Wines linked to Putin and Patriarch Kirill enter U.S. tasting contest in San Francisco, brought in personal luggage by Kovalchuk aide

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How the wine was brought in despite sanctions

On Dec. 12, the daily newspaper Kommersant reported that Russian wineries had sent samples to the San Francisco International Wine Competition, with winners to be announced Dec. 16. Listed among the participants were the two wineries associated with Putin’s palace (Usadba Divnomorskoye and Krinitsa), but Putin is not the only high-level Russian figure competing. Other entries hail from wineries connected to Patriarch Kirill (Usadba Mezyb), Sberbank CEO German Gref (Winepark), former Russian Railways vice president Salman Babayev (Derbent Vino), Krasnodar regional lawmaker Alexei Sidyukov (Myshako).

What stood out in the report was a detailed account of how a Russian official sought ways to circumvent sanctions banning the import of Russian alcohol into the United States.

The wines were delivered by Pavel Mayorov, the deputy executive director of the Association of Russian Winegrowers and Winemakers and a former exchange student at Eastlake High School in San Diego. Initially, Mayorov considered bringing the wine across the U.S.-Mexico border with the help of a “coyote” — a person who illegally smuggles people or goods into the United States. Another option he explored was transporting the wine across the Canadian border with the help of a Canadian family traveling in a motorhome.

Ultimately, however, the wine was brought in by concealing its Russian origin. Mayorov used a passport from another country and carried the wine in his personal luggage. In the first shipment, three suitcases containing 18 bottles each were delivered to San Francisco via Tbilisi and Doha. A second shipment of eight suitcases weighing a total of 254 kilograms (560 pounds) was brought in via Dubai.

To disguise the origin, the Russian excise stamps on the bottles were covered with Hebrew-language stickers reading “Not for sale,” and bottles of Georgian and Israeli wine were added to the “collection assembled at the request of California winemakers.”

Sanctions risks

Although the wineries near Putin’s palace in Gelendzhik are not themselves on sanctions lists, numerous investigations have documented their personal links to Putin. Outlets including the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Meduza, and Important Stories have shown that employees of more than 80 companies linked to Putin use email addresses on the LLCInvest.ru domain. These include managers of Lazurnaya Yagoda LLC (which owns Krinitsa’s vineyards), managers of the winery’s nominal owner (the nonprofit Development of Agrarian Initiatives), as well as employees of the Igora ski resort and of Putin’s residence in Russia’s Novgorod Region.

As Proekt previously reported, since 2020 Ekaterina Golovacheva — a cousin of former Olympic gymnast and lawmaker Alina Kabaeva, who reportedly bore Putin two sons — has worked at Divnomorye JSC and Axis Investments JSC, companies tied to Usadba Divnomorskoye. Until 2018, Golovacheva sat on the board of Kabaeva’s charitable foundation and worked as her aide when Kabaeva was a State Duma deputy.

Mayorov’s own statements indicate that Tasting Alliance, the U.S.-based organizer of the competition, was aware of the legal risks but provided correspondence intended to facilitate the import of the wines into the United States. Both Mayorov and Tasting Alliance may have violated multiple sanctions:

• Executive Order 14068, issued March 11, 2022, bans the import of Russian alcoholic beverages into the United States.
  
  
• Executive Order 13685, issued Dec. 19, 2014, prohibits the import into the United States of any goods from Crimea.
  
  
• Mriya Resort & SPA, the legal entity linked to the Winepark winery, was added to the U.S. sanctions list on Nov. 8, 2018, under Executive Order 13685.
  
  

At the time of publication, the competition organizers had not responded to inquiries from The Insider.

Mayorov, Kovalchuk, and the winemakers’ association

Pavel Andreyevich Mayorov was born in 1984 in Krasnodar. He later studied in the United States as an exchange student. In 2006, he graduated from the law faculty of Kuban State Agrarian University, worked as a senior lawyer at a law firm and later as managing partner of his own consulting group. In 2018 he became head of a regional development institute, the Krasnodar Region Development Corporation.

Media reports suggest personal connections may have helped his rise. Registered at the same address as Mayorov — on Rozhdestvenskaya Embankment in Krasnodar — was Alexander Mishustin, who from 2012 to 2016 served as deputy head of the administration of the Moldovskoye rural district in Sochi. Mishustin is also listed on Mayorov’s auto insurance policy.

According to media reports, in 2020 Mayorov created what he called the National Agency for the Marketing of Russian Wine, according to media reports. However, no legal entity under that name exists. The trademark “NAM of Russian Wine” is owned by Vinologiya LLC (ООО «Винология»), whose sole beneficiary is Mayorov. Vinologiya’s director, Vitaly Ganeev, is listed as a founder of three pro-government youth organizations in Krasnodar: Region 93, the Russian Youth Union, and the Kuban Youth Union.

The agency is patronized by Mikhail Kovalchuk, the brother of financier Yuri Kovalchuk, often referred to as “Putin’s personal banker.” The Kurchatov Institute National Research Center, which Mikhail Kovalchuk heads, is listed as a founder of the agency on its website.

Winemaking has become a shared interest of the Kovalchuk brothers. The Kurchatov Institute has taken control of Magarach, Crimea’s largest grape nursery, with about 1,000 hectares (2,470 acres) of vineyards. Entities linked to Yuri Kovalchuk’s Rossiya Bank have acquired wineries including Massandra, Novy Svet, Inkerman, the Bakhchisaray wine and brandy plant, the Zavetnoye agricultural firm, and Burlyuk, consolidating more than one-third of all vineyards in Crimea under a single group.

In September 2025, they were joined by the Crimean winery previously owned by Ukrainian businessman Vadym Yermolayev, which has 687 hectares (1,697 acres) of vineyards and produces Old Crimea (“Stary Krym”) brandy and Villa Krim wine.

In February 2025, Mayorov changed jobs while maintaining ties to the Kovalchuks. He now heads the Export Development Center of the Association of Russian Winegrowers and Winemakers, overseeing Russian participation in international exhibitions and competitions. He also oversees the association’s working group on wine trade, ethno-gastronomic tourism, and wine promotion, where he regularly mentions initiatives and directives from Mikhail Kovalchuk.

In addition to Mayorov, the board of the ostensibly independent winemakers’ association includes several Kovalchuk-linked figures, among them Dmitry Kiselyov, the head of Rossiya Segodnya; Valery Zakharyin, the nominal owner of Inkerman; and former Massandra director Alexei Pugachev.

How did Elon Musk end up on screen at a forum in Krasnodar?

Bringing Putin-linked wines to a U.S. competition was an audacious move, but not the first publicity stunt performed by Pavel Mayorov.

In October 2019, Mayorov organized an online appearance by Elon Musk at a business forum in Russia’s Krasnodar Region. At the time, Mayorov was working for the state-run Krasnodar Region Development Corporation. To attract the attention of the American billionaire, he rented a billboard near SpaceX’s offices and placed a banner reading “Kak tebe takoe, Elon Musk?” (Russian for, “How do you like that, Elon Musk?”). After a tweet tagging Musk attracted the billionaire’s attention, he responded in machine-translated Russian.

Ultimately, on the evening of Oct. 18, 2019, Musk appeared by video link before about 5,000 forum attendees, though his representatives barred an official livestream of the appearance. The organizers did not offer Musk a speaking fee.

The Insider has reported extensively on the Russian elite’s interest in wine, including a profile and a video report about the aforementioned Krinitsa, located just down the road from Putin’s Black Sea palace, and a brief guide to the Italian vineyards owned by members of Putin’s inner circle.

Other reporting has detailed the Kremlin’s procurement of hundreds of bottles of high-end European wines despite EU sanctions — and the curious coincidence of ex-president Dmitry Medvedev’s scandalous social media publications following deliveries from his Italian winery Fattoria della Aiola.