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Alkhas Argun
CEO, Aquafon-GSM; President, Association of Winemakers and Viticulturists of Abkhazia
Alkhas Argun runs Abkhazia's largest telecom company and, at the same estate where his great-grandfather made wine, ages Pinot Noir in Italian tanks. When his government shut down a UN grape-preservation project on espionage grounds, he went on international radio to call it disgusting. The risk was real. He took it anyway.
Transformation Arc
The moment that defines Alkhas Argun is not the gold medal, or the telecom fortune, or the ancestral vineyard. It is September 2022 — when Abkhazia’s Foreign Ministry expelled a French-born UN scientist studying indigenous grapes, and Argun went on international radio to say what no one else would: this is a witch hunt, and it is killing Abkhazia’s heritage.
It's just disgusting — I can't call it anything else!
The Insider Who Chose Conviction #
Most people who run a country’s largest telecommunications company do not also build wineries in the village where their great-grandfather made wine a hundred years ago. Alkhas Argun does. As General Director of Aquafon-GSM — Abkhazia’s dominant mobile operator — he oversees the infrastructure that keeps a quarter-million people connected across a territory that most of the world refuses to recognize. In his other life, he ages Pinot Noir in Italian tanks in a courtyard in Kulanyrkhva, where Khadzhguat Argun once produced twenty tons of wine per year before war erased that too.
The combination is unusual. The significance is not the résumé — it is what it reveals about Argun’s relationship to the place he lives in. He is not a tourist building a vanity winery. He is an insider with resources, institutions, and something to lose, choosing to invest in the things his territory is most at risk of forgetting.
A Century Interrupted #
Argun became CEO of Aquafon-GSM in 2003, seven years after the Georgian-Abkhaz war had reduced Abkhazia’s vineyards from 1,500 hectares to roughly one hundred. The industry that had once defined the territory — Lykhny, Apsny, Psou, brands known throughout the Soviet Union — had been destroyed in forty-one months of conflict. The post-war reconstruction focused on what was commercially fastest: bulk production, imported concentrates, semi-sweet wines for the Russian market. Volume over authenticity.
The reconnection to winemaking came through family history. The estate in Kulanyrkhva had been his great-grandfather’s. Khadzhguat Argun had produced twenty tons per year there in the 1910s and 1920s. That tradition was not preserved; it was recovered from memory. When Argun founded Argun Iashta in 2014 at the same ancestral estate, he was not scaling an existing skill — he was rebuilding a practice that had been interrupted for nearly a century.
“Our estate ‘Argun Iashta’ is located in the ancestral home in the village of Kulanyrkhva,” he told Sputnik Abkhazia in 2019, “where in the 1910s–1920s my great-grandfather Khadzhguat Argun produced about 20 tons of wine per year.”
The name means “House of Argun” in Abkhazian. It is not a brand name selected for market positioning. It is a statement about who owns the land and why that matters.
What Heritage Costs #
Building a successful winery in an unrecognized territory with no international banking is a structural challenge. Going on Radio Free Europe to denounce your own government’s foreign policy while running a company licensed by that government is a different kind of risk entirely.
Argun took that second step in September 2022. The immediate context was arcane to anyone outside Abkhazia: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had terminated a UN Food and Agriculture Organization project to preserve and DNA-catalog fifty-three indigenous Abkhazian grape varieties. The project head, Tiphaine Lucas — a Burgundy-born viticulturist — was declared persona non grata on suspicion of espionage. The official reasoning was never made public. The consequence was real: the only institutional pathway to restoring Abkhazia’s unique grape heritage — through partnerships with the Bordeaux Wine Institute, Montpellier laboratory, and Swiss Wine Institute — was severed.
Argun went on Echo Kavkaza, the RFE/RL Caucasus service, and said what he evidently believed needed saying. “It’s just disgusting — I can’t call it anything else!” The words were not diplomatic. They were not calculated for political safety. He described the project’s scientific value, accused foreign-policy paranoia of infecting Abkhazian decision-making, and called the decision a witch hunt.
The government whose telecom license Aquafon-GSM operates under had just been publicly criticized by one of the country’s most prominent business figures, on an international platform, over a French scientist studying grape genetics.
The project was not reinstated. Argun continued. In September 2024, he gave a Sputnik Abkhazia interview on the ongoing efforts to restore indigenous varieties. He continues to serve as president of the Association of Winemakers and Viticulturists of Abkhazia — simultaneously the industry’s most prominent advocate and one of its most exposed critics of government policy. The two roles are not contradictory. They reflect the same conviction: that Abkhazian wine heritage is worth defending at some personal cost.
Many Roles, One Territory #
The winery is not Argun’s only institutional commitment to Abkhazia. He directs the Novy Afon Anakopia Reserve — a medieval fortress complex near the coastal town of Novy Afon — placing him at the management of the territory’s most significant historical site alongside its most recognized modern winery.
In 2020, when COVID-19 reached Abkhazia, Argun co-founded the “We Are Together” humanitarian movement with Nika Achba, CEO of Wines and Waters of Abkhazia. The initiative organized delivery of medical supplies during border restrictions. That cooperation — between the man who runs the largest mass-market producer and the founder of the most prominent craft winery — suggests an industry solidarity that transcends commercial competition.
The Association of Winemakers and Viticulturists, which Argun leads, has become the primary vehicle for his heritage advocacy since the FAO project collapsed. The urgency is real: of the 53 varieties identified in the FAO survey, only 13 root plants of the rarest — Azhapsh — are known to survive.
The Argument Worth Making #
Alkhas Argun built Argun Iashta as a side project. The winery produces a few thousand bottles per year against a national output of tens of millions. The revenues are immaterial to a telecom CEO. None of that is the point.
The point is what it means to use institutional power and personal resources for a heritage mission when the alternative — silence, safety, political accommodation — was readily available. Most people in Argun’s position choose the alternative. He chose the winery, the radio interview, the Association presidency, the continued advocacy. The winery is the proof of concept; the advocacy is the argument.
“I want to make my small contribution and break the stereotype that there is no real wine in Abkhazia,” he said in 2018. Eight years later, Argun Iashta holds five international medals, and the stereotype is less settled than it was.