Ukrainian winemaker, US vets team up on a mission: showing the best of Ukraine, one glass at a time

MONTCLAIR, Va. (AP) — In a wine shop an hour outside of Washington, owner Arthur Lampros sampled a wine from a part of the world that was totally new to him, racking his brain to pin down the tastes on his tongue.

Was there a body of water near the vineyards, he wondered, that would moderate any storms or heat waves buffeting the grapes?

“Absolutely, absolutely” — Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, near Odesa, said Giorgi Iukuridze, a Ukrainian winery owner introducing Ukraine’s modernized wines to a broad U.S. audience for the first time.

Sam Lerman, a U.S. Air Force vet and one of a number of former American military officers and diplomats in Ukraine backing him in the endeavor, nodded, beaming at the words of praise that followed for many of the wines.

Ukraine is in the eyes of the world as it battles the Russian invasion with the aid of the United States and dozens of other countries. But Lerman said he and the others who teamed up with Iukuridze for the U.S. launch want Americans to see “that Ukraine is more than an ally at war, suffering tremendous tragedy.”

Bringing the wines to the U.S. will help show “what Ukraine was really about, and has always been about,” he said.

For Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO who served as President Donald Trump’s special representative to Ukraine during a stormy time in his first term, what Ukraine is about is determination, dedication and hope.

“Right now, because of Russia’s invasion and the military assistance the U.S. has given to Ukraine, when people hear and talk about Ukraine, it is all about the war. And it’s a little bit groaning … like, ‘Oh, geez, you know, how much more we’re going to spend on this?’” Volker told The Associated Press.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasions of neighboring countries have served to introduce a whole community of American military people and diplomats to the burgeoning wine regions of the former Soviet Union.

Volker met his winemaker wife, and bought a small winery in Georgia, owing to Russia’s 2008 invasion. He traveled often to Iukridze’s Shabo winery in Ukraine for production tips.

It was Russia’s invasions of Ukraine, especially in February 2022, that made more American military into fans of the wines of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, and of the country’s best vodkas.

Lerman, a former technical sergeant decorated for valor in combat in Afghanistan, first went to Ukraine in a team of volunteer military advisers in the first weeks after Russia’s 2022 invasion, and now represents a U.S. defense company there.

Militaries have a venerable history of revering alcohol. U.S. sailors treasure rationed beer at rare “steel beach picnics” on deck. Officers off-duty in Iraq sipped hoarded zero-alcohol beer and pretended it was more. Militias fighting brutal civil wars in West Africa spared the beer factories, if nothing else.

Lerman sampled Ukraine’s alcohol for the first time in a safehouse with other U.S. vet volunteers and Ukrainian allies in the first weeks of the war. Someone had placed a bottle of Ukrainian vodka on the table where they worked, amid the laptops and firearms.

“I was blown away,” Lerman recounted. “I thought I didn’t even like vodka.”

Soon, Lerman was toting out bottles of vodka and Shabo wines for his family and friends back home. Searches of U.S. stores for more struck out, since much of what little Ukrainian wine was shipped to the U.S. was of an older, sweeter variety aimed at the Ukrainian diaspora.

That led to him teaming up with Iukuridze and partners to set up Spyrt Worldwide, a new U.S. import company to bring in Shabo wines and two Ukrainian vodkas. A share of the profits is designated for Invictus Global Response, a mine-removal nonprofit run by veterans.

Ukraine’s Black Sea coast claims a 2,500-year history of growing wine thanks to settlements founded by ancient Greeks, and some of the vines at Shabo winery date back to the subsequent Ottoman era. Swiss settlers in the 1800s made Shabo and the area around it a proper wine-growing region, prizing its soil and climate.

Wine under Soviet rule, on the other hand, was “barely drinkable muck,” said Volker. He sees the region’s best wines today as a model for private companies shaking off the Soviet mindset.

Soviet state-run wineries wanted cheap wines in big quantities, especially sweeter ones. Shabo’s vines survived a Soviet crackdown on alcohol under Mikhail Gorbachev in the final years before the Soviet collapse thanks only to a Shabo worker who falsified forms, claiming the vineyards produced only table grapes, Iukirdze said.

After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Iukeridze and his father, who have roots in wine production in Georgia, were among the largest producers in an independent Ukraine bringing production up to modern standards. Shabo’s wines have won international awards and are featured in Michelin-starred restaurants.

Shabo is far from the front lines of the war, but Russian rockets on rare occasions have fallen within sight of workers in the vineyards, and Shabo’s wine salesmen have faced checkpoints and immediate induction into Ukraine’s military while traveling their sales routes. The most reliable route for shipping the wines to the United States lies through neighboring Moldova.

“The grape does not wait for any diplomatic solutions,” Iukeridze said. “We continue working without stopping any single day.”

Over the winter holidays, members of Congress, a former defense secretary, defense industry executives and others, including Lerman and Volker, turned out in Washington for the launch of the import company.

All were attuned to the joint mission of wine and war. Unspoken was the worry about Russia’s larger military grinding down Ukraine, and uncertainty over whether Trump would withdraw vital U.S. military support to Ukraine once back in office.

But Iukeridze told a story: In 2014, when the Russian military first invaded eastern Ukraine and seized Crimea on the Black Sea, a family that lived nearby drove by Shabo’s vineyards as they fled toward the border with Moldova.

But the family spotted Shabo’s head winemaker out in the field, planting new vines that would take three years to produce wine. They stopped the car.

“‘What is happening?’” they asked the winemaker.

“’We’re planting new wines, for Ukrainian, independent, glorious country,” Iukeridze recounted the winemaker answering.

Seeing the commitment to “the bright future of Ukraine,” the family “turned around the car and went back,” he told those at the Washington launch.

He raised a glass of Shabo white in a toast.

“For the bright future,” Iukeridze said. “For being an example.”

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