Bečov Castle in the Czech Republic provided the backdrop to an extraordinary find of rare wines from the 1800s following a 42-year-long plight to resurrect the bottles, led by the family who hid them.
The stash of 133 wines — which includes eight bottles of Château d’Yquem, as well as an 1899 Pedro Ximenez Sherry, an 1892 Port and unspecified Cognac — was retrieved from underneath the floor of a chapel inside Bečov Castle, where they had slept for decades. On discovering that some of its own wines were among the precious haul, Y’quem stepped in and offered to restore the bottles to some of their former glory.
Perfect conditions
According to Château d’Yquem cellar master Toni El Khawand, the wines had inadvertently been kept in “perfect conditions” underneath the chapel floor.
The collection “benefitted from very good conditions of conservation in this old chapel. I think very humid and very cold, with thick walls, and also underground so it preserved the moisture and temperature in a very constant way,” El Khawand said.
“Those were excellent conditions to store a wine.”
Explaining that the vintages of d’Yquem found among the hidden stash were 1892 and 1896, El Khawand added: “We tasted a very small quantity to be sure that, aromatically and in terms of balance on the palate and overall perception, the wine corresponded to a Château d’Yquem of that age”.
The winery then set about replacing the corks and fitting the original bottles with capsules to protect them, with only five full original bottles of Y’quem surviving the process.
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