Deep within a vault, where tangled cobwebs cling to the ceiling and a musky sweetness hangs in the air, a remarkable wine collection once owned by Josef Stalin has been unsealed for the first time this week.
The Georgian government, now the custodian of this extraordinary repository in Tbilisi, plans to auction off the roughly 40,000 French and Georgian rarities.
Some bottles in the collection date back to the early 19th century.
Proceeds from the sale are earmarked to establish a new wine education school in Georgia.
Irakli Gilauri, owner of Gilauri Wines, who collaborated with the country’s agriculture ministry on the initiative, said that 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.
Mr Stalin was born to a poor Georgian family in Gori, a city in the country’s east.
He went on to join the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and assumed the leadership after Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924.
Mr Stalin then led the Soviet Union for more than 30 years, until his death in 1953.
He was an enthusiastic wine drinker and collector and 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 Mr 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.”