Tokaji - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• within the text "His Last Bow" by Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes is mentioned by the Prussian spymaster Von Bork employing his persona Altamont as taking a shine to the drink,

"Altamont has a nice taste in wines, and he took a fancy to my Tokay. He is a touchy fellow and needs humouring in small things. I have to study him, I assure you.", Holmes later drinks with Watson and discusses the wine, like the Dalloway's taken from royalty. 'from Franz Josef's special cellar at the Schoenbrunn Palace.'

• In Chapter 2 of Bram Stoker's horror novel "Dracula", the character of Jonathan Harker describes the first meal served to him by Count Dracula: "The count himself came forward and took off the cover of a dish, and I fell to at once on an excellent roast chicken. This, with some cheese and a salad and a bottle of old tokay, of which I had two glasses, was my supper."
• In Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway, the male guests at the Dalloways' party drink an "Imperial Tokay" from "the Emperor's cellars."
• In Terry Gilliam's film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the Baron and the Sultan make a wager over whether the Baron can obtain, from "the imperial cellars at Vienna," a bottle of Tokaji superior to that proffered by the Sultan.
• In Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, there is an attempted poisoning by the Master of Jordan College (the novel) or an official of the Magisterium (the film) of one of the major characters, Lord Asriel, via a decanter of Tokaji in the first chapter. Tokaji is said to be Lord Asriel's favorite wine.
• Sniffing the aromatic essence of Tokaji, as well as its sympathetic effect upon being imbibed, serves as an important and amusing plot device in the 2008 film Dean Spanley.
• In Traveller (role-playing game), Tokaji Essencia has been reserved for private use of the Imperial family, with black-market prices reaching 1 million credits per bottle.
• Tokaji is referred to in Patrick O'Brian's The Letter of Marque shared between Stephen Maturin and Sir Joseph Blaine.
• A 'Tokay Blanket' was a term Hobos used (up to the 1940s) in reference to drinking alcohol to stay warm.
• Jack Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums" contains the passage: "Pretty soon we headed into another siding at a small railroad town and I figured I needed a poor-boy of Tokay wine to complete the cold dusk run to Santa Barbara."
• In Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera, Tokay is the wine of choice that Erik serves to Christine when they have lunch the day after the night he first abducts her. He proudly tells her that he got the wine himself from the Konigsberg cellars. The Tokay mention is in the chapter "Apollo's Lyre."
• Nero Wolfe served Tokaji Essencia to his assembled guests in Rex Stout's 1947 mystery story, "Man Alive," as the story moves toward the identification of the murderer. The story first appeared in the December 1947 issue of The American Magazine, then in "Three Doors to Death," a 1950 collection of Nero Wolfe novellas, and finally in 1961's Nero Wolfe omnibus volume, "Five of a Kind."
• In Alexandre Dumas's The Queen's Necklace, the Duke of Richelieu and his butler discuss the arrangements to get one special bottle of Tokaji, which they expect to please the king Gustav III of Sweden at a dinner the Duke is going to host.
• In Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, after having had dinner with champagne, Sobakevich and Chichikov (main character) opted to open a bottle of "the Hungarian," which "gave them more spirit" and "improved the communication."