The Murakami Wine: Royal Tokaji Essencia 1993-2017

BY NEAL MARTIN | MARCH 18, 2025

To passengers on the 9:35 to Clapham Junction, I look like any other commuter engrossed in a hardback. They have no idea that my mind has been spirited away to an alternate reality created by Japan’s best-selling author, Haruki Murakami. My life has been signposted by his books since the mid-nineties, when I picked up a copy of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” in the famous Kinokuniya bookstore. I was hooked. I devoured every one of Murakami’s novels and eagerly awaited his next. Occasionally, I plant Murakami Easter eggs into my prose, a little homage. Having lived in Japan—its culture and blood intertwined with my own—his stories and characters have always resonated. Unlike Tolkien or Pratchett, Murakami’s fantasies exist just one shift away from reality, what has been dubbed magical realism. His protagonists, often male, lonely and drifting, traverse the liminal space between two worlds. You just have to open a particular door or chance upon a disused well to find yourself in a parallel universe.

An hour later, swirling a Tokaji Essencia from Royal Tokaji, I realise that this is a “Murakami wine.”

Technically, it is wine…but is it really?

Essencia’s sweetness should theoretically overwhelm the senses. Case in point, on this day, my liver contends with 5,049 g/L residual sugar by lunchtime. This sucrose tsunami is dispersed between just nine bottles, from the inaugural 1993 to newly released 2017, averaging around 560 g/L per wine. Vin de paille, Sauternes and Trockenbeerenauslese must banish notions of sweetness in Essencia’s presence. Defying rationality, its contrapuntal acidity prevents cloyingness and imparts a scintilla of bitterness. Unlike wine in the normal world, Essencia is not ideal if the goal is intoxication. Hovering around a meager 2% alcohol, you’d have to imbibe one of the 18 magnums produced by Royal Tokaji, and I cannot guarantee your survival if you attempt the vinous equivalent of BASE jumping. Furthermore, instead of a regular glass, Essencia’s unctuousness means it is preferably drunk with a glass spoon, not unlike medicine. Perhaps that is a more accurate description? Finally, like many Murakami novels, time moves at a different pace apropos Essencia, if at all. It is not indestructible like Madeira. There’s no protective jacket of oxidation. But akin to many sweet wines, there are yawning gaps between clocks’ ticks.