To make wine is to believe in the future: the Ukrainians growing grapes on the frontline
As winemaker Mykhailo Molchanov pottered about trimming foliage from his vines on a warm early-summer day, his dog Direktor at his heels, it was hard to imagine a more idyllic scene. The Molchanovs’ organic vines are planted directly into the richly biodiverse grassland for which southern Ukraine is renowned – hence their label’s name, Steppe Wines – amid the silvery feathergrass and wild salvia. The soundtrack of the day was not the all too familiar buzzing of drones, but the buzzing of bees and the music of cuckoos and golden orioles. But there was also a terrifying reminder of the relentless presence of war: an unexploded Russian rocket, nose down, half-buried in the soil between rows of Chardonnay grapes.
The Molchanovs have considered trying to get it removed, but the huge machinery needed, they concluded, would be too damaging to their precious rows of vines. So they simply work around it. When Russia’s full-scale invasion began in the early hours of 24 February 2022, Molchanov and his wife, Svitlana, left their home in the city of Mykolaiv and crossed the river to their winery, where their vineyards roll down towards the banks of the Southern Buh river. The bad news was that, as fighting intensified in the early days of March, they found themselves between the lines, under the artillery of both armies. “You could see the rockets going directly up towards space – as if they were launching cosmonauts,” said Heorhii Molchanov, the son of the family and a central part of the winemarking business.
The good news was twofold. First, the defence of Mykolaiv was successful. Second, the Molchanovs had a serviceable bomb shelter, AKA their wine cellar. “Put it this way,” said Mykhailo. “We used to have a pretty decent 2017 Cabernet down there. Not any more.”
The capture of Mykolaiv was an important objective for the Russians; success would have opened the way to an attempt on the vital Black Sea port of Odesa. Even outside the city itself, the Molchanovs were uncomfortably close to the battle for Mykolaiv. On the opposite bank of the Southern Buh is the city’s small airport, an obvious target. Also on the opposite bank, a column of Russians was pushing north up the highway, trying to capture an upstream crossing from which to turn back and encircle the city. “We are lucky,” Heorhii said. “They could have crossed the river.” He added: “For my mental health I have tried to think about wine, not whether or not we would be occupied.”
Wine growing is an uncertain business, even without a war raging. While the Russian invasion presented the most apocalyptic threat to the family’s vineyard, grapes have other enemies. Bad weather, rot, disease, fungus – all conspire against growers, particularly since the Molchanovs use only copper and sulphur as pesticides. Last year, said Heorhii, wild goats and pigs munched their way through at least a ton of grapes. But, unlikely as it may seem, the Molchanov family – admittedly working on a very small scale – have actually expanded their acreage since the full-scale invasion, and they plan to increase the current production of about 10,000 bottles a year to 30,000-50,000 over the next decade.
Mykhailo is optimistic – he believes Ukrainian wine, little known outside the country itself, has huge potential to develop. “I was listening to Italian wine growers talking at a conference recently,” he said, “and their situation reminded me of ours – except they were talking about the 1960s.”
Aside from grape varieties familiar in western Europe, Australia and the US – pinot gris, cabernet, and so on – the family grows native Ukrainian grapes such as telti kuruk and odesa black. They are also involved in a new cooperative that one day, in happier times, Mykhailo hopes could attract tourists with a winery on the road to Olbia, the ancient Greek settlement on the Black Sea that is too dangerous for visitors to access now. In the meantime, they are running a hub for local winemakers, some of whom have lost their own vineyards. Passing through the Molchanov winery was Olha Kashchenko and her young son, who live in Kherson – a city of incalculable danger for its reduced population of citizens. They live under drone-netted streets and the grim threat of what has became known as Russia’s “drone safari” – the targeting of civilian vehicles by drones.
Kashchenko, who took the decision to stay on in the city to care for her elderly mother, once worked as a guide on wine tours, and dreamed of becoming a winemaker herself. She went back to university to study wine production, bought land for vines and built a house in the countryside outside the city. But now her plot is firmly in the red zone, the country house has been destroyed, and she has been unable to reach it since 2023. For now, she plans to buy grapes and use the hub at the Molchakovs’ to produce wine – “red with strong tannins and whites with good acidity – sauvignon and riesling, I hope,” she said. “We plan to return, we will rebuild and plant our own grapes. But the area is mined, and who knows how long it will take.” Lost land but not lost hope Kashchenko’s experience is the tip of the iceberg. As in every other sphere of life in Ukraine, the scale of loss is devastating, growing, and hard to calculate. The historical Prince Trubetskoy winery in the Kherson region, for example, dating from the early 20th century, was occupied at the start of the full-scale invasion. When the area was liberated, the owners found the premises damaged and looted – including its important wine collection. And then, in February this year, the entire building was obliterated by bombing. According to Svitlana Tsybak, the president of the Ukrainian Association of Craft Winemakers and co-owner of UA Wines, which has imported good-quality Ukrainian wine to the UK since 2022, the country’s 68,000 hectares of land planted with vines in 2014 dropped to 47,000 after the Crimean peninsula was illegally annexed by Russia. “And now it’s 15,000,” she said, “which is nothing for such a big country”. Since 2022, many of those vineyards have been lost to occupation, and to events such as the blowing up of the Kakhovka dam, which flooded tracts of agricultural land in southern Ukraine. But they have also been lost, she said, to changing farming practices. In the face of the uncertainties of war, many large growers have uprooted their vines in favour of the more reliable, faster rewards of sunflowers or wheat. Growing vines, harvesting grapes, making wine, and presiding over its slow creep to maturity is work that, by its very nature, implies hope. To make wine is to believe in the future. Despite this broad picture of shrinking acreage, a remarkable 82 craft wineries have been established since 2022 in Ukraine, said Tsybak, mostly in the safer central and western parts of the country.
Newer vineyards include what she considers to be an exciting new maker, Gigi, in the Vinnytsia region, whose Georgian owners grow the grapes of their home country, such as saperavi, as well as the Ukrainian grape, sukholymaskyi. She serves Gigi’s wines among many other Ukrainian labels at a bar she co-owns in central Kyiv, called Artania. Despite having many of its windows and glasses smashed in a Russian bombing in late May, it quickly reopened to serve customers wines from across Ukraine. Tsybak, though, is also the chief executive of a vineyard that is far from safe. Beykush winery is on a narrow cape southwest of Mykolaiv. With an estuary on one side and the open waters of the Black Sea on the other, it sits amid a spectacular landscape, with rich native and migratory birdlife.
It is uncomfortably close to the strategic coastal town of Ochakiv, a frequent target for Russian attacks. Only 8km (5 miles) across the water, a long finger of land protrudes from the Kherson region to the south-west – a national park that is under Russian occupation. Also visible from this coastline is the island of Berezan, the home of the earliest ancient Greek settlement on the modern territory of Ukraine, from the seventh century BCE. Wine is often thought to have been introduced here by these early trader-colonists – but some think it goes back much earlier. The Beykush vineyards, which produce about 65,000 bottles a year, are the latest layer in a rich history of viticulture in this area, said Tsybak – not just the ancient Greeks but the Ottomans and, later, Jewish growers who worked here in the early 20th century. The layered history and biodiversity of the area is acknowledged in everything that Beykush does – Italian timorasso grapes are grown, for example, by way of tribute to an old Genoese fort nearby; and many of their labels feature the area’s rich birdlife. Beykush was established in 2010, one of a new wave of fresh vineyards focusing on quality, small-scale production in place of the high-quantity, low-quality, often sweet wines produced before independence. Even so, it was a struggle for fledging small producers like Beykush to operate, until in 2018 a successful campaign led to the reform of the legal framework regulating craft winemakers. Before the full-scale invasion, visitors would be offered tastings on the winery’s waterside terrace. Now it is far too dangerous to welcome enthusiasts, and the operation is run by a skeleton team headed by Olha Romashko, head winemaker, and her deputy, Oleksandr Pashkovsky. Three former colleagues are serving in the army.
Romashko has moved into the winery from her home in Ochakiv for her own safety. The winery’s underground tasting rooms have been a useful refuge. She and Pashkovsky have avoided working visibly out in the open, and observe a blackout after 10pm. Missiles overhead are so ubiquitous, she said, that “when there isn’t an FPV drone or anything else for a while – then it’s strange, and people start to be suspicious about what’s on its way”. “In 2022,” she added, “we had lots of cruise missiles from Crimea, sometimes flying low. Then at some point Shaheds appeared and they changed our life. If you can see a cruise missile you’re fine, it’s not coming for you. If you see a Shahed, though, it is coming for you, or somewhere nearby.” In November 2022, she and Pashkovsky planted malbec grapes, having ordered the young vines two years before that. “People should understand that wine growing has its own cycle,” said Pashkovsky. “You can’t just stop taking care of it. You have to keep on. You can’t miss a single cycle or step – if you do, you have wasted all your work. Sometimes we do forget there’s a war – of course we hear it all the time here, but we are busy, getting on with it.
“We have big hopes for these vines,” he said, as he gave the leaves and shoots of the new malbec vines a loving caress. “You can see that they started to blossom. When you look at these buds, how could you possibly abandon them?”
