How Putin's Ally Saved Millions of Bottles of Great Wine—For Himself

If you looked at an aerial photograph of Bakhmut, Ukraine, in early August 2022, you’d see something strikingly out of place. During their 4-month siege of Bakhmut, the Russian invaders had started to reduce every part of the city to rubble but left out one area. Within this oasis were undamaged buildings and leafy trees. It appeared to be an island in a sea of destruction.

Why was this patch of land spared when the rest of Bakhmut was being obliterated?

The answer lies at the unlikely intersection of war, wine, and bribery. This untouched area was home to Artwinery, known for its champagne-style sparkling wine made with grapes from Crimea, Mykolaiv, Kherson and Odesa, where winemaking has flourished for over 2,500 years. Artwinery’s sparkling wine is cherished as a symbol of Ukraine’s cultural heritage.

That this area was spared wasn't an accident—it was part of a deliberate arrangement. Russian President Vladimir Putin promised the winery to Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group mercenaries, as part of the spoils of war. Knowing that the winery would eventually be his, Prigozhin ordered his fighters to avoid bombing the area.

Gayle Corrigan, a Rhode Island-based wine importer, followed this story closely as it unfolded. Corrigan had been importing wines from Bakhmut since late 2020 and had become friends with Artwinery’s export manager, Nathalie Lysenko.

Corrigan marveled at the exceptional quality of the wines, “I’ll never forget tasting their brut rosé,” Corrigan recalls. “Notes of strawberry and raspberry, with a depth of complexity that blew my socks off.”

Throughout the pandemic, Corrigan maintained regular contact with Lysenko, eventually choosing to import six Artwine sparkling wines aged between 18 and 36 months and also Artwinery’s flagship sparkling, Soloking, containing Crimean grapes from the exceptional 2013 harvest and aged 72 months. After a year, she managed to secure a container of 10,000 bottles—offering a flavor profile that wine enthusiasts described as "brioche-like" and "exceptional."

In December 2021, Corrigan placed another order, and the winery started preparing the shipment. But on February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which interrupted the shipment. The brutal battle for Bakhmut continued in the spring. Every day, Corrigan hoped the city would hold, taking screenshots of military maps to track the fighting. But eventually, the tragic news came: in March 2023, Bakhmut fell to Prigozhin’s forces, and he took possession of the winery.

But Artwinery’s employees had made a dramatic last stand to save its treasures. As shelling intensified, they smuggled as many bottles as possible out of the underground caverns before the city's fate was sealed. Some of these eventually reached Corrigan in the United States.

After the winery fell to Prigozhin, rumors circulated from Russian military bloggers that its 60 acres of caverns 236 feet underground held as many as six million bottles. The wines Artwinery had saved from Prigozhin now held a new significance—they were no longer just exquisite examples of Ukrainian craftsmanship but also precious symbols of a culture under siege.

Corrigan now has close to 20,000 bottles of these rare and historic wines stateside. She sometimes puts a bottle of the pre-full scale invasion wines up for charity auctions that benefit Ukraine, and a recent bottle of Soloking sold for $3,000.

However, the wines smuggled out of Bakhmut under fire cost only a minuscule fraction of this on https://www.artwine.com. In addition to helping the Ukrainian economy, proceeds from these sales support projects that bring awareness to the critical mission of preserving and rebuilding Ukrainian wineries through the non-profit Rebuilding Cellars, which you can learn about at the following link: https://www.rebuildingcellars.org/.

If you’d like to try these wines yourself and if you are in New York on October 21st, click here for tickets to an event at the Ukrainian Institute of America. You’ll get an up-to-the-minute briefing on the War in Ukraine from Four Star General David Petraeus, and you can meet Gayle Corrigan as she pours wines for you from the ones you’ve just been reading about. And full disclosure, I, your author, am hostessing the event and will be eager to meet you and welcome you to an occasion that is about supporting Ukraine!