From Airmail, June 27:
“Stalin’s wine cellar,” read the subject line of an e-mail I received from a West Coast P.R. firm. The message promised adventure and intrigue. The story it told had everything: Nazis, a Soviet dictator, and some of the world’s most precious wine. Joseph Stalin—the Soviet Union’s supreme ruler from 1929 to 1953 and a murderous tyrant legendary for drinking friends and enemies under the table—was a closet oenophile, the e-mail explained. He had a soft spot for grand cru Bordeaux and hoarded thousands of bottles seized from the Romanovs during the Russian Revolution.
When Hitler’s armies roared across the Eastern Front, Stalin sent the best stuff—Nicholas II’s prized 19th-century vintages of Château d’Yquem, Château Lafite Rothschild, and Château Latour—from Leningrad south to his native Georgia for safekeeping. The wine was tucked into a secret cellar inside an old Soviet wine factory, Wine Factory No. 1, in the heart of Tbilisi, where it remained safely ensconced for the past 80-odd years. Traveling east for the cellar reveal, I’d be among the first people to step foot inside in decades.The international delegation included a few collectors and auction house representatives, a Russian father-and-son team specializing in bringing high-end Bordeaux to the Russian market (sanctions notwithstanding), a wine documentarian, and, as a guest of honor, the wine-world legend Pierre Lurton, president of Yquem and Cheval Blanc, traveling with his Brazilian journalist wife.
Gilauri needed to get his new wine releases in front of the world’s most discerning palates, so we gathered for a blind tasting. His red blends held their own against young Bordeaux. For the opulent meal that followed, he channeled the spirit of Stalin’s wine stash, pouring 1948 Cheval Blanc and 1790 Madeira. “This will be the oldest wine any of you has ever tasted,” he announced proudly, as we drained his 236-year-old fortified wine.
Before the government’s official cellar opening ceremony, we were promised a taste of Georgian hospitality and some very good wine. So the evening before the unveiling, we found ourselves touring a hilltop vineyard near the snowcapped Caucasus Mountains. Our host, the affable middle-aged Irakli Gilauri—one of Georgia’s richest men and a former head of the Bank of Georgia—was bankrolling the opening festivities. “I call myself a terroir hunter,” he said, as mosquitoes swarmed the clearing where he’d soon break ground on a new winery. The first vintages of his Gilauri Wines will hit the U.S. market later this year. Georgia is the cradle of funky, amphora-made natural wine, but Gilauri has other ideas. With his pricey French wine consultant, he’s positioning his reds as serious, age-worthy collectibles.“I call myself a terroir hunter.”I sat between government officials at dinner that night. Across from me was David Songulashvili, Georgia’s minister of environmental protection and agriculture, the official overseeing Stalin’s cellar opening—and the man who stood to benefit most if the story held together. He would be using the proceeds from sales of the most expensive bottles to fund a new wine school.
“This is an incredible cellar,” he confided. “It’s Stalin’s collection. It was divided into three parts. One was taken to Siberia, the other somewhere in Russia—I don’t remember—and the third part was taken here. One of the biggest parts is here in Georgia.” The minister was overseeing the cellar’s unveiling, yet seemed hazy on some of the basic details. I didn’t think much of it at the time.Breaking the Seal
The unveiling took place the following morning. Security was heavy outside the historic Wine Factory No. 1, where the bottles are held. Square-jawed men in black suits kept a suspicious eye on the crowd streaming into the chapel-like building, completed in 1896. (The year is etched into the floor.) Inside, across from a wine bar and a wine shop, Stalin’s secret cellar stood, lit in violet hues like a movie set, its dusty bottles secure behind a big iron gate.
Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, of the ruling Georgian Dream party, approached a podium, facing a crush of photographers, and the cellar, a national treasure. “Alongside these Georgian masterpieces, the collection also preserves Joseph Stalin’s personal premium wine reserves and commemorative collections belonging to various world leaders,” he said.An antique lock was ceremoniously pried open. The prime minister walked arm in arm with wine legend Lurton into the cellar. Cobwebbed bottles with withered corks lined the iron shelves. Many were half empty. Few labels remained: the paper had long since turned to dust. It was impossible to identify anything. “This … is an amazing cellar,” Lurton told the local Reuters correspondent, who was filming inside. “It’s like a pantheon of wine here.”
After the photo op, we joined Prime Minister Kobakhidze and his Cabinet for dinner nearby at the historic Writers’ House of Georgia, a center of literary life for more than a century. (John Steinbeck stayed in a room on the top floor in 1947.) A sumptuous supra, a classic Georgian feast, paired an overabundance of Château d’Yquem with creative dishes by chef Tekuna Gachechiladze, often called the godmother of Georgia’s food revolution.
Every supra has a toastmaster who waxes poetic between courses to keep the wine flowing. “To our good health,” announced Songulashvili, rising to the occasion at the start of the meal. “To our government,” he continued. “To Monsieur Lurton, who is supporting us for the identification of the Yquem bottles.” (Lurton didn’t authenticate any bottles of Yquem on this trip to Georgia. He has not responded to AIR MAIL’s requests for comment.)
The Reuters story hit the wires the next day. “Georgia uncorks the value of Stalin’s 40,000-bottle wine collection,” read the headline. The narrative was now official, circulating around the world as fact. There was only one problem: almost everything I’d learned in Georgia cut against the claim that the cellar was Stalin’s.Questions of Provenance
Preliminary research, before my trip, had found nothing in the history books about Stalin’s secret cellar or a penchant for grand cru Bordeaux. If he cherished his collection, I wondered, why would he have abandoned it after the war? And hadn’t he turned his back on his homeland when he became the supreme Soviet leader?
As a wine drinker, Stalin had a well-known soft spot for semi-sweet Georgian reds, which, as the wine historian Stephen Bittner put it, were consumed in the “Russian fashion,” diluted with vodka. He never really acquired a taste for Burgundy or Bordeaux....
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