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Cover Story

Ghosts in the wine and brandy cellar

by Judi McLeod, Canadafreepress.com

December 7, 2004

Even though they came from the wine cellar of Tsar Nicholas II, members in the connoisseur-who-has-everything category snubbed bottles with the Tsar’s royal seal.

Wines from 19th-century tsars and the cellar of Joseph Stalin are not coveted collectibles--even when on the auction block of London’s Sotheby’s.

Expected to go for more than £500,000 when offered for sale, less than half were sold.

Not only are the rare vintages worth up to £4,000 a bottle, they occupy an immortal place in Russian history. Collecting dust and cobwebs easy to blow away, the wines hail from the Imperial winery at Massandra, near Yalta in the Crimea.

a variety of some 150 fortified and dessert wines were among the Sotheby cache, which experts say represented some of the finest, rarest Russian wines to have ever appeared on the market.

The winery from whence they came was built in the 1890s to supply wines for Tsar Nicholas 11’s Summer Palace, Livadia. authentic Romanov seal notwithstanding, only 195 lots were sold, leaving a further 327 items to languish "on the shelf".

Could superstition and omens of bad luck have played a part?

Perhaps fastidious collectors don’t want to lay wine in their cellars because human memory can still recall the brutal slaughter of Russia’s Imperial family at the Impatiev House in Ekaterinburg.

Was it memories of Rasputin perhaps being plied with Nicholas’s wine on the death-defying night of his demise?

Or perhaps it’s bad-luck memories of Stalin the butcher, whose wife took her own life, whose son, killed during the war was not grieved by his own father, and whose daughter died an alcoholic.

In its heyday, the Imperial winery at Massandra produced sweet wines to cater to the Tsar’s legendary winter balls and in fact, to his every whim.

Chief winemaker Lev Sergervich Golitzin was a bona fide Prince and his wizardry for blending wines made him the Faberge of winemaking. Some of his finest blends came with names that would tempt even the most self-denying of monks. But, alas, the recipes for "Honey of the altae" and "Seventh Heaven" followed the prince to his grave.

When Stalin’s troops reached the gates of Massandra in 1920, it looked as if the winery would mark its closing chapter. But that’s before Stalin sampled the wines and decided not only to continue production but also to add to the historic collection.

Then came threats of the Nazi invasion in 1941 when the entire collection was packed up and moved out of Yalta to three discreet destinations.

Stalin was as well known for his brandies as his wines. Back in the days of World War II, he was sending about 300 bottles of brandy a year to nemesis Winston Churchill.

as more contemporary history would later prove, some powerbrokers aren’t so particular from whom they accept gifts of brandy in keepsake bottles.

Maurice Strong, UN Secretary General Kofi anan pointman and mentor to Canada Prime Minister Paul Martin, for one. On a visit to former Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the Kremlin, Strong was given what was described in a CBC television special, as a glass saber full of the same stock of brandy Stalin used to send to Churchill.

Meanwhile, for powerbrokers wanting to stock up on wine to see them through the holiday season, it’s still available at Sotheby’s.

Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com


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