The video opens with men in paramilitary uniforms, their faces covered, striding through unlit gray caverns filled with endless pallets of bottles. One shines his flashlight on a “passport” establishing the authenticity of the product. “Cuvée champenoise,” it says. 2019.
Gradually, the setting reveals itself as something other than a warehouse that’s lost power — the uneven walls and ceilings look like they were hewn out of rock, and the halls seem endless. At one point, the cameraman marvels at a sign that refers to the presence of 171 pallets of 500 bottles apiece. “That’s more than a million bottles just there,” he says. Though his math is faulty — that comes to 85,500 — there are six million bottles in the facility, his guide tells him. There are halls and halls of it.
In another room, filled with riddling racks from the 2015 vintage, the lights work, confirming the earlier impression: They are in a massive cave complex. “You have to periodically turn these bottles,” the guide says. “But we were busy with combat operations. Now we’ve got people who are going to turn them. Now, the Champagne is going to be good again.”
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The cameraman is a Russian military blogger. His guide is a member of the Wagner militia that clawed the southeastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut from the Ukrainian army last spring, after more than a year of annihilating bombardment. They are walking through perhaps the most unusual wine facility in the world, and certainly one
