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Drink

Death of an imperial survivor

26 September 2013

1:00 PM

26 September 2013

1:00 PM

I was praying for a miracle, but it seemed unlikely. There had been one already: the bottle’s very survival. A second would qualify it for sainthood.

It was an extraordinary story, almost on the scale of The Hare with Amber Eyes. Towards the end of the Napoleonic wars, a barrel of Imperial Tokay was dispatched from Trieste to St James’s St, where it was bottled by Berry Bros, in 1811.

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