Most bottles shown on this website were generally unknown before and this naturally raises the question of their origin and authenticity. How can so many old bottles of this world-famous wine suddenly appear? Well, the let me try to answer this:

Some bottles of very old tokaji have long been known

• According to the Guinness book of records "the oldest bottle of wine to have been sold at auction was a bottle of 1646 Imperial Tokay, which was bought by John A. Chunko of Princeton, New Jersey, USA and Jay Walker of Ridgefield, Connecticut, USA for SFr 1250 (£405) including buyers premium at Sothebys, Geneva, Switzerland on 16 Nov 1984." I actually contacted both Sothebys and the owners but didn't get any photo of the bottle.
   
• Some very old bottles were auctioned at Christies, Sothebys and also some other auction houses. From the oldest ones (before 1800) I found less than 10 bottles in the auction archives. Here are a few links are example: Christies, Sothebys, Fieldings. Interesting that apparently Christies auctioned its first Tokaji as early as 1770, only four years after the company was founded by James Christie.   
   
• The bottles of the Royal Saxon Cellar auctioned that were auctioned had probably been auctioned in 1927 in Dresden. See the page about the Royal Saxon Court for more details.
   
• Bottles of the Imperial Cellar in Vienna were also publicly sold. In my page about the Habsburg cellar you can find a Hofkeller price list from 1913. The sold wines were young at the time sold but today are more than 100 years old.
   
• Several archives mention very old Tokaji in private cellars long before the World Wars. Those cellars usually belonged to wealthy families from aristoctracy/nobility. Examples include the1853 inventory of the Potocki family which owned the Wilanow palace at the time. The wines were put on auction that year and 3 bidders, including Florian Fukier, purchased the collection. Another example is 115 year old Tokaji in the cellar of the Białystok palace of Jan Klemens Branicki (1689–1771) and his wife Izabela Poniatowska.
   
• Another known old bottle of vintage 1683, once the oldest Tokaji in Hungary, mysteriously disappeared around 2010 from the collection of the Hungarian Agriculture Museum. 

Mounting evidence that old bottles tokaji bottles have survived World Wars I and II

Regarding World War II there are several documents that indicate that bottles have survided World War II. 

• In 2012 polish historian Mirosław Kłusek pusblished a study with convincing evidence that very old Tokaji bottles had been walled-in in the Wilanow (the former royal palace) and were recovered after World War II. 
   
• Polish entrepreneur Kordian Taraciewicz claimed in his autobiography published in 2005 that he managed to rescue about 100 of the 400 old Fukier bottles he had bought in 1940. Gabriel Kurczewski writes about this on his page. In 2012, when Mr. Tarasiewicz was 102 years old he mentioned that the bottles were all consumed in later years by his family and friends. 
   
• Wine critic Daniel Rogov described a tasting of very old Tokaj in the Soviet Union after World War II. It was hosted by Marshall Zhukov. Mr. Rogov had sent me details of the tasting, expecially vintages tasted and some other details which suggest that those were in fact Fukier wines. I presented those findings and the possibility of Fukier wines surviving thre war at the Tokaji Borok Fesztiválja in 2005. Unfortunately until this day there is still no proof that this tasting really happened, and maybe never will as Mr. Rogov passed away in 2011.
   
• I studied numerous public and private archives (including the Wehrmacht archive in Freiburg) and found documents linked to the confiscation of the Fukier collection as well as papers suggesting that the wines were distributed among top officals in Germany. Unfortunately, I don't have publishing rights yet for the related documents. 

Please check the articles on the Fukier cellar, the Royal Saxon Cellar and the Imperial Cellar in Vienna for more information. 

Purchased Tokaji in Private Cellars and Wine Collections

Very old tokaji could easily be purchased before World War II. Anyone could buy it at the Fukier house in Warsaw, at Berry Broithers & Rudd in London and most probably also at Juliusz Grosse in Krakow. Older tokaji from the Imperial Cellar in Vienna was also on sale as proven by old pre-war price lists. Especially the Fukier price lists generally featured even the oldest vintages and of course occasionally customers bought such rare and expensive wines, and some of those bottles are still privately owned today, sometimes even the Fukier invoices were kept. I know several cellars and collections that include Fukier bottles (sometimes even the invoice) and more often then not I have the privilege to to study them. 

Occasionally very old Tokaji gets auctioned. Christies apparently sold its first Tokaji in 1770 only for years after the business had been started, and as I mentioned above a number of very old Tokaji from the Royal Saxon Court was auctioned 1927 in Dresden. Tokaji ollectors sell and buy old bottles on auctions. 

Cellar Discoveries

I was fortunate to participate in several discoveries of old Tokaji wine that had been walled-in. It sounds a bit odd but finding walled-up wines happens much more often than one thinks, and in my view there are growing chances that many more cellar discoveries are possible, because:

• Walling-in wines in times of war was a common practice not only in Tokaj but everywhere. Here are just a few examples that highlight the frequency of hiding wine treasures behind walls.
  • Wilanow example mentioned above
  • We know from (unverified) Austrian sources that the wines of the famous Imperial cellar in Vienna were walled-in when Napoleon occupied the city in 1805 and 1809.      
  • Also Mr. Taraciewicz mentioned above wrote in his autobiography that he had walled-in the 400 bottles in two cellars before the Warsaw uprising in 1944
  • Michael Broadbent comments in his "Great Vintage Wine Book" about the well-known Bretzenheim Tokaji bottles from Berry Brothers "The wine was walled up in the Hungarian revolution of 1948, unearthed and imported by Berry Bros. & Rudd in 1925."
  • In the book "Die Hof-Silberkammer und die Hof-Kellerei zu Dresden" (1880) we can read "When Tsar Peter I arrived in Dresden in September 1711 and took up residence in the absence of the king with the then Master of the Horse, Count Friedrich Vitzthum von Eckstädt, he was presented with an Antal Tokayer from the court cellar on September 20, which “His Majesty the Tsar himself tasted.” The power of old Hungarian wine, which had allegedly been walled up in the cellar of the Crown Chamberlain Towianski for over sixty years and was therefore called “la trouvaille,” is said to have contributed significantly to strengthening the king, who fell critically ill in Bialystok in 1726." 
     
• The Tokaji wine region was significantly bigger in the past. Like in many other wine making regions difficult vineyards are given up and wine production stagnates or shrinks resulting ion more increasing abandoned cellar capacity (either corridors within a cellar or complete cellars). 
   
• Wine owners hiding their precious wine assets in cellars in times of war or turmoil were usually planning to collect them a few months or years later. After World War II nobody could foresee that it took more than 40 years for the Iron Curtain to collapse and by then many of the treasures were forgotten because the owners had died or had to flee the country. Also, more often than not those people did not wall-in the assets in their own cellar but in one of the many abandoned and forgotten cellars that since have collapsed or lost their entrance. This actually explains why it is often impossible to determine the owners of the wines that were walled-in. Those people usually did not leave business cards or IDs there because it just wasn't necessary. They knew that is was their own property, and if a foreign army found it, well in this csase it was useless to claim ownership, maybe even risky.
   
• Advnaces in modern technology help a lot in identifying both, potential cellars (e.g. through digital archives) and also cellar cavities (e.g.with ground radar).