Rescued From War, Artwine Tells a Complicated Story of Ukrainian Wine

The video opens with men in paramilitary uniforms, their faces covered, striding through unlit gray caverns filled with endless pallets of bottles. One shines his flashlight on a “passport” establishing the authenticity of the product. “Cuvée champenoise,” it says. 2019.

Gradually, the setting reveals itself as something other than a warehouse that’s lost power — the uneven walls and ceilings look like they were hewn out of rock, and the halls seem endless. At one point, the cameraman marvels at a sign that refers to the presence of 171 pallets of 500 bottles apiece. “That’s more than a million bottles just there,” he says. Though his math is faulty — that comes to 85,500 — there are six million bottles in the facility, his guide tells him. There are halls and halls of it.

In another room, filled with riddling racks from the 2015 vintage, the lights work, confirming the earlier impression: They are in a massive cave complex. “You have to periodically turn these bottles,” the guide says. “But we were busy with combat operations. Now we’ve got people who are going to turn them. Now, the Champagne is going to be good again.”

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The cameraman is a Russian military blogger. His guide is a member of the Wagner militia that clawed the southeastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut from the Ukrainian army last spring, after more than a year of annihilating bombardment. They are walking through perhaps the most unusual wine facility in the world, and certainly one of the least conventional prizes in war: Artwinery in Bakhmut.

The “Art” in Artwinery is short for Artyomovsk (ar-TYO-movsk), the Soviet name for Bakhmut. Shortly after the start of the Cold War, France embargoed shipments of Champagne to the Soviet Union. Stalin responded by ordering the establishment of a facility for sparkling wine production using the methode champenoise in a spent gypsum mine 236 feet underground in Bakhmut. (“Champagne is a sign of material wealth, a sign of prosperity,” he had proclaimed in 1939.) The gypsum had supplied the 19th-century Neoclassical building boom in Europe. Now, Stalin’s oenologists determined that the mine’s atmospheric pressure and humidity were ideal for aging — and for Stalin’s bid to rival Champagne. Over the next 70 years, the winery aged its top cuvées 72 months, twice as long as the requirement for vintage Champagne.

It’s not the oldest Ukrainian winery with wines in the U.S. Until the Russian invasion destroyed its facilities in Kherson, Prince Trubetskoi Winery had been producing continuously since 1889. Wine has been made in this part of the world since at least 3,000 years ago. The Russian war has elevated this history, but sometimes obscured that it isn’t merely a history: Ukrainian craft winemaking has had a renaissance in the last 20 years. With no Soviet history to shed, most of it has targeted the contemporary palate: freshness, elegance, finesse. Artwine is a more complicated story.

Even after the Soviet Union stopped being the Soviet Union, Artyomovsk stayed Artyomovsk. The bitter irony of the Ukraine war is that most of it is being fought over areas in the country’s southeast that, before the war, tended to speak Russian rather than Ukrainian and often shared more with Russia and its Soviet past than with western Ukraine. However, after Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 and stirred up separatist movements in eastern Ukraine, Ukraine went on a de-Russification spree. Artyomovsk became Bakhmut and Artyomovsk Winery became Artwinery.

But history can be lazy in places like this; it doesn’t like to move quickly. The 2019 “passport” mentioned earlier still lists the winery’s name as Artyomovsk. The handwriting on the passport is the same that I learned as a boy in Soviet Minsk. And on one of the walls, there still hangs a primitive drawing of a Red Army soldier planting a sapling, presumably in rescued Ukrainian soil, under the date “1945.” From the Wagner militiaman in the video, it summons a typically arrogant example of Russian chauvinism: “Looks like there were decent people here, after all,” he says. “Maybe not all hope is lost for this nation.”

Three months after those words were uttered, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Wagner — who was supposed to take personal ownership of Artwinery, as in feudal times, owing to his background in catering — was assassinated by Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. History here moves slowly except when it moves like lightning.

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As Russian forces bore down on Bakhmut, the management of Artwinery faced an agonizing choice, the same choice that producers of Champagne faced as the Nazis bore down on France: “Blow it up or save it,” in the words of Nathalie Lysenko, the winery’s export manager. I met her at a Carnegie Hall charity gala for Ukrainian children in late October. One of the people involved in the benefit told me that supporters of Ukraine don’t know how to keep the war in people’s minds. They were hoping people would respond to the plight of children, who have been abducted by the thousands and forcibly Russified by the Russians, more than to the plight of the country.

Lysenko had flown in from Kyiv, only her second visit to New York. She grew up speaking Russian in eastern Ukraine, one of three sisters. (She calls Kyiv, the capital, “our fourth sibling.”) Lysenko has been so profoundly betrayed by Russia’s attack that she struggles to admit the winery was created on Stalin’s orders. “First, it was shock,” she says of the invasion in February 2022. “Then panic. Then depression.”

By late 2022, it was clear that the winery was under threat. As Lysenko explains, the Ukrainians made the same choice as their forebears: They decided to rescue as much wine as they could. By then, Bakhmut no longer had electricity. Working by hand in the mine complex with power only from a generator, the winery’s employees, who numbered 1,500 before the war, riddled, disgorged, and labeled 300,000 bottles. They were bombed at every step of their journey aboveground, from the mine exit to the railway tracks to the warehouse where they were stored. A bombing there destroyed the winery’s stock of its most valuable cuvée, Soloking, made partly from the last grapes harvested from independent Crimea, in 2013, and aged for 72 months.

“The acid is very malic, very lean and clipped, as opposed to this long, linear, Champagne-style acid. Тhey’re probably picking early so you’re going to get both green character and not a lot of aromatic complexity.”

Eventually, 30,000 bottles of Artwine made it to a warehouse in Pawtucket, R.I., belonging to Gayle Corrigan, the founder of Brave Selections, Artwinery’s importer. I came into possession of seven of them — a white brut, a rosé brut, a ruby brut, a white sec, a ruby doux, a brut nature aged 60 months, and a bottle of Soloking, which Corrigan had from an earlier order. They arrived at my home in a plain white box stamped “Made in Ukraine.” It felt like, on the one hand, a fossil, and on the other, an incredible testament to resilience and survival. (Some of the cuvées remain commercially available, but some, like the Soloking, are almost gone and available only at charity auction.)

The wine was preceded by so much history, at first grandiose and then tragic, that to taste it seemed almost beside the point, not least because some of the cuvées, including the white brut and the brut nature, had been finished and bottled under extreme duress. But I knew from Lysenko and Corrigan that Artwine, which was focused on the Russian market until 2014, was trying to reorient westward. (The winery has relocated to Odesa and is continuing to make sparkling in tank while it looks for a new permanent facility.) I wanted to give the bottles the respect of a tasting that was both knowledgeable and objective. But I’d hardly tried Ukrainian wine. So I reached out to two experts in Eastern European wine: Patrick Cournot, who owns the natural wine bar Ruffian in New York’s East Village, and Lisa Granik, a Master of Wine who has spent extensive time in Russia and is the author of a seminal book on Georgian wine.

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We went through the simpler dry wines first (the white brut, rosé brut, and ruby brut, all aged for 18 months on the lees), then the brut nature (60 months) and Soloking (72 months), and finished with the two sweeter wines, the white sec and the ruby doux.

The consensus was that the cuvées were most successful when they were trying to resemble Champagne the least. After all, the methodology — the second fermentation in the bottle — was the only thing they shared. Unlike Champagne’s holy trinity of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier, Artwinery made its sparklers from Chardonnay, Aligoté, Pinot Blanc, and Riesling. Southern Ukraine is much warmer, and its soils are nothing like the chalk in Champagne.

“The acid is very malic, very lean and clipped, as opposed to this long, linear, Champagne-style acid,” Cournot said of the white brut, one of the wines finished in the weeks before Bakhmut was overrun. “Тhey’re probably picking early so you’re going to get both green character and not a lot of aromatic complexity.”

“This is in the style of a brut nature,” Granik said — the brut had less than a gram of sugar per liter. “But good brut nature comes from such rich grapes they don’t need sugar, they have ripeness to balance it out. This doesn’t have that. The Chardonnay should give creaminess and breadth, and Riesling is so intensely aromatic, I was expecting more fruit character. Riesling is a relatively late ripener. You need a long growing season for aromatic and phenolic complexity to fall into place.” The Aligoté, “angular and bracing,” was dominating the performance.

“It makes me think of those New York restaurants that have been around for a hundred years. They have dishes that are trying to be current, and often they don’t work. But then I’ll have one of the dishes they’ve been making since the beginning, and wow — this dish — I get it. This is the wine they’re meant to be making.”

These impressions were even more pronounced in response to the long-aged wines, the brut nature and the Soloking. “You can smell the autolytic thing happening,” Granik said of the Soloking, “but on the palate, it has high acidity, and then it’s over. With great aged Champagnes or white wines, they smell aged, but they’re so fresh and extended on the palate. You want dimensions. Wines are like people. I want a wine to keep talking to me.”

They were more enthusiastic about the rosé and ruby brut, and the white sec: Here were wines either working with more regional varieties, or in a sweeter, more practiced style from decades of serving Soviet palates. The gaminess and “char” of the Saperavi, part of the blend for the ruby brut, put Cournot in mind of Asian food. “There’s an attack and it’s over,” he said. “But if I was in a dim sum restaurant … this wine would be fun to drink along a black vinegar, soy sauce, chili oil. Saperavi tends to be functional against sweet and sour or pickled flavors. I’m also thinking Korean bar food — a dry-aged burger, fried chicken wings, gochujang sauce.”

As for the white sec, with 24 grams of sugar per liter, Granik said, “If you’re thinking of old Soviet champagne, this is of extraordinarily high quality. “It’s weighty. It’s complete across the palate. It’s the most integrated wine we’ve had — the acidity matches the sweetness. That creates a longer finish. It’s not cloying, even though it has all that sugar. It’s a simple song, but it’s a song I can get behind.”

Cournot agreed. “It makes me think of those New York restaurants that have been around for a hundred years. They have dishes that are trying to be current, and often they don’t work. But then I’ll have one of the dishes they’ve been making since the beginning, and wow — this dish — I get it,” he said. “This is the wine they’re meant to be making,” he said of the white sec.

Listening to Cournot and Granik  I was struck by the poetry of the language they used to describe the wines. Both that, and their insights, felt like a gift to wines that had every reason to be safe from destruction, but otherwise probably would not have had, for a long time, the benefit of the discernment of palates like theirs. And, without access to the winemakers at Artwine, it was riveting to observe Cournot and Granik reverse-engineer what may have happened in the vineyard and the winery from nothing more than a sip and swirl or two. Even though they thought the wines had a long way to go, the experience was deeply affirming of the exquisite intricacy of the subject matter.

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Some Ukrainian wines are making more successful inroads. In 2019, Bruce Schneider, a much-admired producer of New York State Cab Franc and a pioneer of eco-conscious innovations such as kegged wines, traveled to Ukraine to learn more about his grandparents. While there, he stopped at Like a Local’s, a since-closed Kyiv wine bar that featured only Ukrainian wines. Several years later, he imports four producers from that list, two of which are available at Ruffian.

Among them is Beykush Winery in Mikolayiv, steps from the Black Sea. The wines include a bright, fresh version of an orange Rkatsiteli raised in amphorae; a reserve made from the indigenous Telti Kuruk variety, which is high in acid and has savory qualities; and a white blend made from a half-dozen international grapes. The wines are fresh, high in acid, and often show a slightly briny, mineral finish owing to the proximity of the sea.

Cournot thinks of the Rkatsiteli, which is “dialed back from Georgian intensity” with only three weeks of skin contact, as “Georgian flavors with Austrian intent, as if it were one of the more eccentric wines from a meticulous Austrian winemaker. It doesn’t have the baroqueness of Artwine and it doesn’t have the natty wildness of Georgia.” In his view, “the Beykush wines are very animated. They could be real stars.”

Stakhovsky, another producer in the portfolio, makes a skin-contact Traminer, a Cabernet Sauvignon, and a Saperavi that Schneider says he’ll start bringing in next year. Cournot acknowledges the quality of the Cab — “it’s not my area of interest, but it’s well made, you could be in California” — but is particularly enthusiastic about the Traminer, the local name for Gewürtztraminer. “For a bold grape in a ‘faddish’ style, it has softness and precision. These wines are dialed into the contemporary palate,” he says.

Like those of Chateau Chizay, which makes a dark rosé from 100 percent Blaufrankisch, Stakhovsky’s vineyards are in Zakarpatia, minutes from the Slovakian, Hungarian, and Romanian borders, and a mere 90-minute drive from Tokaj, which shares its volcanic and limestone soils. “This is a historic terroir,” Schneider says of the region. Chizay, which also makes a floral Sauvignon Blanc, a 12.5 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, and a rosé of Pinot Noir, is exploring the connection by planting Furmint.

As Schneider spreads the word about these wines in the United States, the winemakers in Ukraine are gathering their own momentum. The Ukrainian Association of Craft Winemakers formed only in 2021; more winemakers are shifting to organic farming; educational exchange continues despite the constraints of war; and some producers are shedding international varieties for more plantings of Telti Kuruk and other homegrown varieties, such as Odesa Black, a darkly pigmented cross between Alicante Bouschet and Cabernet Sauvignon, and Sukholimansky, a cross of Chardonnay and Plavai. Schneider says that he recently tasted Telti Kuruk with Pascaline Lepeltier, the well-known sommelier, and it “reminded her of other ancient varieties,” he said. “Thick skin, more tannin. It’s not the favored style in recent winemaking. But it has a lot of personality, a lot of depth, a lot of complexity.”