BECOV NAD TEPLOU, Czech Republic: A collection of wine from the late 19th century, which had been hidden for many years under the floor of a chapel in Becov Castle in the Czech Republic, has been carefully restored by the famous French winery Château d'Yquem and is now on public display.
The 133 bottles, most of them from between 1892 and 1899, were discovered in 1985. They had been hidden at the end of World War II by the former owners of Becov Castle, located near the German border.
Toni El Khawand, the Cellar Master at Château d'Yquem, said the hidden storage provided ideal conditions for preserving the wine.
The quality of the wine was confirmed in 2016, when it was tested using a Coravin device. This tool allows a small sample to be taken through a needle inserted into the cork without damaging it.
He explained that the wine had been kept in excellent conditions inside the old chapel, which was very humid and cold, with thick walls and an underground location. These factors helped maintain stable moisture and temperature levels, which are ideal for storing wine.
Château d'Yquem has replaced the corks on several bottles, but El Khawand said the restoration was done very carefully to keep everything as original as possible, even preserving the dust on the bottles.
The wine is now being displayed at Becov Castle, which was once owned by the Beaufort-Spontin family. The family was later labeled as Nazi sympathizers, and the castle was taken over by what was then Czechoslovakia.
The Beaufort-Spontin family had hidden the wine along with a reliquary of St. Maurus, believed to contain the bones of St John the Baptist, before fleeing to Austria.
In 1984, the family contacted an American businessman, Danny Douglas, to help recover the hidden treasure. He secretly applied on their behalf to retrieve an unknown object from an unknown location.
After some back-and-forth with authorities over permits, the police eventually realized where Douglas was searching and what he was trying to recover, leading to the discovery of the hidden collection.
