“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.
