BERMET! It was one of my main reasons for going to Serbia, and yet I could never have expected a meeting like this one.
The thing is, Bermet may well be the most secretive wine in the world. The exact recipes are kept under lock and key by a handful of family wineries in the Fruška Gora region north of Belgrade, in the town of Sremski Karlovci and around it. Most of the ingredients macerated together with the wine are known: herbs, spices and dried fruit. The red version takes around 24 of them, the white around 21, since some additives can affect the colour. The proportions, however, are impossible to find out, much like with Coca-Cola (although chemists have supposedly cracked that one). I was also assured that even if I tried mixing some of those additives myself, nothing would come of it. If that is not a reason to try, what is?
So far, nothing special on paper: a dessert wine flavoured with botanicals. BUT it is so unusual and so good that, at least according to legend, Maria Theresa exempted the residents of Sremski Karlovci from military duties so they could keep producing Bermet for her and her court undisturbed.
According to Karlovci lore, Bermet also made it aboard the Titanic: some tell of a wine list, others of bottles raised from the wreck. I wanted to know where the tale runs into facts, so I went digging through the catalogues. In 1985 Ballard's expedition found the ship but took nothing from the seabed – that was its principle. The first artefacts came up only in 1987, and since then a single company has held the rights to the site, RMS Titanic Inc., exclusive salvor by a 1994 court ruling. Its collection counts more than 5,500 objects, and the bottles among them are beer, spirits and champagne from the 63 cases supplied by F. B. Vandegrift & Co. on the cargo manifest. The champagne, by the way, came up intact, corks and contents included: at that depth water seeps in slowly and equalises the pressure without bursting the glass. Serbian labels appear nowhere in the inventories, although Bermet with its 17% alcohol would have survived that kind of cellaring.
The wine list fares no better. Only a handful of Titanic menus survive; they sell at auction for six-figure sums and collectors have studied them inside out. The standard White Star first-class wine list of 1910 is known: ten champagnes, Sauternes, Moselle, claret, port, sherry, Burgundy and vermouth. The only wine whose presence on board is proven by an actual find is Heidsieck champagne. The irony is that wine lists featuring Bermet do exist in the archives, real ones – the Serbian Academy of Sciences keeps the lists of Viennese hotels of that era, onto which the Karlovci winemakers once pushed their wine by sending students to keep ordering it until the hotels gave in. The hotels just happened to be Viennese, not seaborne. The official website of Sremski Karlovci says 'according to the legend' about the Titanic, and I follow suit: it is a fine tale, let it live, but as a tale.
And the bottle in the photo is EXACTLY the kind that, according to the legend, was on board the Titanic. Finding it in the Wine Museum in Topola was a genuine discovery!
I am not fond of writing about prices, but in this case five-figure sums in euros are a fair subject.
Here are a few more photos from the ‘Zlatna Kruna’ wine museum in Topola.
