The adventure of a lifetime to buy Stalin’s secret multimillion-dollar wine cellar located in Georgia. This is the Raiders of the Lost Ark of wine.
In the late 1990s, John Baker was known as a purveyor of quality rare and old wines. Always entrepreneurial and up for adventure, he was the perfect person for an occasional business partner to approach with a mysterious wine list that was foreign to anything John, or his second-in-command, Kevin, had ever come across.
John and Kevin embarked on an audacious, colourful and potentially dangerous journey to Georgia to discover if the wines actually existed; if the bottles were authentic and had indeed been owned by Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, and then Stalin; and whether the entire collection could be bought and transported to a major auction house for sale.
Stalin’s Wine Cellar is a wild, sometimes rough ride in the glamorous world of high-end wine. From Double Bay, Sydney to Tbilisi, Georgia, via the streets of London and Paris, to the vineyards of Bordeaux and iconic Château d’Yquem, a multimillion-dollar cellar and a breathtaking collection of wine are the elusive treasure.