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London (pte022/03.12.2004/12:10) - The finest and rarest Russian wines are set to go on sale on Friday in London and could fetch up to 4,000 pounds (5,790 euros) a bottle, according to the auction house Sotheby's http://www.sothebys.com . The very best vintages come from the Imperial winery at Massandra, near Yalta, on the southern coast of Crimea. It is expected that the150,000 fortified and dessert wines, which were blended to the tastes of Tsar Nicholas II and later Joseph Stalin, will fetch over 500,000 pounds (724,000 euros).
According to a spokesman of Sotheby's, Richard O'Mahoney, the granite rocks of the winery had ensured perfect storage conditions for the wines over the years. "These wines are just so unique, they can't be pigeonholed. They're amazing wines," he said. "I had the amazing good fortune to go to Crimea in July with a colleague this year, and we tasted over 200 wines. There were a few dry white wines that hadn't really kept, but otherwise every single wine was sensational," he added.
The winery was built in the 1890 to supply wines for the tsar's summer palace at Livadia. The cellars, which consist of twenty-one tunnels - each nearly 500ft long, which took three years to dig - still rank among the best in the world. The chief winemaker Prince Lev Sergervich Golitzin's talent for blending wines was so legendary that Stalin himself played a role in preserving and adding to the cellars. The entire collection was removed from Yalta to three secret locations in 1941 under the threat of Nazi invasion.
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