If this all happened today, you could google the life out of every angle of what you were potentially getting into. But this was in 1999. Dial-up modems still went bing-bing-bing as they connected, then took forever to load a single web page, and you only had access to early browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer. At the time, Kevin was even involved as a consultant in a crazy plan that one winery had to sell bottles of wine online through some kind of web-based shop. They spent hundreds of thousands trying to develop a virtual cash register. For the most part, websites were basic and vast worlds of knowledge had not yet made their way online.
But some had. I spent midnight hours as the departure day loomed trying to find out anything I could about where I was about to land. The best site I managed to dig out was from the United Kingdom, a government-created trade industry site that had basic information on modern Georgia.
‘Georgia lies in the area of land known as the Transcaucasia which stretches between the Black and Caspian Seas, an important junction between eastern Europe and Asia,’ I read. Georgia was apparently roughly the same size as the Republic of Ireland and had a population of about 5.4 million people. President Shevardnadze, a former USSR finance minister, had been voted into office in 1995 and four years later was very much in charge.
I was most interested in the comment that economic reforms in 1996 had seen inflation controlled, exchange rates stabilise, GDP growth of 10 per cent and privatisation of around 50 per cent of the economy. Presumably including wineries and goldmines. Neville had really not let any grass grow under his feet before sweeping in there to try to do business. I had to give him that.
The site told me that people spoke a specific Georgian language and that the capital, Tbilisi, where we were headed, was a city of 1.2 million people.
Encouraged by the information, I kept up my online research, looking for more info about this part of the world. I discovered that Georgia had been one of the most affluent states behind the Iron Curtain, with productive farming land and industry, but had suffered badly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The state had become independent in 1991 but that only led to a vacuum of power, leading to civil unrest, a breakdown in law and order and finally a full-blown civil war. It was only the return of Shevardnadze as president that turned things around, I guessed because he brought some old-school Soviet ideas about how best to deal with pesky civilian uprisings. The uprisings duly stopped, although as I browsed more websites, it became clear the United Nations was still involved in trying to negotiate a solution to the ongoing separatist conflict in Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast.
Georgia had a new currency, as of five years before: the lari, which is divided into 100 tetri. I wrote a note to myself to check whether I’d also need US dollars while we were there, if not for everyday transactions then maybe for potential ‘negotiations’ at the winery. I checked the trade website again and it told me that all official transactions had to be in the Georgian lari.
When I asked Kevin about what type of currency and how much he thought we should take, he had a considered opinion on the reality we’d shortly be facing. ‘John, I was reading that 70 per cent of Georgians apparently live below the poverty line,’ he said. ‘You offer them genuine US dollars, and it’s going to open a lot of doors. Also, we don’t know if that 70 per cent figure includes some of the people we’re trying to do a million-dollar deal with, so I think we definitely want to have some greenbacks to help things along if needed.’
‘I agree, but the whole place also sounds a bit frontier town, from what Neville’s told us and what I’ve read,’ I said. ‘We have to be careful how much money we walk around with.’
‘Well, that’s true of most places,’ Kevin said. ‘You ever visited Detroit?’
‘I haven’t,’ I smiled. ‘But let’s definitely take some US dollars.’
As we packed our bags, an astonished Frank and Jillian found themselves in charge of the Double Bay Cellars for a week or so. It wasn’t unusual for me to be overseas – I sometimes headed to the UK or Europe on wine-buying exercises, but they were unsubtle in their surprise about and suspicion of the mission Kevin and I were about to embark on.
‘So, basically we tell customers that you’re off drinking with Mikhail Gorbachev, if anybody asks,’ Frank said.
‘I think you’ll find you are behind the times,’ Jillian said. ‘Boris Yeltsin is the boss over there now.’
‘Well, you realise that’s Russia, not Georgia,’ Kevin said. ‘But yes, we’re off to buy wine bought by the Soviet motherland.’
‘Just another day in Double Bay,’ said Jillian, shaking her head.
Early on the morning of 14 June 1999, Harry picked us up in the dove-grey Daimler and drove us to Sydney Airport’s international terminal. Kevin sat up front and I sat in the back.
‘Would you like some music?’ Harry asked, and then turned the radio on loudly without waiting for an answer. The chorus of Britney Spears’ debut hit ricocheted around the car. She was number one on the charts and on high rotation that winter.
I asked Kevin, ‘Where do you stand on the Princess of Pop?’
Kevin was looking out the window at the gymea lilies that lined the freeway to the airport.
After some thought, he answered, ‘She’s no Aretha Franklin.’
We stopped in the drop-and-go section at the front of international departures. Harry took a photo of us and our boxes of equipment, with a look on his face that was torn between genuinely wishing us luck and trying not to think about the fact that he had been forced to pay for a quarter of the $7699, before tax, that it had cost for each of our flights. We were taking the kangaroo route to Singapore and on to London, before a third flight back east to Tbilisi, where a nasty dose of jet lag, sweet Georgian sparkling wine and rich chocolates would be waiting after thirty-plus hours of travel.
As promised, once we’d committed to the venture, we’d formed a partnership between Neville, Harry, Kevin and me, and each deposited $10,000 to fund the partnership and pay for our flights, accommodation and even potential excess baggage costs for any wine we hoped to bring home to Australia.
Kevin and I carefully kept a checklist of everything we would need and to be sure we had packed them as we made all the necessary preparations, including such technicalities as making sure we had bright fluoro lights to put behind bottles to check their fill level as we examined the cellar. We knew the lighting would almost certainly be below par, with absolutely no natural light and weak globes most likely only vaguely illuminating the bottles. Both Kevin and I had noted the condition of the cellar in the photos that Neville had shown us. As well as being wet, which could be good for the ageing corks, and cobwebby, the cellar looked dark.
Measuring the fill level of the bottles was an essential task, for several reasons. The height of the fill of wine in the bottles, as wine people call it, is an indication of the condition of the wine, and particularly how efficiently the cork has performed over many years. Poor corks will allow significant leakage when bottles are lying on their side, whereas with a very old wine, as many of these were claimed to be, a good fill level would indicate that the cork has held well, and the wine could be in good if not perfect condition. Over time, I had developed a technique to assess the fill level by taking photographs of bottles standing up against a bright white background, or with a bright white light behind, so that the fill level is clear. This also allows me to see the colour of the wine, which can also indicate the condition of the wine inside the bottle.
But it’s possible to gather such photographic evidence only with a strong enough light to shine through the bottle, so I was determined we carry these lights onto the aeroplane. I wanted to be as self-sufficient as possible, because who knew if the Georgians would be helpful or across the need for such techniques, or if we could obtain the equipment once we were there. We had no plan B, heading into such an unknown region and cellar, so the more variables I could control before we even took off, the better.
It was those kinds of random details, legal necessities and worries about what we might have overlooked or forgotten that filled our minds that morning as we checked our luggage, wrestled Sydney Airport’s brand-new electronic ticketing system, promised we weren’t carrying any illegal cargo as we wandered through security and customs, then finally boarded a Qantas jumbo.
Kevin and I looked at one another as the final passengers got organised in their seats.
‘Nothing ventured,’ I said.
He replied, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’
As the plane’s engine roared and we built speed and lumbered into the sky, I began to be filled with a blood-pumping sense of adventure tangled up with the much heavier, more tangible dilemma of how to be certain of the authenticity of the wine before we had to hand over US$1 million.
For all of my wonder at the history of these wines, if they were real, this was very much a business deal and the amount we were being asked to pay was a big one, certainly more than I’d ever contemplated spending on a cellar of wine. I am okay at analysing the risk/reward aspect of a business deal and haven’t gone too badly wrong over the years – with a couple of dinner-party-tale-worthy exceptions – but as we flew north-west, I couldn’t shake the fact that if this escapade went really badly, I could lose a great deal: not only financially but also in reputation and, well – why lie? – in ego. In practical terms, could I lose my house or the Double Bay Cellars? Probably not: I was only on the hook for a quarter of the total investment. Nevertheless, I had the butterflies in my stomach that probably come with playing poker for the first time, for much higher stakes than you’re used to. I tried to brush off the risk to my personal pride and reputation, or the financial landmines laid out in front of me, but there was no getting around the fact I was playing a game beyond any prior comfort level.
And then, consider that we were flying on the word of a man we barely knew called Neville, who had seen some bottles in the cellar but admitted he didn’t know much about museum wine, and a couple of cheery phone calls with this George character, who had a charming English-as-a-second-language turn of phrase as he enthusiastically shouted down the phone – but was noticeably light on hard detail or specific information about exactly who owned the winery, which of the wines were Stalin’s personal collection, or answers to any of the other key questions I had been pressing him on without success.
It wasn’t just the million-dollar asking price, either. If we were to go ahead with the purchase, the costs would mount. We’d have to work out how to transport tens of thousands of potentially fragile bottles out of Georgia and safely to London, or maybe New York. There would be marketing and other costs. Hopefully, if we could establish the cellar was genuine with exceptional wine classics, a major auction house could help us through those later tasks and costs.
There were precedents for this. One of the bigger British auction houses – I’m pretty sure it was Sotheby’s – had conducted an auction of the Massandra Collection, where the auction house’s experts visited the official Russian winery in the Crimea, authenticated the old Russian and Soviet bloc wines (which were almost all missing labels), placed each individual bottle, standing up, in a cellophane bag, tied the top and added a Sotheby’s label identifying the details of the wine. They then placed the bottles in solid cardboard carrying boxes and transported all the wines to London for the auction. What a logistical exercise and what an enormous expense! And now Kevin and I might be asking them to do exactly the same again with the mysterious, unproven bottles we were on our way to visit. No pressure at all. I didn’t sleep well on the plane.
In Kevin’s hand luggage, he was carrying three polystyrene packing cases for twelve bottles each, along with a lot of wrapping tape. We knew that this trip was not going to see us attempt to move any volume of wine, no matter how well things went in Tbilisi. Kevin and I were completely focused on discovering exactly what was in that cellar, and who we were dealing with. It was about exploring the cellar, not trying to lug it anywhere at this stage.
However, we had decided to make it a condition of a potential deal that we be allowed to take at least a dozen wines with us when we left, so we could check them for authenticity.
Neville had even put it in writing. I was carrying a letter of introduction to George that I was to give him on arrival. ‘I would be most pleased if you could grant two of my colleagues the type of cooperation and assistance I have come used to during my seven-year involvement in Georgian business,’ it said. He asked that Kevin and I be permitted to bring ‘several bottles of wine . . . back to Australia, for scientific analysis,’ and reassured George that these bottles would not need to be opened, so could eventually be returned to the winery.
George had already agreed on the phone, understanding that we would need to show the genuine bottles to various non-Georgian partners if the deal were to go ahead. But also, if things went pear-shaped, those twelve bottles would potentially offer our only return on our investment in the trip. If we could emerge with several pre-1900 bottles of French classics, we would be ahead, no matter what.
At worst, I thought as Kevin slept next to me, we’d have at least a dozen excellent bottles of wine for a dinner party to tell the story of our adventure and to rue what could have been.
And so we crossed the world, to London then back across Europe and the Black Sea towards Tbilisi. We landed, met George at the airport, were dutifully swept through customs, no questions asked – as promised by our jovial host – and were driven at crazy speeds through a dark, mysterious city. We pulled up at a bland 1950s-era hotel, like any tired Hilton you might find in any city in the world, and fell face-first into our beds.
It was Tuesday 15 June 1999.
And we were in Tbilisi. In the land of Josef Stalin.