One of Europe’s most compelling wines sells for $1,000 a bottle, and no one knows how it tastes.
Called Deocoupage, it’s a blend of grapes grown in the backyards of residents of Izium, Ukraine, while the city was under Russian occupation from April to September 2022. When human rights activist Tetiana Burianova visited Izium that November, the people who survived were eager to share their stories and homegrown fruit with her. Burianova hand-collected the grapes, brought them to a Kyiv-based winemaker and created 200 bottles of Deocoupage, a deeply political wine.
“Those grapes were grown during Russian occupation, and they were harvested at liberation,” says Edward Akrout, the CEO and founder of Art Shield, a nonprofit organization that amplifies works by artists living amid war and oppression. “They are a symbol of resistance and they are a symbol of liberation.”
Wine can be a powerful tool to express resilience and humanity when both are under attack. Like many wars, wine is all about land. Vinifying grapes highlights your own connection to their places of origin—the terroir of human experience—and helps turn something brutal and intangible into an emissary of identity and hope.
Projects like Deocoupage help to communicate the fact that very real people’s lives hang in the balance of war. When everything from geopolitical sovereignty to personal safety is threatened, wine can be a bridge—not only to each other, but also to ourselves.
It’s not the first time that wine has been a part of a war effort.
Wine and World War II
During the Second World War, when Germany occupied three-fifths of mainland France, wine was a means of German oppression and French resistance. German soldiers stole nearly two million bottles of Champagne in their first few weeks in the region, burned Dom Pérignon’s abbey and demanded that French winemakers send some 320 million bottles of wine to Germany each year. At one point, Moët & Chandon was forced to send the Third Reich 50,000 bottles of Champagne weekly, writes Don and Petie Kladstrup in their fascinatingly reported book, Wine & War.
Meanwhile, French winemakers hid valuable bottles and housed members of the Resistance and their weaponry in Champagne’s chalky, labyrinthine crayeres. They shared intelligence with Allied fighters about forthcoming German campaigns based on where they were being told to ship wine. They gave only damaged and faulty bottles to German soldiers, an act of protest for which François Taittinger was jailed and others were killed.
In 1945, after the war’s end, a 23-year-old French army sergeant found half a million bottles of Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne in Adolf Hitler’s fortress in the Bavarian Alps. Hailing from storied estates like Chateau d’Yquem and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, these bottles were stolen and stockpiled precisely because they were integral to French economies, heritage and identity.
“Germany saw the Champagne region as a prize, and a lot of Ukraine is seen by Russia as a prize,” says Akrout. “Whatever grows on that land is part of your prize. To protect that, to safeguard and keep the ownership of it, to be able to label it and bottle it as yours, is an act of resistance—and an act of war, in a way.”
Resistance Behind the Iron Curtain
That sense of ownership over one’s homeland and its output can be crucial to sustaining hope during crises. From 1921 to 1991, when the Soviet Union absorbed Georgia, it enforced the mandatory collectivization of all agriculture, including the wine grapes nearly every Georgian family grew in their backyards. This act not only created widespread food shortages from Siberia to Ukraine, but it also struck a major psychological blow to Georgians.
“In every family, it was important to have your own wine,” explains Ramaz Nikoladze, the winemaker and owner of Nikoladze Wine Cellar in Imereti, Georgia. “In Georgia, nothing happens without wine. If a guest comes to your house, you share this wine and some food with them. If you don’t have your own wine, you are nothing.”
In an effort to maintain their heritage and identity, some Georgians secretly maintained backyard plots of indigenous grapes. They bribed Soviet inspectors and supplied wine to other Georgians on the black market.
It was a localized but meaningful act of resistance, Nikoladze says. “A very small amount of the grapes, of our vineyards, we kept for us.”
Currently, he cultivates Tsolikouri, Tsitska and other indigenous Georgian wine grapes in the same plot that his great-grandfather planted before the Soviet era.
Protecting Viticultural Heritage
The drive to preserve your family’s vineyard at all costs is something that Sami Ghosn understands completely. The co-owner of Massaya winery in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Ghosn and his family fled Lebanon during its civil war; then, nearly 20 years later, he moved back, determined to restore their property. For months following his return, he slept on the roof of the then-decrepit estate with a rifle for protection, and spent years rebuilding it with his brother, Ramzi.
Massaya now has two Lebanese wineries where they produce arak and wines exported globally. For Ghosn, those bottles are emissaries for his homeland.
“I am so proud to be Lebanese,” he says. “Whenever I travel the world with our wine, I want to communicate a message of civility, or history, of culture from this part of the world, instead of the horrible stories you see on the news.”
Wines like these create connections among otherwise far-flung communities. They can build tangible legacies, too.
When someone purchases a bottle of Deocoupage, for instance, 100% of the sales go to Superhumans, an organization that makes prosthetic limbs for injured Ukrainians.
Most people who have purchased bottles plan to wait until Ukrainian victory to open and drink theirs, Burianova says.“They want to celebrate with this wine because it’s a symbol of Ukrainian liberation.”
And, for the people of Izium, it’s quite literally a message in a bottle.
“We are sharing with the world the story of the grapes and the people who survived,” Burianova says. “We are immortalizing their story in this wine.”
More Ukraine Coverage
- In war-torn Ukraine, nightlife offers a fleeting escape, says writer Adam Robb in this reported boots-on-the-ground story.
- Two years into the Russian invasion, Ukrainian nightlife is thriving, Robb reaffirms after a second visit he discusses in this podcast interview.
- With a slew of wineries right on the frontline of the invasions, Ukraine’s wine industry has faced many challenges since the start of the war.
- These U.S. wineries supported Ukraine with events, bottle sales and more.
- Moldova wineries also provided Ukrainian aid, writer Blane Bachelor reports.
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Published: August 6, 2024
