Digging for French wine in Salonkia

[docchippy]

Pals

Anyone know any more about this article in Telegraph yesterday.

"Diggingfor Wine. An increasing number of foreigners,ostly French, are visiting Macedonia to dig up vintage wine left by French troops during the First World War, reports the Dnevnik newspaper."

Doc

[Coldstreamer]

but will it taste nice ?

[Chris Boonzaier]

2 thoughts...

I was in a bunker in Verdun with hundreds of bottles of mineral water... many still full (but undrinkable)

When my company relieved another French company In Sarajevo way back when, we inherited over 2000 bottles of wine from their rations that they had not managed to drink ;-)

[MartinWills]

I hope to visit the battlefields there later this year and will let you know what we find!

[bob lembke]

Pals

Anyone know any more about this article in Telegraph yesterday.

"Diggingfor Wine. An increasing number of foreigners,ostly French, are visiting Macedonia to dig up vintage wine left by French troops during the First World War, reports the Dnevnik newspaper."

Doc

On US National Public Radio I heard a radio reporter interview the noted Brit wine expert Hugh Johnston (or Johnson; I think the latter, I have one of his books, but haven't looked at it for years) on this very question. Hugh J and yours truly were in perfect accord.

The only wines that can be expected or even have a chance to be good after so much time would be red wines of exceptional quality, or (I might add) a few very special types of wine. For example, some (of the richest) Polish nobility regularly drank 200 year old Hungarian Tokaj of the highest quality. (Tokaj Essenzia)

The vast bulk of the red wine that the French Army drank, the Pinard, was rather rough stuff even then, and could not possibly remain drinkable after 90 years.

If the article literally meant "dug up", as in being in contact with earth, as in being buried, the odds of any wine being drinkable would shift from the remotely possible to the infinitesmally possible.

However, there is hope. The ultimate Polish vodka, Starska (roughly translates to "old stuff"), is made by taking very good vodka, putting it in the small Tokaj wooden casks, and burying it in a horse midden (i.e., burying it in liquid horse p--p) for 20 years. This will allow a subtle exchange of the essence thru the wooden cask over time. (I wonder how the horse stuff itself will taste after 20 years of this exchange?)

I have not been in Macedonia (the ex-Jugoslav republic; not Greece, the newspaper's name is clearly Slavic) in 36 years, but when I was there then I seemed to have been badly fooled by my hosts, according to recent exchanges with "locals" on this Forum. I think that someone in the Ministry of Tourism is trying to set bait for some gullible Frenchies. Perhaps spoofing foreigners is a local pastime.

Bob Lembke

[BeppoSapone]

Pals

Anyone know any more about this article in Telegraph yesterday.

"Diggingfor Wine. An increasing number of foreigners,ostly French, are visiting Macedonia to dig up vintage wine left by French troops during the First World War, reports the Dnevnik newspaper."

Doc

Is this for real? The stuff would be undrinkable.

Is it possible that "Dnevnik" ran a spoof article that has made its way, without the correction, onto something like Reuters?

Do they celebrate "April Fools Day" in Macedonia?

[bob lembke]

Do they celebrate "April Fools Day" in Macedonia?

Beppo may have "hit the nail on the head".

[Nikolay]

Why don't they try to dig up instead for some home-made grape rakya bottles that the BG guys left there after 1918! The chances are much bigger. And it will taste pretty good They only have to find where exactly were the positions of the following Bulgarian regiments: 8th, 13th, 24th, 29th and 34th. Because these regiments were all filled with people from well-known rakya-producing areas....

[bob lembke]

Why don't they try to dig up instead for some home-made grape rakya bottles that the BG guys left there after 1918! The chances are much bigger. And it will taste pretty good They only have to find where exactly were the positions of the following Bulgarian regiments: 8th, 13th, 24th, 29th and 34th. Because these regiments were all filled with people from well-known rakya-producing areas....

Nikolay;

You are right that the rakija (one of many Balkan spellings), the fluid itself, would have been more stable itself than wine. However, the rakija/rakya itself would have been more likely to attack the bottling from the inside, for example, perhaps shrinking a cork that wine would have expanded, or eating up a metal cap. A 90 year old bottle of any sort of booze will most likely be quite toxic, or merely disgusting.

I have a color picture of a glass bottle of Roman wine, say 1700 years old, with the bottle still 2/3s full. But the stuff, thru the glass, looks quite toxic. Not sure of the corking method.

The rakya/rakija word also seems to be used in Turkish. The word sounds Slavic to me, but, Nikolay, is the word from the Slavic or the Turkish? (I find a bit of Turkish in the Jugoslav languaages, more in Serbian than many Serbs would like to admit. Same in the Greek, such as imam baldi.)

I have not seen a lot of drinking in Turkey, but when mentioning the drinking I saw, and the Islamic prohibition, I was told in Turkey: "The Prophet (peace be upon Him) did not mention a prohibition on single-malt Scotch whiskey!" Pragmatic, those Turks!

Bob Lembke

[Nikolay]

Nikolay;

You are right that the rakija (one of many Balkan spellings), the fluid itself, would have been more stable itself than wine. However, the rakija/rakya itself would have been more likely to attack the bottling from the inside, for example, perhaps shrinking a cork that wine would have expanded, or eating up a metal cap. A 90 year old bottle of any sort of booze will most likely be quite toxic, or merely disgusting.

I have a color picture of a glass bottle of Roman wine, say 1700 years old, with the bottle still 2/3s full. But the stuff, thru the glass, looks quite toxic. Not sure of the corking method.

The rakya/rakija word also seems to be used in Turkish. The word sounds Slavic to me, but, Nikolay, is the word from the Slavic or the Turkish? (I find a bit of Turkish in the Jugoslav languaages, more in Serbian than many Serbs would like to admit. Same in the Greek, such as imam baldi.)

I have not seen a lot of drinking in Turkey, but when mentioning the drinking I saw, and the Islamic prohibition, I was told in Turkey: "The Prophet (peace be upon Him) did not mention a prohibition on single-malt Scotch whiskey!" Pragmatic, those Turks!

Bob Lembke

Hi, Bob

The word "rakya" has Arabic origin as far as I know. Actually that sort of brandy was produced in nowadays Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia much earlier than the Ottoman conquest. In the middle ages they called it in Bulgaria "medovina" (they used to make it with an instract of "med" ("honey"), how exactly it was done nobody knows now). After the 15th century the word rakya was applied generally to all brandy-tipe alcoholic drinks in the area. However what is now famous as "raki" in Turkey is made of anason and is pretty different from the "Balkan" rakya. In Bulgaria for instance we called that type of drink - "mastika", and in Greece they call it "ouzo". So the same word is used for different drinks from country to country.

Generally the Moslem population in the Balkans has far more liberal views towards alcohol than the rest of the Moslem world. Probably the centuries of having Balkan Christian neighbours producing rakiya in their backyard have taken its tall And the producing of home made rakiya is still a tradition in the rural society in the Balkans. Most of Bulgarian soldiers fighting in Salonika had their supplies regularly filled up by shippments from home. And the officers generally allowed moderate drinking , as long of course, as it didn't mess up with the fulfillment of duty.

Cheers