Discovery, research, consulting, eventsServices

I offer services for owners, collectors, museums, auction houses and other researchers working on very old Tokaji.

My services are free in exchange for the right to document and research the bottles and related artefacts, and possibly to publish the results. Nothing is invoiced, brokered or sold: no fees, no commission, no advertising, and this site earns nothing. I do not trade or sell Tokaji bottles, and I give no valuations for sale. In general, very old Tokaji bottles are almost never offered commercially. For younger «old» Tokaji, look at Tokajneum, Múzeális Tokaji Borkostoló, Vigbor or Antique Wines and Spirits, as well as the auction houses that regularly feature old wine.

How is it possible to discover so many old Tokaji bottles? In my view it is a combination of four factors.

• Number of bottles. These very old wines were well known in their day, above all the wines of famous cellars such as the Fukier house in Warsaw, the Imperial cellar in Vienna and the Royal Saxon cellar in Dresden — thousands of bottles in total. To be precise, we should call this rediscovery.
• Evidence of existence. After the two world wars those cellars ceased to exist and their treasures with them. The wines were considered lost, and although a bottle or two turned up at auction from time to time, very old Tokaji largely disappeared from the consciousness of the wine world. Still, the evidence mounted that a part of those bottles had survived.
• Number of bottle hunters. As far as I can tell, state institutions never explored the option of finding these bottles. I do not know whether former owners looked into it — the Fukier family, the Saxon royals, the Habsburgs — but I doubt it. In the end only a handful of passionate people were seriously looking, in the context of private investigations. Apparently too few to make progress for over seventy years.
• Persistence and luck. I was always convinced that many of those precious bottles must have survived the wars somewhere. I began researching in many places, and after more than twenty years I was lucky enough to locate the first of the oldest. Today more and more bottles are surfacing, and there are good reasons to believe that many more will be discovered.

The search itself is very time-consuming and offers no guarantee of success. Most of the time goes on researching potentially interesting locations — mostly cellars and the basements of buildings — and on negotiating access with property owners. Only if access is granted does the exciting part start: checking for the entrances of forgotten cellars, and looking for unknown sections that have collapsed or been walled in. That exploration involves some technology for cavity and object detection, mostly ground-penetrating radar. I am not by any means an expert in cellar statics and structural integrity, so there is naturally some risk involved. A few cellar sections I explored in the past have since partially or completely collapsed.

A completely different approach is the wine collection — of private persons, families, museums, institutions. Those sometimes hide tremendous Tokaji gems. It is relatively easy to find collections that include Tokaji down to about 1811; older bottles are very hard to locate. But luckily they occasionally exist, and sometimes the owners are not even aware of what they have.

Cellar research

Any wine cellar, and even any basement, can potentially yield old Tokaji. The key part is locating the ones with a higher probability of success. For obvious reasons I cannot share the techniques I use, but if you own a potentially interesting property I can certainly help in judging the chances of finding old bottles.

Because Tokaji production was far larger in the past, many cellars in the region are no longer used, or have been forgotten entirely, while others are only used in part. Complete and consistent information about cellars and owners is not easy to come by, and I expect that knowledge of the location, size, entrances and topology of hundreds of cellars has simply vanished over the centuries. It is not uncommon for formerly unknown cellars or cellar sections to be discovered by accident, when existing cellars are surveyed, extended or repaired — or during ordinary construction work in the wine region.

For an introduction to the cellar world of Tokaj I recommend István Müller’s book Tokaj-Hegyalja alulnézetben (in Hungarian).

Impressions from cellar expeditions

Images from my own expeditions, most of which yield no old bottles at all. I am also informed regularly about expeditions by others interested in old Tokaji, and I am often brought in as field expert when old bottles or related artefacts are discovered.

Researching old Tokaji bottles matters not only for examination but for understanding their origin and their journey. Each bottle is a unique piece of history, a time capsule often full of surprising facts. Different scientific methods are used to verify, explore and understand them — and to complete what is known about the cultural history of the Tokaj UNESCO World Heritage of which these bottles are an integral part.

The work spans several fields, and I am grateful for the help of field experts and of a handful of co-researchers dedicated to very old Tokaji. This page presents the most important methods, not all of them. For obvious reasons — detecting fraud, and deterring attempts at it — I cannot share most of the analytical detail. Can I prove that every bottle on this site is 100% authentic? Of course not. I present only bottles that can be verified to a level I consider sufficiently plausible. My estimate is that the error rate in my attributions is below 15%, at least on the experience of twenty-odd years, and I am convinced most of the bottles shown here will stand the test of time as methods advance. Bottles without sufficient evidence, or with contradictory or unclear results, are not featured. As research progresses I add, correct and, where necessary, delete information — or whole bottles.

Archive research

Considerable time is spent in public and private archives, looking for information related to:

• cellar locations
• wine estate details and vineyards
• ownership questions
• bottle details
• economics — prices, contracts, export activity
• legal proceedings
• auction results
• correspondence
• validation of facts

Bottle examination

The foundation and cornerstone of any statement I can make about an old Tokaji bottle. It is resource-consuming but necessary, and it includes:

• analysis of bottle shape, size, production method and material, often involving glass experts
• analysis of labels, ink, cork, capsule, seals and applications such as coins and papers
• consistency and plausibility checks against a database of verified bottles

Material analysis methods include combustion analysis, X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF), infrared reflection-absorption spectroscopy (IRRAS), and various metal tests for capsules and coins.

These methods cannot detect fraud with certainty; they minimise the margin for error. I am thankful for any useful piece of information, analytical method or funding that supports this extensive and expensive area of work. Most bottle owners and collectors are quite open to subjecting their bottles and documents to scrutiny, as long as the bottle is not opened or damaged.

In order to deter fraud I publish neither all of the methods nor the concrete results. For the same reason I do not publish details of bottles identified as falsifications. Many old bottles, presumably Tokaji, remain unidentified; in future I may publish details here in order to make progress with the help of visitors to this site.

The historian Krisztián Ungváry’s talk gives a good overview of the history of bottled Tokaji (in Hungarian). The full method is set out on the bottle examination page.

Document verification and validation

Where bottles come with documents, those are examined in two dimensions.

1. Content analysis. Establish a logical relationship between the bottle or bottles and the document or documents. Sometimes that is easy — an invoice, a sales contract, a cellar inventory, a gift card, inheritance papers. Often it is very hard. The work involves consistency checks on language, typescript, locations, dates, persons, titles, stamps and seals, coats of arms.
2. Material analysis. Paper, watermarks, ink, seals and sealing wax, tested with the methods above, to verify authenticity, age and internal consistency.

Wine analysis

Only possible when the content of the bottle is accessible — typically when the cork leaks, the bottle is broken, or it is opened to be drunk. All three are rare. Methods include standard tests for alcohol, sugar content and acidity, mass spectrometry and gas chromatography.

Ongoing bottle identification projects

Many old bottles believed to be Tokaji are in the process of identification. One example: two unknown bottles with a unique double coat of arms in the glass mark which, according to the accompanying document, are samples of a Hungarian wine presented at a wine exhibition in Paris in 1843. The paper mentions the Café de la Régence, a famous place in the history of chess. The bottles come from a cellar discovery in the Tokaj region where a number of other bottles were found, all Tokaji, from some ten different producers.

The context of the discovery and the document’s reference to Sátoraljaújhely both suggest a Tokaji wine, but a first quick check produced nothing meaningful about a wine exhibition in Paris in 1843. The key to identifying the producer is clearly the coat of arms, and it should not be too hard to identify. Interestingly, the arms do not belong to the best-known noble names of the wine region — Andrássy, Széchenyi, Waldbott, Degenfeld, Maillot, Bretzenheim, Vay.

I help owners, wine collectors and museums in building and managing their inventory of historic Tokaji bottles and related artefacts — recording what a collection contains, what is known about each piece, and how it should be kept. This is advice on documentation and care, not on buying, selling or price: I give no valuations and take no part in transactions.

I support organisers of historic Tokaji tastings by providing insight into the old wines, including presentations and publications — background on the bottles being opened, talks at conferences, and written work.