A secret wine stash, hidden by suspected Nazi sympathisers, has been unveiled after decades beneath a castle floor. The remarkable collection of late 19th-century wine, discovered under a chapel floor in the Czech Republic's Becov castle, has been painstakingly restored by the renowned French winery Château d’Yquem and is now on public display.
Discovery and Restoration
The 133 bottles, mostly dating from 1892 to 1899, were unearthed in 1985. They had been concealed at the close of the Second World War by the then-owners of Becov castle, located near the German border. The family fled across the border at the end of the war, leaving the cache behind.
Toni El Khawand, Cellar Master at Château d’Yquem, said that the cache provided perfect conditions for keeping the wine. Its quality was proven in 2016, tested using a Coravin device that extracts a sample without damaging the cork. "It benefited 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. Those were excellent conditions to store a wine," he said.
Authentic Restoration
Château d’Yquem has recorked several bottles, but Mr El Khawand said the restoration had been scrupulously authentic down to preserving the dust on the bottles. The wine will be on display at Becov castle in the small town of Becov nad Teplou, once the home of the Beaufort-Spontin family. The family was labelled Nazi sympathisers, and the castle was taken over by what was then Czechoslovakia.
The Beaufort-Spontins hid their wine alongside a reliquary of St. Maurus, which is said to hold the bones of St John the Baptist, and fled to Austria. In 1984, the family approached an American businessman, Danny Douglas, to help get the hidden treasure back, and he applied secretly on their behalf to retrieve an unknown object from an unknown location. After a back-and-forth with authorities over permitting, police eventually realised where Mr Douglas was looking and what treasure he was seeking, leading to the collection's discovery.
Related Historical Finds
Last week, a vast wine collection once belonging to Soviet leader Josef Stalin was unsealed for the first time in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. The 40,000 French and Georgian rarities, some of which date back to the early 1800s, are to be auctioned to establish a new education school in the country. Mr Stalin was an enthusiastic wine drinker, and his trove includes bottles from Bordeaux's most famous estates that were once owned by Russia's Tsar Alexander III and his son Nicholas II.
