Tangled cobwebs dangle eerily from the ceiling in the dim light, giving this cellar more the feel of a sunken pirate ship than the repository of a precious wine collection once owned by Georgia’s most famous son, Josef Stalin.
Only the air in the room — a pleasant, musky sweetness — gives away the truth of what lies in these bottles: some 40,000 French and Georgian rarities, some of them dating back to the early 19th century.
The Georgian government, which owns the collection, unsealed the wine vault for the first time this week in the capital Tbilisi. It now plans to auction off the collection and use the funds to open a world-class wine education school in Georgia.
Irakli Gilauri, the owner of Gilauri Wines who worked with Georgia’s agriculture ministry on the unveiling, said the upcoming auction would help “put Georgia on the collectors’ map.”
The South Caucasus country bills itself as the birthplace of wine, with archeological evidence demonstrating a continuous wine-making tradition stretching back 8,000 years.
Stalin, who was born in Georgia and led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953, was a passionate wine drinker and collector.
His trove includes rarities once owned by Tsar Alexander III and his son Nicholas II from Bordeaux’s most famous estates. The Soviets seized the Imperial Romanov collection after the 1917 Russian Revolution, and Stalin became its guardian, slowly adding his favorite Georgian varieties.
Peering into the dust-covered bottles at the amber liquid inside, collector Victor Chen, who travelled to Tbilisi from Dallas, Texas, was excited by what he saw.
“I feel like you’re Indiana Jones opening up a cave: it could be nothing, it could be something,” he said, referring to the fictional swashbuckling archeologist from the film franchise.
“There’s not many things that are still historical moments at this point. And this could be one of them.”
