Ukraine It is one of the world’s wine regions with a history dating back thousands of years. It is also reinventing its wine culture and, despite the Russian invasion in 2022 and the ongoing war, excellent Ukrainian wines are appearing as far away as the United States.
It may be hard to imagine anyone caring about making wine in the middle of a war. However, small pleasures like coffee and wine remain desirable parts of everyday life in Ukraine. Equally valuable is the symbolic cultural importance of wine to Ukrainians.
“It’s a big step to show the world that Ukraine has wine,” said Sergiy Klimov, author of “The Untold Story of Ukrainian Winemaking” from kyiv. It’s a sentiment echoed by others in the industry.
“We don’t want to sell our wines because of the war,” said Svitlana Tsybak, executive director of Beykush Winery, which is near the front along the Black Sea. “We would like to sell them because they are individual, unique and interesting.”
Tsybak is also president of the Ukrainian Association of Winemakers, a trade group. Before the war broke out, she mainly focused on expanding domestic sales. Then 2022 came, and not only did they lose sales in key markets like Kharkiv and Odessa, but companies were also attacked. “Many vineyards and wineries were occupied and the vineyards were mined,” Tsybak said, referring to land mines. “But we saved many.”
The fact that winemaking continues under war conditions speaks to its cultural and economic importance. During World War II, winemaking in France and other countries did not stop despite the German occupation.
Ukraine is located in the cradle of wine, dating back 11 thousand years or more. Like the historic wine-producing countries of Spain and Portugal, which were held back for decades by dictatorships that favored mass production, Ukraine needed to shed its autocracy before it could join the modern, globalized wine economy.
“That was a time of quantity, not quality,” Klimov said.
Ukraine achieved independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, but it was not until 2016, he said, that Ukraine repealed laws that made it difficult for small businesses to succeed in the wine sector.
In 2014, Klimov and others organized the kyiv Food and Wine Festival. They also opened a wine bar in kyiv called Like a Local’s.
It was at that bar where Bruce Schneider, a New York wine entrepreneur, first tried a series of Ukrainian wines in 2019. He was pleasantly surprised. “Many were tasty and drinkable,” he said.
Later, at the 2023 ProWein fair in Germany, he saw improvements in Ukrainian wines and decided to open an import company, Vyno Ukrainy.
“I was motivated to try to help the wineries,” he said. “But the wines must be good.”
Importing wines from Ukraine is not easy.
Klimov said that supporting Ukraine by buying Ukrainian wines is not only a message to foreigners. “I tell Ukrainians, ‘Buy Ukrainian wines, not wines from Italy,’” he said. “You can try something good, because these wines are very interesting and you can help.”
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