When Bill Gates read “A Gentleman in Moscow,” he wrote an exceptional book review. Here is a snippet:

“Although the book is fictional, the Metropol is a real hotel. I’ve even been lucky enough to stay there (and it looked mostly the same as Towles describes in the book). It’s the kind of place where you can’t help but picture what it was like at different points in time. The hotel is located across the street from the Kremlin and managed to survive the Bolshevik revolution and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. That’s a lot of history for one building.”

“Many scenes in the book never happened in real life (as far as I know), but they’re easy to imagine given the Metropol’s history. In one memorable chapter, Bolshevik officials decide that the hotel’s wine cellar is “counter to the ideals of the Revolution.” The hotel staff is forced to remove labels from more than 100,000 bottles, and the restaurant must sell all wine for the same price. The Count—who sees himself as a wine expert—is horrified.”

So good was the book that it has now been released as a mini-series on all of the channels listed at the bottom of this page.

1926: The Metropol Hotel,
across the street from the Kremlin in Moscow:

Rostov: ‘Do you know what the party has done now? They have removed the labels from all the wine bottles. It’s madness!’

Nina: ‘It’s only wine.’

Rostov: ‘Only wine? A bottle of wine; it captures a moment in history. Its flavor tells a story of place, of time, of the ground beneath the winemaker’s feet, whether the weather was wet or dry. But now we have to accept that none of that matters. A wine is simply red or white.’

– Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow, episode 3