When we started UnscrewMe, our focus was on tastings organised by others. However, we also host private tastings ourselves every now and then. Here, we give you some insights into our latest private tasting which was all about Ukrainian wine 🇺🇦.

If you would like to work with us to organise a tasting with Ukrainian wines 🇺🇦 or something else 🍷, please get in touch 👋. We’re looking forward to hear from you! 🙂

The backstory

You might wonder, why we were interested in Ukrainian wine in the first place. As with many good wine tastings, it all goes back to a personal story. But not all stories go back over 20 years. In summer of 2001, I volunteered to go to Mariupol in Ukraine with a youth group to support an orphanage working with often drug-addicted street kids for about two weeks. Such a journey was about as far and foreign, as I could imagine at that time.

For me, it was a big adventure, getting out of my comfort zone and experiencing a completely different world. During these few weeks, I met friendly people and enjoyed a degree of hospitality I have rarely seen before. I spent a memorable, hot summer’s day by the Azov Sea, playing in the sizzling sun. I spent a fun afternoon in a traditional sauna. And I did my brighten up the day for a couple of homeless children, who unlike me could not go back to a comfortable life back in Germany.

Ever since, I wanted to go back to Ukraine. This time not to volunteer, but to explore modern life in big cities like Kyiv and Odesa and get to know the local wine scene, just like I do when I go on a city break to Prague or Stockholm. And I wanted to go back to Mariupol to see how it changed.

For about 20 years, this plan was lingering in my head, but it was one of those things that I thought, I could do anytime. Next year, or the year after. Now, I regret that I didn’t go back a couple of years ago, before the full-scale invasion changed everything in 2022.

After learning so much about Ukrainian wine now and getting to know Ukrainians that love wine as much as I do, I am looking forward to go back to Ukraine in the future and see some of the vineyards and winemakers I have discovered through the Ukrainian Wine Company.

Back to the tasting. Today, almost everyone has heard of Ukraine. But not many people know that Ukraine actually produces excellent wine. We wanted to help Ukrainian winemakers to change that by showing people another side of Ukraine, full of flavour, experimentation & hope.

As many of our guests had never tried Ukrainian wine before, we wanted to present different styles 🍇 across various regions. We decided to kick things off with something fizzy to get everyone in a festive mood and started the evening with a sparkling wine. Then we featured three whites, one orange and three exciting reds. We finished the tasting with something slightly different - a medium-sweet wine with grapefruit flavours, which turned out to be a really fun and refreshing drink to end the evening with.

We wanted our guests to experience unique wines from all over Ukraine, so we picked seven winemakers from Zakarpattia 🏞, the Black Sea region 🌅 including the Mykolaiv & Odesa as well as one winery based near Kyiv.

Authentic Ukrainian Snacks

With our concept “🍾💙💛 Sipping & Supporting Ukrainian Wine 🇺🇦🍷“, it was important for us to partner with Ukrainian businesses. We were very lucky that we found an excellent location for this tasting in Mriya Neo Bistro on Old Brompton Road in Kensington & Chelsea.

I enjoyed working with Olga, who started her restaurant with a mission to make Ukrainian food more sophisticated & to give Ukrainian refugees in London a meaningful place to work. Even better for us, she also has a deep passion for Ukrainian wine 🍾:

“Oh, and those Ukrainian wines no one has ever seemed to have heard of? They’re on Mriya’s menu, sourced from Ukraine’s budding wineries, such as the Beykush Winery from Ukraine’s Black Sea coast.”
(Read more about her and her vision in The Kyiv Independent: London restaurant cooks up Ukrainian fine dining)

Together with her chef, she curated a range of delicious, authentic Ukrainian snacks to go along with our wine selection. We were happy that our guests liked this Ukrainian wine and food exploration as much as we did. Our personal favourite of the snacks was definitely the “salo”, flavourful, thinly sliced salt-cured pork fat on delicious rye bread.

And if you’re still not convinced, even the famous chef Rick Stein visited Mriya and chatted with Olga as part of his new Food Stories programme 📺.

Sourcing Ukrainian Wine in London

For many years, at least as far back as 2019, we were thinking about exploring Ukrainian wine. However, without doing much research, we assumed - especially now during the full-scale war - it would be difficult to get Ukrainian wine to London. Luckily, my friend Dilyan from The Jolly Merchants invited me to the excellent Ultimate Central & Eastern Europe Wine Fair (CEE) where I discovered the Ukrainian Wine Company, a UK importer supported by Wines of Ukraine.

After a short chat with wine expert Sera at their stall, I decided that now is the time to go ahead and introduce people to Ukrainian wine. After all, ordering Ukrainian wine in London is actually as easy, quick & smooth as buying English or French wine!

Discovering the Diversity of Ukrainian Wines

Ukraine has a very long and mixed winemaking history.

We wanted to let people taste some wines made from grape varieties that are only grown in Ukraine. But we also wanted to showcase how innovative Ukrainian winemakers approach international grape varieties to create something interesting based on things we already know.

We started the evening with a fairly unique rosé sparkling wine 🍾, Carpathian Sekt Blaufrankisch Brut Rose (2023) from Chateau Chizay (Шато Чизай), a pretty big and popular wine producer based in the Zakarpattia wine region in western Ukraine, bordering Hungary and Slovakia.
As we expected, this one was a true crowdpleaser impressing our guests with its raspberry compote and freshly crushed grapes flavour notes with only 11.5% alcohol, made from the lovely Austrian black grape variety Blaufränkisch 🇦🇹. It’s not a grape you will find used in many sparkling wines, but it works beautifully in this light, refreshing Charmant method fizz, produced similar to Proseccco in Italy.

Moving to white wines ⚪️, we presented a fresh, easy drinking Albariño (2022) from Beykush Winery. The vineyards are located on a peninsula right by the Black Sea in the Mykolaiv subregion in the South of Ukraine.
We like to think that the sea air adds some salinity and minerality, combining beautifully with typical peach and stone fruit notes of Albariño or Alvarinho wines from Spain 🇪🇸 or Portugal 🇵🇹.

Our second white wine was another international variety, this time one originating from France 🇫🇷. The floral Muskat Ottonel (2021) from Frumushika-Nova was liked by many of our guests. The small winemaker is doing a lot of things beyond wine and has been developing a holiday destination around farming in Bessarabia, the most western part of the Odesa region.

Our final white was something truly special, a wine made from a local Ukrainian grape 🇺🇦 and made by a new, experimental wine producer in the Kyiv region. The white balanced and smooth Sukholimanskiy (2022) from BIOLOGIST Winery (крафтова виноробня під Києвом) was one of my personal favourites.

We continued the tasting with something slightly more edgy and still pretty local 🟠. We poured the Orange Blend Slava Ukraine (2022) from BIOLOGIST. It is made from 34% of the Georgian variety Rkatsiteli 🇬🇪, blended with Traminer and Silvaner. It is quite tame for an orange wine, we mainly selected it because it shows a Ukrainian take on Rkatsiteli. The wine label has a special story, because the winemaker showed true creativity by using blue and yellow tape 🇺🇦 for the initial batch. Not because they liked tape so much, but because that was the only material they had at this very difficult time during the war.

We swiftly moved on to some red big hitters 🔴, starting with the Saperavi Ace (2021) from Stakhovsky Wines, another winemaker locate in the western Zakarpattia region.
Celebrity wines is a popular concept around the world, and this winemaker was started by a famous former Ukrainian #1 tennis player 🥇, Sergiy Stakhovsky, who has once beaten Roger Federer at Wimbledon 🎾. However, this story takes an unexpected turn, because since 2022, Sergiy Stakhovsky serves in the Ukrainian Armed Forces to defend his country.
The wine is made from the Georgian Saperavi grape variety 🇬🇪, one of only a few grapes that produce red juice, giving the wine a deep colour.

Focusing yet again on a local Ukrainian grape 🇺🇦, we then tasted two wines made only a couple of kilometres apart at the shores of Lake Yalpug in the Danube Bessarabia subregion at the south-western border of Ukraine close to Moldova and Romania. Both wines are made from the Ukrainian grape variety Odesa Black, the first was the Odesa Black VIP Wine Selection (2019) from ТМ Villa TINTA (Локальні вина української Бессарабії) and the second was Odesa Black (2022) from Kolonist (Family Winery «Колоніст»). Both showed a beautiful blend of bold flavours, smooth tannins and some oak notes.

We finished the tasting with a surprise bottle, a semi-sweet wine drink 🍯. Produced by Chateau Chizay, the Pinot Noir Rose with Grapefruit (NV) was a fun and refreshing sensation. For us, this tasted more like a cocktail, than a wine, clearly dominated by grapefruit notes but with a certain elegance and structure added in the background, thanks to strawberry and cherry notes from the Pinot Noir base wine.

We were very lucky that throughout the evening, Sera from the Ukrainian Wine Company joined us. Being from Ukraine, she could provide some helpful in-depth knowledge and experience about the country and even show impressions from the ongoing wine harvest at some of the producers we tasted.

Having someone at a tasting with a personal connection to the wines and the people behind the bottles always adds another dimension, helping everyone appreciate the hard work and the wines even more.

If this sounds like fun and inspiring experience 🍾, please get in touch 👋.
We are more than happy to organise a tasting for you & with you. 📑
We provide expert guidance on themes, topics, wines & venues. 💡

🥳 Our private tasting "🍾💙💛 Sipping & Supporting Ukrainian Wine 🇺🇦🍷" was a big success! 👍 📍 We were giving our guests a virtual tour around the country. 🗺 ⚡️ Presenting 9 carefully selected bottles from 7 winemakers. 🚜 ☑️ @winesofukraine we tasted: 🍷 🍾 Sparkling: @chizaywine ⚪️ White: @beykushwinery 🌊 & @frumushikanova & biologist_wine_company 🟠 Orange: @biologist_wine_company 🔴 Red: @stakhovsky.wines 🎾 & @villa_tinta_shop & @kolonist_wine 🍇 We focused on local grapes: Odesa Black, Sukholimanskiy & Saperavi 🇬🇪 💡 Ukraine 🇺🇦 is an exciting wine country that has so much to offer. 😍 🤝 And we were lucky to get to know some amazing Ukrainians in London. 🙂 🙏 Thank you @uawines_uk & @sera_crow for support & guidance with the wine selection. 🛒 🍞 It was a pleasure to work with @ts_olga & her team @Mriya_Neo_Bistro - the Ukrainian snacks went beautifully with the wines. 🤩 📰 No surprise that @kyivindependent_official wrote about Mriya & @chefrickstein of @ricksteinrestaurants featured Mriya on his new "Food Stories programme" on BBC Two @bbciplayer 📺 📆 And all of this only happend because @thejollymerchants invited us to @the_ultimate_cee_wine_fair 👏 #wine #london #ukraine #mriya #winetasting #ukrainianwine

on Instagram  winesofukraine  uawines_uk  sera_crow  Mriya_Neo_Bistro  ts_olga  chizaywine  beykushwinery  frumushikanova  biologist_wine_company  stakhovsky.wines  villa_tinta_shop  kolonist_wine  thejollymerchants  the_ultimate_cee_wine_fair  kyivindependent_official  chefrickstein  ricksteinrestaurants  bbciplayer

First published in October 2024.