By Lucy Papachristou
TBILISI, May 29 (Reuters) – Tangled cobwebs dangle from the ceiling in dim light and a pleasant, musky sweetness pervades the air in this repository of a precious wine collection, once owned by Georgia’s most infamous son, Josef Stalin.
The Georgian government, which owns the roughly 40,000 French and Georgian rarities, unsealed the wine vault for the first time this week in the capital Tbilisi.
It plans to auction off the collection, some of which dates from the early 19th century, and use the funds to open a wine education school in Georgia.
Irakli Gilauri, the owner of Gilauri Wines who worked with Georgia’s agriculture ministry on the project, said the auction would help to “put Georgia on the collectors’ map”.
The South Caucasus country sells itself as the birthplace of wine, with archaeological evidence demonstrating a continuous wine-making tradition stretching back 8,000 years.
Stalin, who was born in Georgia and led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953, was an enthusiastic wine drinker and collector.
His trove includes wine from Bordeaux’s most famous estates that were once owned by Russia’s Tsar Alexander III and his son Nicholas II. The Soviets seized the Imperial Romanov collection after the 1917 Russian Revolution, and Stalin became its guardian, slowly adding his favourite Georgian varieties.
Peering into the dust-covered bottles at the amber liquid inside, collector Victor Chen, who travelled to Tbilisi from Dallas, Texas, was excited by what he saw.
“I feel like you’re Indiana Jones opening up a cave: it could be nothing, it could be something,” he said, referring to the fictional swashbuckling archaeologist from the film franchise.
“There’s not many things that are still historical moments at this point. And this could be one of them.”
(Reporting by Lucy Papachristou; editing by Barbara Lewis)
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