Pop quiz for wine historians!

Anyone know what is depicted in this photo?

No cheating by looking at my FB page!

Too small, Peter! Make it larger, so the ‘bifocal set’ can participate!

Well damn! It’s so friggin’ small, could be an ant mutiny or the terra cotta warriors, I can’t tell.

I made it larger, but my “original” is a copy of a copied photo from several decades ago.

“Clos” Ste.Hune?

It’s not a clear picture, of course, but from what I can see, it looks like a church of Italian architecture, and there looks to be a truck over on the upper left, the design of which place it in the 1940s-50s. We know it’s a wine related photo, and so if it is an Italian church during that time period, the only people doing wine in that volume would have been in Chianti, and it’s quite likely that most of that business would have been done in dem-johns and fiaschi, and because of the way they’re stacked–very un-barrel like–that jives.

Here’s a pick of Chianti getting shipped in a time before:

So that’s my guess, glass bottles stacked outside a Chianti winery in the postwar years.

Did they use reefers to ship wine back then?

You’d have to smoke some reefer to want to stack wine bottles the way they are in Chaad’s photo.

The picture was taken in 1941 by the Soviets while evacuating the Massandra cellars near Yalta. That’s over 1 million bottles of Tsarist wine and Crimean wine being moved to three, secret locations before the arrival of the Nazis.

I guess you’ve never been to Pisa.

VERY interesting story, indeed. Thanks for posting! I remember about 10 years ago–maybe it was '99/'00–buying some '40s vintage Massandra, a sweet wine, with some wacky back-story about it being stored in a cave in the republic of Georgia or something. I might have notes on it somewhere, but I remember it was ridiculously cheap, in crazy shaped bottles, and impressed me as pruny. It was fairly early in my wine savvy days, so I didn’t really appreciate what I was tasting, but I do remember it.