At a benefit concert for Ukrainian children, at Carnegie Hall, Nathalie Lysenko and Gayle Corrigan walked up to the bar and paid forty-six dollars for two glasses of a Ukrainian sparkling wine that Lysenko had helped smuggle out of Bakhmut under Russian bombardment.

“I didn’t realize they were charging for it,” Corrigan said.

“It’s a good cause,” Lysenko said.

Lysenko, who is tall and has large, round eyes, is the export manager for Artwinery, which until recently was one of the largest wineries in the former Soviet Union. Corrigan, who wore a black cocktail dress, is her American importer. Before the Russians occupied Bakhmut, the city was a major center of sparkling-wine production. During the Cold War, Stalin, facing a champagne ban, ordered the establishment of a high-end facility there, in a former gypsum mine more than two hundred feet underground. Classical music, which was thought to be calming for the wines and the workers, played twenty-four hours a day. In May, 2023, the music stopped.

“When the Russians get close, everyone at Artwinery argue what to do,” Lysenko, who lives in Kyiv, said, in her accented but capable English. (She studied it as a girl in Ukraine to defy her father, a domineering engineer: “It was the one subject he didn’t know.”) “We thought, We have to blow it up,” Lysenko went on. “But we couldn’t do it.”

Working in the mine three shifts a day, the company’s employees managed to ready some three hundred thousand bottles for rescue. “When the first bottles go above, the Russians are shelling,” Lysenko said. Some got to a railway point; the tracks were shelled. Surviving bottles were taken to a warehouse; that, too, was shelled, destroying the last Ukrainian bottles of Soloking, Artwinery’s most prized cuvée, made partly from the last grapes harvested in independent Crimea, and aged for seventy-two months. But eighteen months after Corrigan placed an order for them, thirty thousand bottles from Artwinery made it to her warehouse, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

“When Gayle tell me she receive the shipment, it was happiest day of my life,” Lysenko said. Corrigan still had a bit of Soloking from an earlier order, which she donated to the Carnegie Hall gala. What few magnums remain are available only through charity auction, and fetch as much as thirty-five hundred dollars each.

The Soloking was a brilliant gold color and smelled like toast and almonds, with hints of green apple and stewed peach. Corrigan held up her glass. “It’s the Ukrainian Dom Pérignon,” she said.

Six million Artwinery bottles remain under Russian control; Lysenko has heard that the caverns were turned into a field hospital for Russian soldiers, and that the winemaking equipment was being carted away, to Moscow. “When the Russians take over, there is no water running, so they used the wine to flush their toilets,” Lysenko said. “We should have blown it up.”

It was time for the show. Liev Schreiber, the m.c., spoke with urgency about waning interest in Ukraine around the world. The Orchestra for Ukraine and a chorus performed Beethoven’s Ninth and, for some reason, a part of the “Star Wars” score.

At the after-party, Lysenko and Corrigan waited to take photos with Schreiber. They had spent the week on what Corrigan called a “ ‘Thelma and Louise’ tour” of the Eastern Seaboard. They feasted on varenyky and eggs at Veselka, in the East Village. “It was very good,” Lysenko said. “But in Ukraine no one give you varenyky and eggs from one bowl.” They drove to Washington and cried at the Holodomor memorial to the Ukrainian famine orchestrated by Stalin. They wrecked Corrigan’s dad’s Honda Ridgeline in a parking garage. They saw many Halloween decorations. “This is something very strange for me, because everyone is trying very hard to get scared, and putting fake blood on the car, and things like that,” Lysenko said. “But this is reality of life in my country.” At a friend’s house in Pennsylvania, as they ate s’mores around a campfire, Lysenko’s phone went off, alerting her to air-raid sirens in Kyiv. “It was like the five stages of grief,” Corrigan said. “We buried Bakhmut on that trip.”

Lysenko corrected her: “We’re still fighting for it.”

When they reached Schreiber, Lysenko thrust a black box at him. It was inscribed, “Hello, Mr. Schreiber. We had to smuggle this sparkling wine out of Ukraine.”

“Do you like sparkling wine?” Lysenko asked.

“I’m an Irish-whiskey drinker,” Schreiber, who wore a gray suit and glasses with clear frames, said. Inside the box was a bottle of Artwinery’s Brut Nature Grand Reserve, aged sixty months.

“It’s the only bottle Nathalie brought,” Corrigan said. The bottle had been dressed in felt of blue and gold, the Ukrainian colors.

“We will give a bottle like this, but big, a six-litre methuselah, to President Zelensky,” Lysenko said. “So he opens on Victory Day.”

“I thought Zelensky doesn’t drink,” Schreiber said.

“On Victory Day, he might drink,” Corrigan said. ♦