Inside, there are more than 40,000 bottles, partly taken from the cellars of the tsars and partly personally selected by Stalin.
There is a cellar in Tbilisi where cobwebs hang from the ceiling in the dim light and the air has the musky sweetness that comes from centuries of rest. Inside, there are about 40 thousand bottles of wine that until this week no one had ever been able to see. They belonged to Iosif Stalin and the Georgian government, which inherited the collection, has opened the premises to the public for the first time announcing that it will put everything up for auction. The funds will be used to open a wine school.
Georgia has always been one of the world capitals of winemaking, with archaeological finds documenting a winemaking tradition that has continued uninterrupted for 8 thousand years. Auctioning the cellar of the most famous Georgian ever (no offense to Demna) to finance the future of national winemaking is the kind of operation that works both culturally and economically and symbolically.
The origin of this collection is also a story within a story. The finest wines come from the most famous estates in Bordeaux, but they first passed through the cellars of the tsars: they were owned by Alexander III and his son Nicholas II. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Soviets seized the imperial collection of the Romanovs. Stalin, born in Georgia, in power from 1924 until his death in 1953, a passionate drinker and collector, became its custodian, gradually adding his favorite Georgian varieties. The result is an archive that spans the Tsarist empire, the Bolshevik revolution, and Soviet totalitarianism; in every bottle, there is also a historical document and as such, it will be auctioned.
Irakli Gilauri, owner of Gilauri Wines, collaborated with the Georgian Ministry of Agriculture on the project. At Reuters he said that the auction will help “put Georgia on the map of collectors.” The unknown that remains is about the actual state of preservation of the wine inside the bottles, which in the twists and turns of history may have undergone alterations.
It is titled Beware of the dvce! and it is a tale of "the deeds of a few people, often alone and poorly organized but filled with anger, courage, and above all hope for a new world free from fascism."
