We can offer 2 bottles of Massandra Pinot Gris 1888 at $5,500 per bottle - Lucky Number Eight!
Near Yalta on the Crimean Black Sea Coast lies the Massandra Imperial
Winery. The winery is situated in a beautiful park in a natural
amphitheater, protected on three sides by mountains and facing the Sea.
In the 1890’s the Tsar decided to build the ‘Best winery in the World’
at Massandra to provide wines for his nearby Summer Palace at Livadia.
During construction, miners were brought from Georgia to tunnel deep into
the mountainside and construct cellars on three levels. One of the finest
winery cellars in the world, the temperature is a perfect and constant 13/14
degrees Centigrade.
Massandra Winery has 5,000 employees and 4,400 hectares of vines which
stretch for 180 kms along the coast. Most of the wines produced are
fortified (Port or Madeira style) or dessert wines (Muscat, Tokay or Sauternes
style) and in a typical over 1 million cases are produced.
The Massandra Collection
The first wine maker at Massandra from 1894 to 1915 was Prince Lev
Sergeivich Golitzin. During this period, Golitzin collected many fine
wines from other parts of the world, all of which were donated to Massandra
upon his death, the start of what is now known as the Massandra Collection.
The collection remained safe during the Russian revolution for the
tunnels in which it was stored had been bricked up and concealed.
At the end of 1920 the Red Army took control of the Crimea and the
collection was discovered. In 1922, on Stalin's orders, wine found at the
Tsar's many Russian palaces was moved to Massandra and the majority added to
the collection.
In early 1941, fearing the German advance, the entire collection was
prepared for evacuation. The last part of the shipment left for the
cellars of the No. 1 winery in Tbilisi on 21 September 1941 and the Nazis
arrived in Yalta on 8 November. Yalta was liberated by the Detached
Seaboard Army on 16th April 1944 following which, the monumental task of
shipping all the wines back was undertaken, all bottles being back in the
cellars by the time of the Yalta conference in February 1945.
The Massandra Collection is one of the largest collections of old wines
in the world, estimated at over 1 million bottles, covering vintages from as
far back as 1775. Available for commercial sales are wines dating back to
1891, including some of the extremely rare bottles incorporating the Tsar’s
personal seal.
Though initially popular with the Russian aristocracy who spent their
summers near Czar Nicholas, the winery has since been visited by several
notable personalities including Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Ho Chi Minh, and Josip Broz Tito. Gorky wrote a tribute
to Massandra that is inscribed in a metal plaque on the wall of the winery. On
two occasions wines from the Massandra Winery have been attempted to be given
as gifts to Presidents of the United States. In 1987 Gorbachev requested wines
from the year of Ronald Reagan's birth to give to him
as Reagan was on a visit to Russia. The bottles were delivered by hand to the
Kremlin, but never given to Reagan. In 1994 a bottle from the year of Bill Clinton's birth was given to an
American businessman to give to him, yet no further message was heard. In 2015
the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, visited the winery
with the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. While touring the
winery, Putin and Berlusconi allegedly drank from a 1775 bottle of Jeres de la
Frontera worth $90,000. The tour was conducted by the winery's pro-Russian
director, Yanina Pavlenko, and charges of embezzlement were subsequently
prepared against her by Ukrainian prosecutors.
