MoxVlog

The chaos of eastern Ukraine has taken a heavy toll on this Soviet-era winery, which once supplied more than half the country

You would not know from Yuri’s calm demeanour, as he describes the bubbles rising in his champagne flute, that that we are only a few miles from the frontlines in eastern Ukraine.

Protected by more than 80 metres of rich black earth, the Soviet-era winery known for its fizzy cabernet sauvignon and merlot sits beneath the battlefields that, in recent weeks, have seen a fresh wave of violence between Russia-backed separatists and the Ukrainian army.

Despite the unrest, Yuri, who asks for his last name not to be used, continues to host connoisseurs and the curious around Artwinery, a maze of climate-controlled winemaking caves opened in honour of the then Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s birthday in 1950.

While below ground, the rumbling of armoured vehicles and artillery fire are audible, above, in Bakhmut, a salt-mining city of 80,000 people living 12 miles from the frontlines, the signs of war are omnipresent.

Checkpoints are in place at every entrance to the city. Armed soldiers roam streets scarred by tank tracks. Apartment buildings are spray-painted with the words “bomb shelter” in Russian. Helicopters routinely buzz overhead, delivering wounded troops from flashpoint areas such as Avdiivka to the hospital.More than 30 civilians and fighters on both sides have been killed and dozens more wounded this year, in the worst outbreak of violence since 2015, which some have linked to Russia being re-energised by Donald Trump’s presidency.

In the 250,000 sq metre expanse of caves, however, the focus is wine. “You’ll notice it has raspberry on the nose and a taste of blackcurrant with a hint of blackberry,” Yuri says, sampling the rare Krimart red brut sparkling wine that has been made here since the first batch was produced four decades ago.

We are also shown hundreds of thousands of bottles of white, pink and red sparkling wines that ferment for up to three years on racks using French-inspired methods.

It is a hive of activity as 250 workers wearing white aprons zip around on golf carts to monitor the bottling process. The tunnels are painted in a rainbow of pastels “to keep the workers from feeling depressed” while they work underground, explains Viktoria Malyovana, Artwinery’s deputy general manager.

They had 700 employees before the war, she says, but many fled for Russia and other parts of Ukraine when the fighting was heaviest in 2014. Others “went off and joined the war … they traded bottles for bullets”.

Production is also down: since the war broke out three years ago, the winery has produced 10m-12m bottles a year. Malyovana says it made 19m in 2013.

Demand for winery tours, once a popular local attraction, has also slowed, partly because the buses that used to shuttle visitors from separatist-controlled Donetsk no longer run, but mainly because the area is now in the middle of a war zone.

Yuri, who has worked at the winery since the early 1990s, shows off a map of the company’s buyers; flagged pins stick out from dozens of cities in countries such as Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Canada, China, Israel, Switzerland, the UK and Germany, its biggest customer.

Russia used to be Artwinery’s largest foreign market, but since the conflict, Kiev and Moscow have been embroiled in a trade war.

Russia’s invasion and annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 also dealt a devastating blow to Ukraine’s wine industry.

Artwinery used to procure 70% of its grapes from the peninsula, Malyovana says. Its vineyards, bathed in summertime sun and cooled by Black Sea breezes, once produced more than half of Ukraine’s wine.

Today, Artwinery gets almost all its grapes from Ukraine’s steppe zone, the warmer southern regions of Mykolayiv, Kherson and Odessa. Some saperavi grapes come from their native Georgia.

The winery was dealt another blow when Ukraine imposed a law on the “decommunisation” of the country, a move intended to remove visible signs of its Soviet legacy, forcing the winery to change its name.

Until February 2016, Bakhmut was called Artemivsk, named after the Russian revolutionary and Stalin ally Fyodor Sergeyev, better known as Comrade Artem.

A statue of him that stood in the city’s central square was taken down more than a year ago.

Amid what Malyovana describes as political pressure from Kiev, Artemivsk Winery changed its name to Artwinery last autumn.

“First, we had problems because of Crimea, and then the war came to us, and now decommunisation,” Malyovana says, adding that the situation has created a “branding nightmare”.

“We have 192 patents in Europe that we have to change. Europeans won’t understand the name change. It is like death for us.”

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