Recently a small group, including two journalists, the requisite number of definite Dead Heads, and some émigrés from Peet’s Coffee across the street, gathered in Berkeley to sample Georgian wines at a former electrical substation gentrified into a wine store, aptly named Vintage. In between tasting varietals that had been fermented in traditional Georgian clay containers, the virtues of Stalin wine, a sweetish red, were discussed. A bottle of Stalin wine wasn’t on the tasting table but Christopher Terrell, an enthusiastic young Brit who imports Georgian wine into California, assured the group that it could be found online.
Stalin’s visage gracing a wine bottle isn’t the brand identity most people in the West associate with an A-list spokesman, dead or alive. Some might say it’s a marketing strategy with the kiss of death written all over it. But Stalin, also known by the moniker Koba (after a Georgian folk hero), was a Georgian homeboy and loyalties run deep in the Caucasus. In addition to the wine with his picture on the label, there is also a sweet red wine, Khvanchkara, that is said to have been the former Soviet leader’s favorite. And that wine is currently at the center of a trademark dispute.
When I lived in Russia, I bought bottles of wine at around 60 cents each with Stalin’s face when I could find them in kiosks. Stalin’s steely eyes would stare out at me from six or eight bottles on the kitchen counter as I cooked that evening’s version of choucroute. In early 1998, when I went to the usual kiosk to replenish my dwindling stockpile of the wine, I was greeted by a head shake. I learned that rebels, maybe Abakazians or North Ossetians (it was hard to keep track of which group was doing what) were holding the entrance to the Trans-Caucasian Highway hostage. That meant no wine, Stalin or otherwise, loaded onto Georgian trucks was getting through to Russia. Months later a scramble through kiosks just before I was to return to the States netted one bottle of the stuff, which I gave to a friend in Boston as a souvenir and proof that such a vintage existed.
It’s Billy Elliot meets Boris at the Bolshoi. Set in pre-Perestroika Moscow 1986, this semi-autobiographical first film from Brooklyn-based director Dmitry Povolotsky follows a ballet-obsessed teen who pretends his father is the famous dancer (and defector) Mikhail Baryshnikov. The movie captures the spirit of the economic and political restructuring at the time, and features a musical score by no less than Boney M.
