MYKOLAYIV, Ukraine -- For some Ukrainians, Russia's full-scale invasion meant putting their "regular" lives on hold. For winemaker Heorhiy Molchanov, it meant stepping up his activities.
Over the past few months, he has completed the construction of a wine-tasting hall and guesthouse with the sounds of fire from training exercises and Russian attacks reverberating through Slyvyne, upriver from the southern port city of Mykolayiv.
"Our army has started active military actions near Kherson" -- 60 kilometers southeast of Mykolayiv -- "so we can see plenty of military movements," Molchanov, of the Slivino Village winery, said in October.
While it was at that point "not too noisy" and he reported a good harvest, remnants of a large bomb still stick vertically out of the ground in one of his tracts of land. It's a startling sight that he played down with a dry remark: "We have only one rocket inside our vineyard," he said.
In March 2022, early in the invasion, Russian forces swarmed into the Mykolayiv region, trying to seize the airport and firing indiscriminately into the densely populated city, a strategic port on a river that flows into the Black Sea between Kherson and Odesa. On March 29, a cruise missile hit the regional government headquarters, ripping a huge hole through the building and killing at least 37 people.
Molchanov stayed put, and others continued to operate under similar conditions.
Russian forces stopped short of the city and retreated in the face of a major Ukrainian counteroffensive that fall in which Kyiv's forces liberated Kherson.
Today, remnants of rockets, bombs, and shells still scar the area, and Russian attacks persist.
"Our vineyards and our people work under constant missile attacks, which is quite dangerous," said Svitlana Tsybak of Beykush winery, based some 60 kilometers away in Ochakiv. "Despite this, our brave and hard-working colleagues yielded quite good harvests over these two years."
Ukraine's craft winemakers are not exactly benefitting from the war. But growing international interest in Ukrainian wine, partly prompted by the Russian invasion, has laid fertile ground for the domestic wine industry to start expanding -- and Ukrainian politicians are starting to take note of the window of opportunity.
While there was a boom in Ukrainian winemaking beginning in 2010, small-scale wine production had begun to decline in recent years, according to the authors of proposed legislation aimed to encourage growers and recharge the industry. Slivino and Beykush are among 26 small wineries in Ukraine today, down from 52 in 2018 and about 100 in 2013, the year before Russia responded to the Maidan protest movement and the downfall of Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych by seizing Crimea and fomenting war in the Donbas.
Legislators, under pressure from winemakers, passed a law in August that they hope will reverse that trend.
"The initiative will help create economic incentives for the development of small-scale winemaking," an author of the legislation, Danylo Hetmantsev, wrote on Telegram before it was adopted.
The law lowered some of the bureaucratic barriers that have long hampered winemakers like Molchanov, who said that "if you want to send to Europe you need to pick up plenty of papers, plenty of patience."
Tsybak, who is also head of the Association of Craft Winemakers of Ukraine, called the legislation a "great achievement."
"It was quite hard to hire additional staff," Tsybak said, citing the bureaucratic barriers. "Obtaining a license was a big challenge. Now the winemakers can concentrate on their main task: producing great wines," Tsybak said.
On December 4, parliament deputy Ihor Marchuk said that "we expect to issue the first license under the simplified procedure for small winemakers any day."
It was an earlier attempt to simplify the bureaucratic process that spurred Molchanov on: In March 2018, parliament passed a bill aimed to simplify the procedure for registering a small or medium-sized winery.
"We were the first in Ukraine to be licensed under this law, so we built these small structures," he said, gesturing at a white two-story building at the winery. "We planted one hectare of grapevines here and started to make a small wine business."
The greatest number of small winemakers are concentrated in the Mykolayiv region because of the favorable "climate and soil conditions," said London-based sommelier Dmytro Goncharuk.
Ukrainian wine is still young. Producers and buyers hope that it will continue to gain traction globally. Ukrainian experts say it is now perhaps on a par with England's emerging wine industry.
"Ukrainian wine has a future, in 10-15 years," Yevhen Safonov, a former manager of MyWine bar, in Odesa, which specializes in stocking Ukrainian wines, said in July, when these wines fueled jovial nights around the piano amid intense missile strikes.
"People live like tomorrow never comes. And it's an amazing feeling," he said.
Goncharuk agreed with his assessment of the prospects for Ukrainian wines.
"They have to experiment" he said, adding that winemaking knowledge was largely destroyed during the Soviet era and now winemakers are seeking "any information from pre-Soviet times."
When Goncharuk first thought about importing Ukrainian wines to the United Kingdom, he wanted to focus on the unusual grape varieties that can be sourced in Ukraine as opposed to, say, Cabernet Sauvignon. The Telti-Kuruk grape, for example, can only be found in Ukraine.
"These grapes came from Turkey or Armenia centuries ago. It was widely grown in the Odesa region, and during the Soviet period actually they replanted everything there" with frost- and disease-resistant varieties, he said.
One winemaker, Shabo, managed to save it. Shabo was also impacted by Gorbachev's "anti-alcohol campaign" in the late Soviet era, which negatively affected Ukrainian vineyards, they say.
The months immediately following Russia's full-scale invasion saw a global surge in thirst for Ukrainian wines.
"Starting from March [2022] there was huge demand," Goncharuk said. "I mean, for much of last year there was huge demand. Everyone was looking for Ukrainian wine."
Interest in Ukrainian wine abroad helped counteract the constricted market at home, which was the result of bombardments, blackouts, and restrictions on the sale of alcohol.
"People were curious, first of all; they just didn't even know that Ukraine produced wine. They thought it is a very cold country, something like Russia," Goncharyuk said. "They were actually surprised that it exists."
While Russia's invasion has boosted Ukrainian wine producers in some ways, they have suffered in others. Besides hurdles like destruction, death, and bombs blasting into their vineyards, they have also had to contend with slow delivery times.
"There's a very big problem with fuel," which is needed for both transport and tractors, Molchanov said. He said people would wait for hours at gas stations only to find there was none left when they finally got to the pump.
"All these supply chains were broken. Some chemicals, some trees you want to plant…. Plenty of people would just leave…you can do nothing to reconstruct it," he said. There has also been a comparative shortage of glass bottles since a major Ukrainian glass factory was bombed in March 2022.
"We couldn't bottle the wines because of the uncertainty and absence of bottles and staff," said Tsybak.
Russian looting has also posed a major problem for people in the wine business and theft has been ubiquitous. Stoic winery, in the Kherson region, used to be called Prince Trubetskoi, but it was renamed to lose the reference to the Russian Decembrist and in tribute to stoicism.
It has been damaged by bombardments and was depleted by looting during the Russian occupation, which ended when Moscow's forces retreated across the Dnieper River over a year ago.
"The war has taken everything from us -- wine stolen and [bottles] broken, our professionals were forced to flee violence, and warehouses were bombed," Stoic the company said on Instagram in April.
The Russian onslaught has also raised questions about the future of winemaking in a war-marred environment. Kateryna Polyanska, an ecologist from the organization Environment. People. Law., has collected more than 100 soil samples from various regions to pinpoint chemical changes in the soil as a consequence of war.
Soil from a shell crater in a schoolyard in the Mykolayiv region contained over 600 milligrams of lead per kilogram, she said, while soil from the site of a rocket crater in the forest in the same region yielded copper concentrations of more than 100 times the "permissible limit."
At times, wine producers in Ukraine have been in a unique position to help out.
Amid water-supply problems in Mykolayiv, residents sometimes come to Molchanov's winery to fill containers with water from their purified supply. While the city started digging wells and supplying residents via a "water tram," he began providing water treated by reverse osmosis water to other Ukrainian regions, with the aid of grants.
Tsybak said Beykush strongly supports the Ukrainian military: "We donate and provide our soldiers with drones. We run many charity events in Ukraine and beyond. We do auctions with old and special vintages of our wines."
With no end to the war in sight, meanwhile, Stoic's owners are determined to persevere.
"Do we have the right to give up and stop the history of the chateau?" they said on Instagram. "We don't, and we don't want to."
