Yule Georgieva: John, it's so great to be with you. Thank you for joining me.

John Baker: Yule, nice to be with you and thank you for your invitation.

Yule Georgieva: Wonderful. Well, I'm so excited to discuss this book with you and your history. So I have the book right here, Stalin's Wine Cellar, which you are of course one of the Vipron and author. I read this with my husband and baby. We read it to him actually. It was bedtime stories for his first two months of life, and we could not put it down. It was a fantastic book. So I'm very excited to talk about it and to talk about your connection to wine in general. But I thought maybe we just start by you telling us a little bit about your own background in wine. 

John Baker: Okay. My wine time, shall we say, started, I used to run a big rock and roll venue in Australia, where we had all the big Australian bands anyway, Enix, Men at Work, Cold Chisel, all of these great bands, and I loved it, it was great, it was crazy. We'd have our lounge, for example, would be at quarter to six, it'd be empty in a quarter past six, there'd be 2,000 people in there going crazy. And it was great. But I remember getting home one morning, three or four in the morning, smelling somewhere between a cigarette factory and a brewery, and I thought, I don't know if I want to be doing this for the rest of my life. But I quite liked those bottles of wine, which I didn't know that much about at the time. So I sold the hotel and bought my first wine shop. And I went from there. Then I had a series of wine shops. And the main one was in Double Bay in Sydney, which is a premium suburb. And that's where the book started, sort of thing. We were dealing very much in premium wines. And my view of wine shops was, you have to have a point of difference. Otherwise, you're just another wine shop on the corner like other wine shops. And our point of difference was old and rare wines, and particularly buying people's private cellars when you could do a big promotion about it, the provenance of the wine, the history, et cetera. And that was our point of difference. And that's how we, which was what led to the cellar in Georgia. So that was how I got into wine.

Yule Georgieva: Fantastic. And what are you doing now?

John Baker: Well, I'm not doing much with wine, although I have a few restaurants trying to take away my cellar, so when I feel like selling a few bottles of wine, I move a few along, but that's about all. Otherwise, I just enjoy wine and it's great. I'm particularly interested in wines I don't know. So to drink the great wines of the world, particularly Bordeaux, which was my specialty, is fine, but I don't really need to drink any more of those. I sort of know roughly what they are, I pretty well know what they taste like. So I'm much more interested in the wine that I don't know. And if someone says to me, oh, this wine is particularly good and I don't know it, I go, well, I want to taste that. Like if someone said to me, oh, we've got a Bulgarian cabernet that's really interesting, I'll go, wow, I want to try that. So yeah, so that's my interesting wine is much more tasting than drinking.

Yule Georgieva: You know, that's funny. My husband's actually Bulgarian. So we were just in Bulgaria in May, and I can send you a couple of wines that we discovered over there that are fantastic. But that's a great philosophy to try new things since it is an enviable position to have been Bordeauxed out.

John Baker: I have to think.

John Baker: Well, I'm sorry to find out it was, actually I'm not going to say it half the time, but I know because I had a business called Bordeaux Shippers where we were porting only Bordeaux and it was great business and the wines are great and the people in Bordeaux are wonderful to deal with, but I don't know, it's time to move on or something, I'm not quite sure what.

Yule Georgieva: There is no shortage of things to explore in wine. So on the note of old and rare wines, let's turn towards the story of Stalin's wine cellars, since I think that's what we're here to discuss. So before we get into this particular story and your experience, can you just give us a little bit of a just level set a bit for us? Give us a bit of background about Russia's connection to wine, since I think it's not an association that comes quickly to most people, right? We don't think of Russia as a wine producing country or necessarily a very prominently wine consuming country. So can you give us a bit of that background of why wine plays a role in Russia?

John Baker: Yeah, sure. I mean, he goes back to Peter the Great and the creation of St. Petersburg. Peter the Great was early 1700s. I should get the dates, shouldn't I? But he considered that Russia was too barbaric and it needed a western port on the Baltic where it could communicate with London, Paris and Venice. Paris and Venice were probably the great cities of the world in those days. So when he created St. Petersburg, he wanted to create a great city of the world, very much in the lines of Paris-Venice, hence you've got all the canals and everything. And when St. Petersburg was created, French was the language of the court. If you wanted to be in the nobility, you spoke French, you dressed in French clothes, you ate French food, you drank French wine, you had a French chef, the whole thing, just to try and raise the standard of the people. And hence, the great French wines were sold into Russia to the Tsars. And of course the French love someone that wants to buy a lot of their wine. I think that's a French acquirement. So there was this progression of the nobility. So that's why a lot of the great French wines were there. And when we were investigating this cellar, which was the cellar of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, we were amazed at the great French wines that were in the cellar. you know, sorry, the Italian wine became much more prominent a bit later, but it was really, and was a great Bordeaux, particularly Chateau Aquim, the great dessert wine, and Chateau Margaux, Chateau Aubriant, Lafite Rothschild, you know, the great French Bordeaux were in the cellar. And they were the ones we found were 100 to 150 years old at the time we found them. So quite interesting.

Yule Georgieva: So, John, let's hear the story of Stalin's wine cellar. And I suppose, as you said, it was also Czar Nicholas II's wine cellar. So walk us through the story as far as you're willing to go, since we don't want to give away any spoilers. But let's hear some of the tale.

John Baker: OK, I'll tell you about how we became aware of the cellar because that's quite extraordinary in itself, it's almost like winning the lottery. But when we had the shop in Double Bay in Sydney and we were buying people's cellars, we, it was a sort of self-generating business in that the more we were doing that, the more we were drawing attention to what we were doing and therefore we end up with people who would come in to sell us their cellar. They had a cellar, or they had bottles, or they had various wines of some age or some notoriety that they'd want to sell, and often we'd buy them, sometimes we didn't, particularly if the condition wasn't quite right, we wouldn't be buying them. But then we had had a few characters of series to come in, and we always want to talk about old and rare wines, and one was a particular character called Harry Zuckorf. Harry was an Eastern European gentleman, shall we say. Harry was quite excitable. When Harry had something good, he used to get very excited and come in, his hands would be shaking, he'd say, John, John, I've got something fantastic, I've got something fantastic. I'd say, okay, Harry, what have you got? Half the time, I'd say, what do you have, impossible, I think he must be bored or something. But occasionally he did. And in the early part of the book, we talk about a great cellar that we bought in Beacon Hills, a suburb of Sydney, that had two full sets of Penfolds grain shavage, the great Australian wine. I think it had five cases of 1966 Lafitte Rothschild and various bottles of Chateau Akem. And we bought that and we had a wonderful tasting about customers and we sold the whole seller in a weekend. It was amazing. And this one time, I was sitting up in the office and the fax machine, this was 98, 99. So the fax machine started whirring and pages started coming off the fax machine. I thought, that's interesting. So I just picked up the front page and it had interested question mark. And I realized it was from Harry Zuckor, and it was 30 pages that was supposedly a wine cellar. And I looked at a few of the pages and I went, this doesn't really make sense to me, in that the names weren't the names of the great wines that we were most familiar with. So I got the 30 pages and looked at it. So that was the first column on the left was names going down the page. Second column were what I assume were dates, 1855, 1896, 1847, 1910, which almost threw me off because in those days, this is 1998, we would buy cellars and the wines would be 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, something like that. So to have dates that were 100 years old, older than that, and I think there were some bottles in there from the 1700s, almost threw me off. But I thought, when Harry underplays something, which he was, like you said, interested, it means Harry's really got something. So I thought, okay, and I knew this was a bit of a game with Harriet because she likes playing these sort of games. So, I let it go and I spoke with Kevin Hopka, who was my general manager at the time, who's a chap that actually went to Georgia with me. And Kevin, I said, Kevin, what do you make of this? And he had a good look at it, really couldn't work it out. And I thought, okay, I've got this theory that if something's really bothering you, but you know something's there and you're really bothering you, don't knock yourself out, just let it go. And when you're walking down the street or making a cup of tea or something, the penny will drop. And sure enough, one day I was in the shop after that very big weekend we had when we sold that whole cellar, and a chap came in and he said, do you have any of that Chateau de Chem, like he couldn't pronounce it properly. And I went, no, so I'm sorry, we sold it all on the way again, because back printages of Chateau Akem sell quite quickly. And I thought, hello. And I thought, now I looked on this, I looked at the seller list again. And on the list, Akem, quite simple. But I remember when I first looked at that wine I saw this Akem Akem and I thought Ikea, I don't want any Ikea wine sort of thing, so it threw me off. But when I realized it, then I thought this list is phonetic, it's not spelt. And I thought somewhere in the world where this was created, someone's been reading the labels of the great French wines and recording in whatever language it was where they were, and then at some stage it's been translated back to English, so you get this phonetic translations, hence Akeem was spelt I-K-E-M. Margo was spelled as correctly as M-A-R-G-A-U-X. So it was spelled M-A-R-G-O-T. Latour is correctly spelled as L-A-T-O-U-R. And on the list it was L-A-T-U-R. So once you know the code, it's quite easy, because you've got to crack the code. So I thought, I've got this. And I rang Kevin and said, Kevin, I've got the code, I know what this is. And he was coming in a bit later so he came in early and I told him and he looked at the list and he said, John, this is amazing. If what you're saying is correct, this is possibly the greatest unknown wine cellar in the world. I said, yeah, he got it. So that's how we worked out that this was possibly a list of wine of some note.

Yule Georgieva: What a fascinating beginning and congratulations. It's a very Dan Brown, Da Vinci code. It's funny that these things sort of happen in your brain and you sort of don't quite know how you work this out, but it just did.

John Baker: They just do. Yeah, and it makes so much sense after the fact, right? That it's there. It is. How do you find your way through it?

Yule Georgieva: So how did you get from cracking the code to getting to Georgia?

John Baker: Okay, well, we caught up with Harry Zarko, the chap, and I said to Harry, I said, Harry, the list is phonetic, isn't it? He said, yeah, you're right. And I thought he knew that all along, which he could have, of course, told me, but anyway. And we met a chap called Neville Rhodes, who was the connection. And he was involved in the gold mine in Georgia. And his colleagues in Georgia had bought, this was the time of the privatization of property in Georgia, because this was, I think, the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Georgia became a republic, I think, in 1992, 1993. We were there in 99. So it was very much post-Soviet era where there's, I don't think Georgia even had a constitution when the Russians walked out, they just walked out and left it. So cash and guns became very much the currency, which is what we had to deal with. And we were told that the Georgians wanted a million was US for this cellar and there's 40,000 bottles. But they really didn't know what was in the cellar or what it was because they really didn't know anything about wine, these particular Georges we're dealing with. So the only thing to do is someone had to go and look at it. And of course, someone obviously had to be there. And so I took Kevin with me, my general manager at Double Bay, because Kevin is a bit of a fox, especially dealing in old and rare wives. And I thought, well, if there's a fox there, Kevin, the fox will smell the fox straight away. So I thought, although I'm not bad off, Kevin's a master of this investigative stuff. And so I took Kevin and we arrived in Georgia and met the Georgians and spent three or four days, I think it was three, three and a half days underground, inspecting bottle by bottle basically, to see if they married up with what we were told. That's so fast. So you landed in Georgia, you're in this cellar. How did you figure out that it had belonged to Stalin and to Tsar Nicholas II? We were told that when we met Neville Rhodes, the chap in Australia who had the gold mining interest in Georgia, and his partner in Georgia, his name of course was George. I believe, I assume everyone in Georgia is called George. I'm sure it was Georgi, right? Yeah, anyway, George Amrabashvili or something, one of those Georgian names that I have trouble getting my tongue around. So Neville told us a story that George had told him that this was the cellar of the last Tsar of Russia and the story that came through was that when the Russian Revolution 1917 thereabouts Nicholas II was taken out etc. and Lenin took over, of course, and then Lenin died not long after Stalin took over. And then Stalin was, when the end of the Second World War, Stalin was very concerned that Hitler was going to overrun Russia, so he started moving artefacts out of St. Petersburg, and he divided the cellar into, we believe, three parts. One part went to the Missandra Winery in the Crimea, which is the Russian national winery, and he sent one part to Tbilisi in Georgia because Stalins are Georgian, born just outside Tbilisi. So he sent the great French wines to Tbilisi to never be found. And they weren't found until our fax machine word off at the double band, here was the list. It was extraordinary.

So all this is, I mean, this is all story. And I mean, I was incredibly skeptical about the whole thing. I thought this is so fanciful, it's almost impossible, but it just might not be impossible. And you know when this was our business buying and selling old and rare cellars, so this was Yeah, this is a got the Rembrandt in the junk shop sort of thing almost and So we have to go of course, so I had to go anyway.

Yule Georgieva: Let's talk about what you found in the cellar so in the book you talk about how most of the wines have no labels So how did you actually well first of all talk about that, just what you found in the cellar, but then also how did you go about verifying that these were potentially authentic wines?

John Baker: Yeah, what we always do when we bought cellars, and this is when we bought them in Australia as well, we'd always have a list, if someone wanted to sell us their cellar, they'd have to bring us a list of what they had, we'd negotiate on what they wanted, and if we agreed, we'd agree, and then we'd just work off the list. And there'd always be what we call unders and overs. There'd be one more bottle of something and one less bottle of something else. And yeah, you adjust it accordingly and the final price is slightly adjusted by unders and overs. So we had this list, the fact, and we worked off the facts list because that's what we had really. When we got there, we found the seller book that was translated. So we found the original seller book written in Georgian, which of course we couldn't read, but that was okay. We're offered the seller for a million dollars based on this list that was faxed to us, so we worked off that. So we were particularly interested in the Shatua Kem, the great dessert wine, and there was 217 bottles of Chateau Akem from the 1800s, early 1900s, which was extraordinary. In my retailer's head, I think, well, that's 8 1⁄2 cases. That's like extraordinary, of Akem over 100 years old. It's like mind-boggling. So we're particularly interested in those, and we're particularly interested in Lafitte, Rothschild, the great first growths. So we had a system where we had a potro who was one of the Georgians who spoke quite good English, very nice chap, very helpful, the only thing that disturbed me, he always had a gun in his pocket, which I found a bit unsettling. And when we'd go to lunch in a restaurant, the judges sit down and put their guns on the table like today someone might put a mobile phone on the table. And that's just the way it was. So I thought, okay. So Protro, there's a cellar master there, I think Uri was his name, and he explained to Protro how the cellar book worked and how you find the wines in relation to the cellar book. And Uri was great on concentration, so he was good for about 10 or 15 minutes. He disappeared. And between Pratro and Kevin, they worked out how to identify certain wines. So I had the facts list, and I'd say, all right, on shelf three, I've got Chateau Margaux. Can you find that?" They'd go to shelf, Patra would go to shelf three in the cellar book and find it and say, oh, it's Chateau Margaux, 1896. And I'd go, okay. I'd say, how many bottles do you have? And he says, seven. That's exactly what I've got on my list. I said, okay, could you pull the seven bottles out? And we put them on a table. And we had these, we took these very bright fluoros because we'd seen photographs of the cellar before we went and I realized it was quite dark and there were lights but they were just a glow and that was all. So I thought we needed some strong torches. And so we put the, in that case we put the seven bottles on the table, put the bright fluoros behind them and we, so we could take a photograph. And the idea of the fluoros is being a bright light behind it, you see the level, the fill level of each bottle and also often you can see the colour of the wine. So it's interesting to see the colour of those wines. And then the telltale, as you asked the question, yes, there was no labels, and cellulose was very wet, I mean dripping wet, which was bad for the labels, but it was good for the corks. The cork was important of course. So to identify them, when you're looking at wine of this age or even any old wine, you're looking, you want the package to look like what you'd expect for its age. One of the things we're always, we're very concerned about, and in particular buying any old wine, is how full is the fill level and if it's full like a new bottle then it's probably a forgery because with corbs no matter how well they're kept the level of the wine will gradually go down in time just by evaporation. So we were particularly looking for anything that looked like it had been topped up or filled or forged or anything like that and we didn't find any. I mean, as much as we were, yeah, Ken and I were really on the lookout for telltale signs that this was a, this was a fraud, this was, you know, wasn't, this wasn't genuine. We couldn't find a hint of it. So as ridiculous, as one would say ridiculous, as farfetched and as colourful as the story was, it was possibly true. And the more we looked at bottles, and the other way we'd identify bottles is if you scrape a bit of the capsule off, a lot of the bottles had chateau capsules so you'd look at the capsule and read it, but we weren't totally convinced by that. So if you scrape a bit of the capsule, you can shine a bright torch, you can read the cork and it'll have, you know, Akem 1896, Margot 1845 or whatever on the cork. And I think it's pretty hard to forge those. I mean, but anyway, we're we're pretty, after three days, we're pretty sure these wines are genuine. And the story at all fits like, I think the youngest wine was about 1920. Well, the Russian Revolution was 1917. I think they had a more or less a civil war for about four or five years. So the French would be shipping wine to the Russians as fast as they could because the French loved doing that. And I'm sure I guess about 1920, 1924, 25 something, possibly was when the Bolsheviks stopped that practice. So everything just fit it. It sort of added up. And we did taste, we got to taste a couple of wines and they were extraordinary. We're looking for a hole in the story, but we couldn't find one. Well, especially the tasting. I mean, you have a pretty seasoned palate for French wines, as you mentioned, right? And the old and rare types. So anyone were to put to the test,

Yule Georgieva: it would be you.

John Baker: Yeah, except that, you know, the first one we tasted was a wine we tasted was an 1899 Chateau Sudero, which is one of the great Southern houses just down from Chateau Aix-en-Provence, and that was 100 years old. And I mean, I had imported a lot of Sudero, a number of vintages, but I'd never tasted a Sudero of this age. But I knew the style of the Chateau, and therefore when I tasted this wine, it's totally different to Chateau Akem, for example. Sudaro is more elegant, a wine of much more finesse and charm sort of thing. Akem's just got a lot more character to it. Akem's just a wine of its own. So when we tasted 100 years old Sudaro, I thought, well, that's probably where I'd expect Sudaro to go in 100 years. And the wine was sublime, it was extraordinary. And so yeah, so and we tasted in 1870 Chateau Akem that was very, if I can say, Akemish. Although I've never tasted Akem nearly that old, but I've tasted, you know, 40, 50 year old Akems. And this certainly was on that progression. And those wines were in superb condition, which was amazing.

Yule Georgieva: Well, so when we were chatting before we got started here, you talked about how the labels, right, and how it might have been from the dampness, but you also have another theory. So why don't you share with everybody what that is?

John Baker: Yeah, it's something that just, again, this penny dropped. I don't know if you've read a book called The Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, fabulous book. And it's about after the Russian Revolution in the Metropole Hotel where Count Rostrov lived. I won't tell the whole story, it's a great book to read. And in that he ended up being a waiter in the hotel. And they were told to go to the cellar and clean all the labels off the bottles so that there's no brand names. This is very Bolshevik sort of thinking, there's no brand name. So, when you, I guess when you had a dinner at the Metropole and they served you and you ordered a bottle of red wine, you couldn't order a name, you just got a bottle of red wine to clean the skin, so it could have been Lafite or Lateur or who knows what. So, you just sit down with this bottle of red wine. And just recently, I was reading about they're making a movie of a gentleman in Moscow and Ewan McGregor's actually playing Count Rostov, it would be fantastic I think and the penny and I somehow I was reading something about it and the penny dropped I thought got it, so just going back a little bit I was at an interview event one time and a lady said to me you know in question time had I read A Gentleman in Moscow? And I said, I had actually, I said, a brilliant book. And she said, do you remember in that where, and she made the comment, where they had to go down to the cell and clean all the labels off? And I thought, I said, actually, I don't, but I do now. Thanks for inviting me. And I did, and I didn't think of anything more of it. And then for some reason, when I was reading about the making of the movie, I reflected on her asking that question. it on for asking a question and possibly I wonder in the Czar's cellar, Nicholas II's cellar, if the Bolsheviks went there and cleaned all the labels off the bottles as well, because in the cellar in Georgia, the great French wines had no labels. They had Chateau Capsules and Chateau Corps, but no labels. So I was wondering if the Bolsheviks went into Nicholas II cellar and cleaned all the labels off there as well. I mean it's possible, who knows.

Yule Georgieva: Well as you said, the wine that you tasted was Ikemi, I think that action would be very Bolsheviki. So I'd ask you, because to me this is quite a story that's close to my, not my heart, but close to my sensibility and sense because I studied Soviet history and I'm quite passionate about it. And I have to ask you, what was it like when you were down in this cellar holding bottles that possibly the last Tsar of Russia and Joseph Stalin himself held in their hands? Right? Because those are such formidable figures in history. What was that like?

John Baker: Yeah, you hit it now around the head of probably what became most significant to me. When we're there, as I said, we're underground for three or four days just going bottle by bottle checking, you know, Coz d'Estinel and Chateau Latour and Chateau Cam and all these other ones. And after a while I started to realize, and depends on your view of wine, to me what wine is living, living, breathing, not breathing, living, organic product that ages in a certain way. And then of course, when you pull the cork out, you change its life. But these bottles to me, really represented the history of the 20th century, because they'd been lying in the Winter Palace cellar in St. Petersburg and then in Tbilisi in Georgia, lying there watching what's going on above, which was the Russian Revolution, the First World War, the Second World War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc. And all this was going on above them, and they were sort of lying there somewhat in witness to them. And I must say that after a while that really became quite overwhelming, really. And also the thought that, did Stalin handle this bottle? Did Nicholas, the second hand list bottle did, you know, if you really want to stretch your imagination, did Rasputin, select wine from the cellar and who knows, but it's all possible. And with a bit of imagination, it's actually fascinating. So yeah, that's cultural significance really became quite prominent.

Yule Georgieva: I suspect also just being in Georgia and sort of experiencing that post-Soviet evolution of the country. I mean, what was that like? You mentioned guns on tables.

John Baker: It's a good summary, but what else was, what else? No, that was, that was, well, I keep getting asked when I'm doing dinners and lunches, yeah, wasn't I fearful for my life? In hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have been. But I was 20 years younger, and this was our business, and this was probably the greatest, well, I think a number of people now use that phrase, it's the greatest unknown wine cellar in the world, and it probably was. So this is the pinnacle of our business. I get fairly single-minded when I'm doing this sort of thing. People sort of say, oh, what about the architecture? I don't care about the architecture. I never spent a billion dollars on a wine cellar in my life, and this is pretty serious. But yeah, and I said it was cash and guns ruled, you get in the car and they put their gun on the console in the middle and scream off at some sort of ridiculous speed. And I think Georgia is quite a cultured country, and I think in history it has been, but to see a lot of the old buildings a bit in fairly poor condition from the Soviet era is a bit disappointing. But then also Georgia is known as the cradle of wine. I think they date wine back 8,000 years in Georgia. I think it's generally in the industry, it's considered to be where the wine, as we know, started. So there's a quite an interesting cultural connection there. It was interesting. I like those Eastern European countries. They're different. They're very colorful. They've got great traditions. One night, we'd been at dinner and George said, oh my friends, we must go to the sulphur baths. And I thought, oh, let's go to the sulphur baths. And these sulphur baths of course are baths and steam rooms going back hundreds of years, and you get scrubbed with these material that's almost like sandpaper, it's not quite but it feels It feels like it. And so, you know, midnight, you go off for a sulfur bath. We don't have that many countries where you do that. It's just what they do. So I find all that quite interesting and quite sort of fun.

Yule Georgieva: John, I'm sensing you're a man who enjoys adventure.

John Baker: Yeah, I'm crying.

Yule Georgieva: So can you tell us anything about Georgian wine? I think not a lot of people know about Georgian wine, either then or now, because maybe it's evolved over the last 30 years, but tell us about Georgian wine.

John Baker: Yeah, Georgian, I actually personally don't know a lot about Georgian wine. When I was in retailing, we really didn't see any. It's become prominent again now, and they've got a few techniques where they bury, they put, I think this was before even wooden barrels existed, they used clay pots called karebi, karebi I think it's called, and they would fill a clay pot with wine and then they'd bury it in particular scenarios. I'm not exactly sure how they do it. And that's how they matured their wine in various ways. And a lot of winemakers now, and certainly in Australia, I'm sure where you are, would be trying these techniques because they're old traditional ways of doing things and they're interesting and different. So yeah, Georgia has many indigenous varieties of grape primes that I can't remember what they're called now. But yeah, so they've got a lot of wines, their own varieties that no other country have, as a number of countries in Europe have, because a lot of countries in Europe have a history of wine that's particular to their own environment. And some of them now, of course, are introducing French varieties of Cabernet, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, et cetera. But up until recently, they didn't have any of those varieties that we know that are seen. So yeah, so I think Georgian wine is interesting. They do a lot of what we're calling this natural wine, minimal interventional wine, orange wine where they leave, particularly the whites, they'll leave the skin contact for hours or days or maybe even longer to give the wine a bit more color and character and whether you like that sort of wine or not is, that's a personal choice. But they're interesting. Yeah.

Yule Georgieva: And did you have some interesting bottles when you were there or since?

John Baker: Well, actually one thing, we did a tasting because in the cellar there was a lot of old Georgian wine that we're interested in, but we're particularly there for the old French wine. And we had a tasting of these old Georgian wines, 30, 40, 50, 60 years old. And I've still got my notes on that actually. And my notes consistently say, I can't detect grape, but the wine's not dead. The wine still had a bit of acid, they had a tea colour, maybe some had a bit of a golden sort of colour, but the wine's not dead. And I thought, but they've got this slightly candy character, just around a slightly candy, even though these are dry whites and dry reds. I wasn't really understanding it. And we're at lunch one time at a restaurant and other Georgians ordered what's considered the best red wine in Georgia. And we had this wine and it was a bit, it was a red wine but it was a bit sweet and the penny dropped. They sugar their wines. They obviously add a bit of sugar to the winemaking process to give them a bit of sweetness because like Russia and Georgia, I think I've been in Czechoslovakia, a lot of these companies they love sweet things, desserts and sweet drinks. And that's of course why they love Chateau de Chem, because it's the ultimate of sweetness in wine. But they sugar their wines. So these old wines, although they weren't really grape, I couldn't connect grape to them, they still had a bit of acid. And the sugar of course is a preservative. So it would maintain the wine as well. So yeah, so that was interesting.

Yule Georgieva: That is interesting. So you think it was actually added sugar. It wasn't just residual sugar from stopping.

John Baker: Oh, no, they have to be adding sugar, I'm sure. But not that I particularly care for that, but that's okay. That's just the way it is. That's what I thought.

Yule Georgieva: That's something different.

John Baker: Yeah. Well, yeah, that's anyways.

Yule Georgieva: So you were in front of so many great wines. From your perspective, what is it that makes a wine great?

John Baker: Oh, wow. That's a long story, that one. What does it make it great? Well, the great wines of the world are not really about smell and taste. Like if you read Robert Parker's notes or any of these great critics or Jancis Robinson, they carry on a Bowery character. But the great wines of the world are much more about texture, mouthfeel, length, and a great wine is quite evocative. It arouses senses, even almost sensual sort of thing. So when you have a great wine, of course, hopefully you know the story of the wine, and someone will tell you the story of the wine, so you've been introduced the right way. But they rarely disappoint, sometimes they do. But the great wines are about, they've got a presence to them. And of course, with the great French wines, of course, you're delving into the French culture because I think wine might be one of the great products of France and might represent the French culture as much as any other product does. So when you're drinking one of the great French wines, you know, it is a bit of a delve into France and the history and the culture. So a lot of these wines have what we call, they have a pedigree, meaning, you know, you can taste one, it's 10 years old, 20 years old, 50 years old, and it'll be of the style of the house, of the chateau, and if it's well kept, it'll still be alive and looking interesting.

Yule Georgieva: That's a great way to think about greatness. I mean, that it's an indulgence in the culture, and it's a way to sort of connect to the place that it's from. So you can hear it.

John Baker: One of the views I've certainly got about wine is that if you know enough about wine or someone at the table knows enough about wine, you can travel the world without leaving your dinner table. Start with the German Riesling and then you can go to maybe an Italian Chianti and then you go to France, you go to America, wherever you like, buy different bottles on the table. If you have a reasonably good example, they will talk of where they're from, and that which I find quite interesting, quite fascinating. And it takes you on a mental journey, which is just quite enticing. 

Yule Georgieva: Well, so on that note, what would you say is the greatest bottle of wine or the greatest wine experience you've ever had?

John Baker: I can't remember the reason. I said a few, it's a bit hard to narrow. I suppose the 1899 Chateau Sudaro in the cellar in Tbilisi in Georgia, 100 year old Sudaro, because that was the first wine we tasted from the cellar. So until then we hadn't tasted anything. So if that wine was not good, we were out of Tbilisi, we were leaving because this wasn't real. But it was so good that, you know, I think in the book I sort of say, the sudurro was fantastic but the orchestra was deafening. This was the real thing. So that was a great wine, but I don't really compare great wines, I mean, I don't know. And it also depends the company you're in, the mood, time of day, temperature, foods you're eating. You know, if the setting is great, the wine's superb. If the setting's dull and not very good, a great wine could be a bit average.

Yule Georgieva: That is true. It's enjoying a wine is in a way a conversation between you and the wine. It's a nice way to think about it.

John Baker: Right.

Yule Georgieva: Yeah. Well, I don't want to give away any more of the book, John, so I think we should maybe wrap up. But is there anything else about this wine cellar, about this experience that you'd like to share that I haven't asked you about?

John Baker: Not really. I think it's all in the book is doing well because I've never been involved in a book before, so I had no idea what to expect. But it's a bestseller and I think it's been translated into five countries so far and a few more in conversation. So, yeah, it's great, it's been wonderful.

Yule Georgieva: And we will absolutely send out the, put the link in the bottom so that people can find it. I know over here in Canada, I don't think it has yet landed, but I do believe that the Australian retailer is able to ship to Canada and to the US, so we're able to get it to all of our listeners everywhere, right?

John Baker: Yeah, I think it's available somewhere around. People around the world seem to be getting it.

Yule Georgieva: Well, do you have any other plans to write another book, now that you're in the wine writing?

John Baker: I don't have another story.

Yule Georgieva: Well, you just have to keep going on more adventures, I suppose.

John Baker: Well, we'll see. Thank you very much, Yule.

Yule Georgieva: All right, wonderful. Well, thank you, John, so much for joining me. This has been a great conversation. And I'm excited to share this with our listeners.

John Baker: Thank you, Yule. Thanks for your interest. I'm blessed to be on this show. I'm blessed to be on this show.

John Baker: Thank you.