Douglas Blyde

ugh Johnson OBE describes it as medieval Viagra — and it certainly gets the party started,’ says The Royal Tokaji Wine Company’s ebullient MD, Charles Mount, as we try golden-hued Essencia, the richest and rarest of all the Tokaji wines. And it doesn’t come cheap: a custom-made 1.5-litre carafe of Essencia from Fortnum & Mason costs £30,000.

Author and wine historian Johnson founded the company in 1990 in Hungary, to revive and preserve the wines reaped from one of history’s most celebrated wine regions. To make the wine, grapes are affected by a benign fungus, drawing out water and focusing sugars. ‘It takes 40kg of grapes to make half a bottle,’ says

Mount. Choosing the richest grapes is such skilled work that harvesters who pick seven kilograms are considered to have ‘had a good day’. It then takes up to eight years for the juice, which is around 85 per cent sugar, to ferment to a final alcohol content of two to four per cent. The result is formidable.

We savour the wine alongside lunch at Otto’s on Gray’s Inn Road, where host Otto Tepasse prepares a free-range duck raised by three sisters in the Loire to a 19th-century recipe. A specialty of Paris’ Tour D’Argent, then The Savoy in London under Victorian celebrity chef Auguste Escoffier, the duck is roasted rare; the juices are extracted with an ornate press, then added to a glossy, boozy jus. At Otto’s, Tepasse encourages guests to turn the screw of his 1927 press themselves, while wearing a Viking helmet. Extravagant, yes, but such an flamboyant lunch is a perfect partner for Essencia. (royal-tokaji.com)