parade, with Hitler present, was held on 5 October. This page long dated the clearing of the Fukier cellar to 6–8 October, on the authority of Henryk Maria Fukier's own memoir, which places the removal on the day after the parade and gives it three days.

Here is the sentence the dating rests on, in Fukier's own words.

“After the taking of Warsaw in 1939 German troops surround the house and for three days — the sixth, seventh and eighth of October — carry away by lorry all the wines: casks and bottles, young and old, and those oldest in the world.”

Henryk Maria Fukier, Wspomnienia staromiejskie, quoted by Gabriel Kurczewski

It is a single sentence, written twenty years after the event, and it is the whole of the evidence for the traditional chronology. It is also the sentence Kurczewski warns against over-reading: all the wines were taken from the premises, but the memoir never mentions a second storage place, and its silence has been read as though it were a statement.

That dating no longer stands first. A contemporaneous German diary, published in a critical edition in 2025, puts an armed sack of the Fukier premises three days before the parade — and describes something quite unlike an organised confiscation.

Manstein on the Old Town Market Square, 2 October 1939

Erich von Manstein was Chief of the General Staff of Heeresgruppe Süd during the Polish campaign. On 2 October 1939 he stood beside Gerd von Rundstedt as the 18th Infantry Division marched past the Teatr Wielki, one of five assault divisions entering the city that day, and afterwards drove through the ruins. His diary entry for that day ends on the Rynek Starego Miasta.

“Auf dem Altmarkt wurde grade Weinhandlung Fukier (Fugger) von Polen geplündert. Wir retteten die Restbestände. Geben 50 Fl[aschen] der 18. Div., nehmen uns etwas, [geben] den Rest von etwa noch 800 Fl. der Armee für Lazarette.”

On the Old Market the Fukier (Fugger) wine business was just being plundered by Poles. We rescued what was left of the stock. Give 50 bottles to the 18th Division, take something for ourselves, give the remainder of about 800 bottles still there to the Army for the field hospitals.

Erich von Manstein, war diary, 2 October 1939 — Roman Töppel (ed.), Manstein. Kriegstagebücher und Briefe 1939–1941, Paderborn 2025, pp. 90–91 and n. 397

The date is fixed twice over inside the source. The entry heads the day the five assault divisions entered Warsaw — the 10th, 18th, 19th, 31st and 46th Infantry Divisions, per the editor's note — and the letter Manstein wrote to his wife on 3 October opens its Warsaw passage with “Gestern waren wir zum Einmarsch in Warschau”. The editor's footnote identifies the object precisely: the wine cellar of the Polish merchant Henryk Maria Fukier (1886–1959) in the Warsaw Fugger house.

What the entry changes

Four things, and none of them small. The sack of the Fukier premises had begun by 2 October, not 6 October. It began, on Manstein's account, with civilians rather than with a German operation, in a city that had capitulated five days earlier and was queuing in thousands for water and food. The German response he records is conspicuously improvised — fifty bottles to a division, an unspecified quantity taken by the army-group staff for itself, the balance passed to the Army for field hospitals. And it gives a contemporaneous number: about 800 bottles remaining at that moment, plus the fifty and whatever the staff kept.

That number is the key to reconciling the two accounts, because it is far too small to be the cellar. Bókay counted some 5,500 bottles five years earlier. What Manstein saw being emptied was the Weinhandlung — the shop at street level, reached from the square — not the Piwnica Hetmańska beneath it. On that reading the two dates are not in conflict at all: the shop was looted on 2 October and its remnant dispersed by the Germans the same afternoon; the historic cellar was cleared later, in the days Fukier remembered.

The Cochenhausen order, and the week it belongs to

On 6 October 1939 Generalleutnant Conrad von Cochenhausen — commander of the 10th Infantry Division, part of 8th Army, and commanding officer of Warsaw — issued a daily order to the commanders of the 18th and 19th Infantry Divisions complaining bitterly about looting and pillaging by German troops. He mentions, among other things, a case in which German soldiers had shot at one another in the city's wine cellars.

Read beside Manstein, that order stops being background and becomes the middle term of a sequence. The 18th Division appears in both documents: it takes fifty bottles from Manstein's hand on 2 October and is formally reprimanded for looting four days later. Set out in order, the first week of October reads as one continuous and worsening disorder rather than as a requisition.

A caution on who was looting

Manstein writes that the shop was being plundered von Polen, by Poles. It is a first-hand, same-day observation and it should be reported as such — but it is also the private diary of a German general with an evident interest in how German troops appear, and the Cochenhausen order four days later shows German soldiers looting on a scale that required a formal rebuke from the city commandant. Both things were happening in Warsaw that week. The entry is good evidence that civilians were breaking into the premises on 2 October; it is not evidence that Germans were not. And it is worth naming what Manstein is calling a rescue: the distribution of a third party's property to a division, to his own staff, and to army hospitals.

The chain of command, still unestablished

No order, no requisition and no destination have been found for the removal of the historic cellar. What can now be said is that this was not part of Sonderauftrag Linz — Dr Hans Posse of the projected Führermuseum did not arrive to select paintings until November, and the National Museum was not touched until December — and that the earliest documented handling of Fukier wine by Germans, on 2 October, was carried out by a passing army-group staff with no reference to any authority at all. The German origin of the family name counted for nothing.

From those days in early October 1939 onward, the Fukier wines were assumed to be lost or destroyed. Most writers took the simplest view: drunk by soldiers. Manstein's fifty bottles to the 18th Division and eight hundred to the field hospitals are the first documentary support that view has ever had. Not a single bottle was known to survive until 2017.

In 1939 the private cellars at Wilanów were secured behind a wall. They came through the occupation, the Uprising and the destruction of Warsaw untouched, and were opened in the winter of 1947–48. Neither the Germans nor, after them, the Russians found the wine — the wall held through both occupations. What came out is the best-documented hoard of very old Tokaji in postwar Poland: over a thousand bottles, the oldest of them 1768.

Three state documents from the records of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers, held at the Archiwum Akt Nowych and published by Kłusek, carry the whole story. They are first-rank sources for old Tokaji, because the expert who wrote them was describing bottles he had in his hands.

The timing matters. After the Uprising the Branickis were evacuated from Wilanów to Nieborów; in January 1945, days after the liberation of Nieborów, the whole family was deported to Krasnogorsk near Moscow, and they did not return to Poland until the autumn of 1947. Adam Branicki, the owner of Wilanów, died on 2 December 1947 — nine days before the expertise — leaving his widow Beata Branicka and three daughters. The estate itself had passed to the state under the land-reform decree of 1944; personal effects had not, and it was as personal property that the wine was dealt with.

Document 1 — the expertise of 11 December 1947

Ekspertyza win i miodów z prywatnych piwnic z Wilanowa. The cellar had survived intact. The bottles stood upright in a dry room — which the expert judged advantageous for the Hungarian wines and meads that made up most of the stock — but the labels and the shelf notes had rotted away. Identification therefore rested on the wax seals, and by them he sorted more than a thousand bottles into three epochs: the oldest of the epoch of Marshal Lubomirski, 1768, sealed Szreniawa; a middle group of some eighty to ninety years, sealed Pilawa; and a younger group of fifty to seventy years, sealed Korczak.

“The most interesting and most precious are without doubt the old Tokajis of the epoch of 1768.” He counted a dozen or so types among them: dry ones — dębiaki, “with a nut” — mild semi-sweet ones, several of which had dried out from originally sweet wines, and sweet maślacze of the natural sweetness of old Tokaji, which he called very precious for the sick and the old as a medicinal tonic.

Beside them he found a sweetish wine of 1811, the comet year, which he described as the greatest refinement of old wine from the best vintage; he looked for 1834, 1848 — the year of the Hungarian revolution — and the famous 1866, and found none. The rest: a fine old Malaga, tired French Bordeaux and Burgundy, uninteresting Rhine wines, and two parties of old mead, the oldest about eighty years, dry, and close to Tokaji in taste. He stressed what the find meant. This was perhaps the only larger stock of genuinely old wines and meads from a private cellar to survive the war at all — the great Warsaw merchant cellars, the firms and the other walled-up private hoards having been destroyed. He valued single bottles of the old Tokaji at some ten to twenty thousand złoty, the old meads at 5,000–6,000 and the Wilanów meads at 3,000–4,000, with the warning that these were amateur prices, not market ones — there was no longer a market to quote.

Document 2 — the protocol of 10 January 1948

On the order of Director Ruszowski of 5 January the state bought from Beata Branicka one hundred bottles: 50 of the 1768 Marshal Lubomirski Tokaji, 30 small bottles of dry mead of about eighty years, and 20 bottles of Wilanów mead of 1898, the Maliniak. The protocol names who was present when the wall came down on 10 January 1948: the seals were checked first, then the expert went in with Stanisław Gepner, curator of the Wilanów palace and museum, Stanisław Lesiak of the Presidium, Beata Branicka and two of the family’s former servants. He sorted by three things — a sample bottle of each assortment which he had tasted, the Branickis’ own private notes, and then bottle by bottle. That last part is the most practical piece of examination writing in this whole archive.

• The wax seal establishes the epoch.
• Then the clarity of the liquid, and the deposit on the inner wall of the glass — the so-called kamień, the stone, which forms in Tokaji very late and proves the age of the contents.
• The bottom sediment must be sand or dust. Fungus or caked lumps mean spoilage.
• A ring on the neck, formed by mould, condemns the bottle: such wine is worthless.
• Store standing, in a cool but dry cellar — and inspect from time to time.
• Mark every bottle, so far as possible without opening it, with a note of sort, taste and age.
• Stand a chosen bottle twelve hours at room temperature before serving.
• Serve as a dessert wine, in small glasses with black coffee, in place of liqueur or cognac; for the weakened and convalescent, a glass of old sweet Tokaji twice a day — experience, he notes, is that the sick reject dry Tokaji as too harsh.

The hundred bottles went in three crates to the Presidium of the Council of Ministers and were put temporarily in the store by the state kitchen; on 15 January 1948 they were carried up to the Prime Minister’s apartment, for the personal decision of Citizen Premier. A proper cellar for them, the protocol adds, was being prepared in the Presidium building.

Document 3 — the note of 15 January 1948

Prices: the 1768 Tokaji at 8,000 złoty a bottle, the old meads and the Wilanów meads at 2,000 — 500,000 złoty for the hundred. The fifty Tokajis were the mild semi-sweet and the sweet, some of them numbered, packed in two crates of twenty-four to twenty-six and still needing detailed sorting against the notes of what he calls his two-day expertise. Tasting the small mead bottles he found that several in fact held old sweet Tokaji, very good; defining sealed bottles exactly, he wrote, is exceedingly difficult. (The meads are given as 1898 Maliniak in the purchase order and as 1899 and 1902 in this note — the documents do not agree.) The remaining nine hundred or so bottles went back to Beata Branicka, whose petition of 1955 puts it in her own words: of the wines found she received half in kind, and the rest was bought by the Presidium of the Government.

Kłusek measures what the state paid. In 1948, 500,000 złoty bought about fourteen tonnes of rye bread, or 119 tonnes of coal, or some 120 pairs of women’s leather shoes; a farmer would have had to sell six working horses or ten dairy cows to raise it, and a woman working the fields as a seasonal labourer would have needed more than 1,400 days. The state credit for rebuilding a war-damaged rural building that summer was capped at 125,000 złoty. Fifty bottles of 1768 Tokaji were priced at four times that.

Who wrote the documents

All three signatures are illegible in the archive — nieczytelny podpis. The folder nevertheless points hard at one man. Document 1 opens with the writer delegated on behalf of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers to determine the quality and value of the wines and meads kept at Wilanów; and Henryk Maria Fukier’s obituaries describe him as exactly that — former counsellor and inspector of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers, and a sworn wine expert. The voice fits too: the Tokaji connoisseurship, the vintage canon of 1811, 1834, 1848 and 1866, the merchant’s reflex of pricing bottles for amateurs.

And there is the object below. The wrapper of the Liszka privilege booklet of 1595, described above, carries a pencil note signed Henryk Fukier and dated 10/I 1948 — the day of the protocol. And the tags above settle the question in his favour from the other direction: the bottles themselves were labelled Inwentaryzacja Fukier — inventory by Fukier. What is still formally open is only the signature on the documents; reading it on the AAN originals would make the identification complete, and publishable.

The note reads, as best it can be made out: «[W?] Fukierowska piwnica — nie w moim domu! Kamienica Fukierowska jest moja dom [sic]!» — the Fukier cellar, not in my house; the Fukier house is my home. It was written on the day he handled another family’s surviving old Tokaji, his own cellar in ruins and the rebuilt house passing out of his hands.

Why there was Tokaji at Wilanów

Wilanów came to the Branickis late. The palace was Potocki property through the nineteenth century, and in 1892 the last of that line, Aleksandra Potocka, left it to her cousin Ksawery Branicki; it stayed in the family until 1945, the last owner being Adam Branicki. The cellar walled up in 1939 therefore belonged to a house that had been drinking Tokaji on a scale few families in Europe could match, and had been doing so long before it held Wilanów.

The best-known illustration comes from a letter of 1760, written from Białystok to Warsaw and published by the Wilanów museum in its Pasaż Wiedzy. Jan Klemens Branicki, castellan of Kraków and hetman, gave a name-day feast for his wife Elżbieta Poniatowska — sister of Stanisław, the future king. The table was laid in a gallery for two hundred, and along its length ran a channel filled with Tokaji, made to look like a sea. On the wine floated twenty-four little ships, finely made, loaded with pistachios, sugars, preserves and sweetmeats, which drew up in front of the ladies so that they could take what they liked from the cargo. After the dessert an enormous cup was carried in — said to have belonged once to Czarniecki — and the guests dipped it into the wine. The whole sea, the letter says, was destroyed in half an hour.

Two points of accuracy. That feast was held at the Branicki palace in Białystok, not at Wilanów; the account is published by the Wilanów museum, which is how it is usually met with online. And Tokaji at this scale is a statement about rank rather than about taste: the wine was the most expensive thing on the table, and pouring a canal of it in front of two hundred guests was the point.

The family’s reach is worth noting for anyone tracing bottles. Xavier (Ksawery) Branicki (1816–1879) was adjutant to Tsar Nicholas I until 1843; after years in Italy and France he settled in 1849 at the Château de Montrésor in Touraine, bought with his mother’s help, which he filled with Polish collections and which remains in Branicki hands today. Branicki property moved between Warsaw, Ukraine, the Russian court and France across the nineteenth century, and wine moved with it — so a Branicki bottle need not have stayed in Poland.

Sources: Muzeum Pałacu Króla Jana III w Wilanowie, Imieninowe upominki w XVIII wieku (Pasaż Wiedzy), for the 1760 letter; Château de Montrésor and the Touraine literature on Xavier Branicki for the Montrésor line.

What remains open. The signatures on the three AAN documents; what became of the fifty bottles of 1768 taken up to the Prime Minister’s apartment; and where the nine hundred returned to Beata Branicka went after 1948. Source: Mirosław Kłusek, Odzyskiwanie ruchomości przez spadkobierców Adama Branickiego w latach 1948–1960 w świetle materiałów źródłowych, Krakowskie Studia Małopolskie 17 (2012), publishing AAN, Urząd Rady Ministrów w Warszawie, sygn. 1/3, pp. 56–61.

What the house was doing between 1939 and 1944

There is a tradition behind this, and it is worth having first, because it explains the testimony that follows. Henryk Maria Fukier wrote that on returning “from the Tombs” — the Easter Sepulchres visited on Holy Saturday — custom required a call at the Fukier house to see the sień and the courtyard, and a look into the winery for a small bottle of wine if there was room to stand. “In my time almost half of Warsaw passed through the Market Square and the winery during those few days before the feast.”

The winery itself closed in 1939 — on one account before the outbreak of war, for the financial reasons set out in article 08; on another after the building was damaged in the September bombing. But the house did not stay shut. In 1941 it was bought by the Okocim brewery, itself by then confiscated by the Germans from the Goetz family. Aerial photographs of the summer of 1944 show that the building had been repaired. And the Easter custom survived the occupation. Maciej Szymański, remembering Easter 1944:

“At Easter 1944 I was invited to visit the churches of the Warsaw Old Town together with the Kamler family. After the pilgrimage and the ‘visiting’ of the Tombs, I was invited for the traditional śledzik — a glass of vodka and something to eat — down in the cellar at Fukier's.”

Maciej Szymański, Ja, Jo pamięta. Album rodzinny i wspomnienia, vol. 1 (Kraków, 2002), quoted by Gabriel Kurczewski

Wine had become vodka, and it was a different establishment under a different owner. But this is, so far as Kurczewski knows, the only direct testimony that the house was trading again in the occupation — and it is corroborated sideways by the insurgents of 1944, who found drink in those cellars four months later. It also closes the gap this article used to open with. Between the plunder of October 1939 and the destruction of 1944 the Fukier house was not a shuttered ruin: it was repaired, it was in German-controlled corporate ownership, and on Holy Saturday 1944 people were still going down into the cellar for a drink.

One photograph carries the whole of that closure in a single detail. The Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe holds a view of the house under occupation (sygn. 2-8990), and set beside Koneczny's façade of May 1935 it reads like a before and after. In 1935 two large boards flank the shop window, each lettered Skład vin T. Fukier … 1610. In the occupation photograph the boards are gone, the display window is boarded over, and the windows of the first and second floors are shuttered or nailed shut — one shutter hanging open on the second floor. The stucco façade and the canopy are untouched. That the upper glazing is boarded rather than merely closed points to blast damage, which would place the frame somewhere between the September 1939 bombardment and the repairs the Okocim brewery had carried out by the summer of 1944 — an inference from the picture, not a caption on it. What is not an inference is the removal of the sign: the firm's own founding claim, painted at street level and legible across the Market Square for decades, had been taken down.

The insurgents' testimony

For the year of the Rising itself, the Warsaw Rising Museum's Oral History Archive is the source, and Gabriel Kurczewski quarried it. Gabriel Kurczewski went through it for mentions of the Fukier wines and cellars and published nine testimonies. They are recollections, taken down decades later from people who in 1944 were teenagers — and they need reading with that firmly in mind — but two things in them matter a great deal.

First, a correction to the chronology

Kurczewski's own warning is more valuable than any of the testimonies, and it revises the story this page tells. He cautions expressly against two conclusions that Henryk Maria Fukier's memoir invites by its silences: that the Hetman cellar was, in the summer of 1939, the only place in Warsaw holding a large stock of old historic wine; and that the collection plundered in October 1939 left Warsaw immediately and in its entirety. Neither follows from the memoir. Set beside the Tarasiewicz purchase of 1940 — four hundred bottles of Hetman-cellar wine sold, legally, by the tax office, months after the cellar was supposed to have been emptied — the plain narrative of a cellar cleared in three days and gone begins to look like the beginning of the story rather than the end of it. Manstein's diary of 2 October 1939 (article 09) points the same way from the other end: the plunder started earlier, in more hands, and more piecemeal than the memoir suggests.

Second, the walled-up cellars

Two of the testimonies describe finds made by accident while insurgents cut passages from cellar to cellar beneath the Old Town.

• Bohdan Hryniewicz, breaking through in the cellars of the town hall, heard a bottle clink as the crowbar went through a brick. Behind the wall were fifty bottles walled up in the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski (1764–95) — “it was tokaj and mead”. The corks had gone entirely to powder; only the wax survived, bearing its stamps. What was left of the wine, about half a bottle, was “practically goo, almost syrup”. He drank some from a coffee cup on his name-day, 10 August, and afterwards “could move neither hand nor foot”.
• Mieczysław Wacław Świrski drank mead he was told was three hundred years old, from a small cellar walled up at the time of the Swedish invasion and broken into by chance. “It was a jelly”, afterwards cut into little cups.

Put those beside the Tarasiewicz bottles, walled into two cellars before the Uprising, and beside the Branicki cellar at Wilanów, walled up in 1939 and opened in January 1948, and a pattern emerges that is more useful than any single anecdote. Walling up is the reason anything survived at all — and it is also why the survivals are found by demolition, war and accident rather than handed down.

Not everything underground was Fukier's

The witnesses discriminate more carefully than a summary of them suggests, and that is worth recording, because it is the best argument for taking the careful ones seriously. Dariusz Celiński sets beside the Fukier cellars a wholly separate stock: “the German army had supplies of Moët & Chandon champagne. Terrible quantities!” — and with it the paradox that defined those weeks, champagne everywhere and no water anywhere. Men half-blinded by the dust of collapsing houses had to be nearly blind before the doctor would spend water on rinsing their eyes; Celiński tried filling a bath with champagne instead, to no effect at all. Bohdan Hryniewicz places his own find in the town hall and never claims it for Fukier. Mieczysław Świrski volunteers that the casks sent round to his company were “not necessarily the original ones”. Zbigniew Szpakowski names a building and a source rather than a legend. The uncritical attributions and the careful ones can be told apart, and they should not be discounted together.

Kurczewski's own image of what the testimonies build is worth keeping as he wrote it: an almost subterranean Fukier city, opened to the fighting young and yielding up its treasures, including those hidden from earlier invaders — its heart the multi-storey cellars on the Market Square, its reach running from the Castle as far as ulica Długa, where in the insurgent hospital wine was used to wash wounds.

The rest of what they remember

Zbigniew Szpakowski records a second Fukier storage location — the magazyny fukierowskie below the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, near the Castle — whose staff handed bottles to the insurgents, among them “a bottle of wine of 1800, that is a hundred and forty-four years old”. Coming from a catering family he was surprised they gave it over mossy and cobwebbed, unwiped; “but they wanted to show what the wine was.” It drank, he says, “like an essence-like apple compote, but unfortunately it had its strength.” Jerzy Tomasz Świderski and Bernard Słomski describe the other end of the scale: no water anywhere, whole enormous barrels in the cellars, cracked and spilling, wine carried out in buckets and brought up hot to the night barricades, wine used for washing and for cooking kasha. Tadeusz Chojko, facing amputation and fainting from blood loss, poured a bottle of Fukier wine over his own head to stay conscious.

Two further details fix the scale and the depth. Elżbieta Zofia Stolarczyk remembers boys sent across a street under fire with two petrol bombs apiece — a kick from behind for encouragement, and the certainty that a fall on the rubble would set them off. The boy who ran without needing the kick was rewarded on the far side with two bottles of red wine, “of course from the Fukier cellars.” And Janusz Leydo, asked whether he would do it again, said he would not: the rebuilt Old Town is not the original one, and “those are not Fukier's cellars, where we were given wine three storeys below the house.” Three storeys down is the only measurement of the cellar's depth any of them offers.

What the archive does not do is answer the question. As Kurczewski puts it, the insurgents' stories explain nothing about the fate of the collection but sharpen the wish to know it — and may contain leads towards it. The open question is now precisely framed: what became of the wine plundered in October 1939, and how much of what was drunk on the barricades in August 1944 was still it.

In 1958, somewhere in the Soviet Union, Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov hosted what may be the most serious tasting of old Tokaji ever recorded. Our knowledge of it rests on the unpublished notes of the Israeli wine writer Daniel Rogov, who was present as secretary to General Alan Shapley, deputy commander of the US Marine Corps and a personal friend of Zhukov. A small group of Soviet officers made up the rest of the table. Two principal dancers of the Bolshoi performed, as did Serge Jaroff, choirmaster of the Don Cossack Chorus, with six of his best singers. The artists did not taste.

The service was ceremonial to the point of absurdity: liveried servants carried each bottle round the table on a sterling silver platter, and the wine was not poured into glasses but served by the spoonful, from a mother-of-pearl tablespoon. Every wine was of the seventeenth, eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Rogov took photographs and was not permitted to keep them.

What he was told about the provenance is this: Red Army soldiers had found the wines at the end of the war. Three hundred bottles of the 1668 vintage; a thousand more from 1682, 1737, 1783 and 1811. Each bottle numbered in white paint, visible under ultraviolet light. And a cellar catalogue was produced at the table, itemising the wines, the vintages, the dates of acquisition, the sellers, entries recording with whom the owner had drunk particular bottles, and the near-matching vintages used when topping up during recorking — on a six-year cycle. The bottles had been stored upright.

Read the vintage row carefully, because it is the one place the two columns disagree. Zhukov's table had a 1737; Fukier's list has a 1734. That could be a mismatch. It could equally be a number read once, at a dinner, sixty years ago, off a hand-painted bottle. The 1668, 1682, 1783 and 1811 match exactly. So does the six-year recorking cycle, the upright storage, the UV-active white paint, the absence of paper labels, and — hardest of all to explain by chance — a cellar catalogue that recorded whom the owner had drunk each bottle with.

Rogov's notes on the tasting have never been published. Locating them remains one of the more valuable open items on my research list.

In 2005 I gave a presentation in Tokaj arguing that the Fukier collection had not necessarily been destroyed, and that bottles from it might still exist. It raised some interest and nothing else. No institution took up the question; nobody went looking. So the search stayed a private one, and it ran for more than fifteen years.

In 2017 I found the first bottle myself — the first Fukier bottle known to anyone in seventy-eight years. Everything on this page about the marking systems, the paint chemistry, the inks and the UV response follows from that find and from the bottles that have come to light since. Until 2017 the cellar was a documentary problem. After 2017 it became a physical one.

A Fukier bottle carries its own paperwork on its surface. The house used three overlapping systems, and knowing them is the difference between an identification and a guess.

• White-yellowish paint, applied directly to the glass. Carrying the barrel ID — the letter W followed by a three-digit number — the vintage year, and the type of wine with any additional attributes: Imperial, słodki, kapka. This paint glows under ultraviolet light. Daniel Rogov mentioned it in 1958; our own work has confirmed it, and the chemical composition of the paint has now been analysed to the point where we know exactly which components produce the glow. It is one of our examination methods. The paint can be glimpsed in the 1933 film footage.
• Handwritten paper labels, on the body or the neck, giving the name Fukier in red ink, the vintage, the type of wine, and a cellar inventory number — most probably a shelf ID, of the form “A I”. The inks have likewise been analysed and serve as a second, independent test.
• Nothing at all. Bottles distinctive enough to be identified on sight were left unmarked. Absence of marking is not by itself evidence against a Fukier origin.

The frames below pair ordinary light with ultraviolet: the paint marks that are invisible or illegible by eye are exactly the ones that carry the barrel ID and the vintage.

Bottles are not the only things that left the cellar. Paper and metal from the house turn up more often than wine does, and it is frequently a printed price list or an invoice that pins a bottle to a vintage and a year. Everything here is material I use for cross-referencing.

Numerous questions about the Fukier cellar remain unanswered. The foundation of the house; the purchase and sales activity of the firm; the oldest Tokaji vintages actually kept in the cellar; the cellar management practices; the guest book and what stood in it; the recorking regime — each of these is still open, and this page will carry them as they are settled rather than as they are guessed.

Some of them can hopefully be resolved. One is the question of the “secret liquid” said to have been used before recorking: I keep several corks from broken Fukier bottles, and they are waiting for scientific analysis.