This Northern Virginia veteran and his partners are delivering Ukrainian 'wine diplomacy'
By Sébastien Kraft | Published April 7, 2025
A remote Ukrainian safehouse is not the typical destination where one might expect to experience an intoxicating, entrepreneurial epiphany.
But enter 2022, at the onset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when such was the case for veteran Sam Lerman, founder of Spyrt Worldwide – a U.S. importer of Ukrainian wine and spirits named after the eastern European nation’s term for alcohol.
Lerman first discovered Ukraine’s aptitude for winemaking during his stay in a safehouse, prompting him to develop an insatiable appetite for the country’s beverage industry.
The ensuing partnerships Lerman forged culminated in a stateside launch of Ukrainian wine – from none other than Prince William County.
In recent months, Spyrt Worldwide has broadened its reach in Northern Virginia thanks to its burgeoning partnership with Ukraine’s SHABO winery.
Spyrt’s efforts kicked off with a holiday launch event in Washington, D.C., with members of Congress such as local U.S. Rep. Eugene Vindman – a Ukrainian immigrant himself – defense industry executives and others.
The company then held its first public wine tasting Feb. 27 at WineStyles, a retail shop in Montclair. Lerman, who lives in the Dale City area, had been a longtime member of the shop’s wine club, whereupon he met owner Arthur Lampros.
Getting it to the states
Spyrt Worldwide’s local launch has the company on the upswing, propelled by a newfound American appetite for the previously unfamiliar Ukrainian palate.
“We have distribution in D.C., Maryland and Virginia,” Lerman told InsideNoVa during a March visit to WineStyles. “World-class sommeliers are doing these tastings and are completely bewildered.”
SHABO perseveres
Located off the Black Sea coast near Odesa in southern Ukraine, SHABO denotes both a village and the major winery, founded in 1822 via “as far as we know, the only, fully autonomous Swiss winemaking colony in the world,” according to SHABO owner and CEO Giorgi Iukuridze.
Despite its longstanding roots, SHABO underwent a rocky transition in light of Soviet-era cost-cutting policies before Iukuridze’s family took ownership in 2003.
“It was all about quantity, and less so about quality – then in the 90s, the company was in complete ruins,” Iukuridze said. “It was not producing any wine under their own label. They were only selling wine in bulk to other wine producers.”
Lerman grew up in the Washington area. Having experienced 9/11 while in high school, he at 17 joined the Air Force Security Forces, the branch’s law enforcement, ground combat and airfield defense division. Lerman later earned his bachelor’s degree between Hurricane Katrina relief efforts in 2005 and deployments to Afghanistan in 2011 and 2012.
While rising through the ranks at Quantico Tactical, a defense manufacturer, Lerman in 2021 left his post to assist with Afghan evacuation efforts, helping to bring a close Afghan compatriot stateside and offering the evacuee a five-month stay at the Lerman family residence in Woodbridge.
What ensued in 2022, only a few weeks into the Russian invasion into Ukraine, was a call from a friend in the special operations community detailing an impending volunteer advisory mission to Ukraine.
“They [were] really asking for somebody who knows the U.S. gear, weapons, armor and procurement strategy,” Lerman said.
Shortly thereafter, Lerman found himself stationed in a Ukrainian safehouse amid a group of American veterans, aiding the war effort in tandem with fellow Ukrainian military personnel.
“I couldn’t believe the resilience, commitment and friendship of every Ukrainian I worked with,” Lerman said. “I was just floored.”
On the first night in the safehouse, a Ukrainian counterpart introduced Lerman to horilka, the Ukrainian vodka equivalent – or, at least, its distant cousin, as locals would have it.
“He’s like, ‘Vodka is Russian, and it can only make you angry,’” Lerman said. “Horilka is Ukrainian, and it opens your mind.”
Upon first tasting, the impact was immediate. Lerman was hooked. “I could not believe how good everything was,” he said.
‘Not a pity party for Ukraine’
For Lerman, a trip that was supposed to last just a few days morphed into several weeks living among the Ukrainian cohort at the safehouse.
“I was in love with everything about it, including what I was working on,” Lerman said. “It was the purest form of that I’d ever gotten to do – no bottom line, no money to worry about, just try to get the right things to the right people.”
Upon eventually returning home – at his wife’s urging – Lerman secured a new role in the defense industry that allowed him to contribute to the war effort firsthand.
The position entailed various roundtrips to Ukraine, excursions that left him anything but empty-handed.
“I started coming home on trips with suitcases full of vodka and wine – I would declare them to customs at Dulles, but you’re not allowed to bring more than one liter of alcohol into the [European Union] for any reason,” Lerman said. “I would occasionally get caught and yelled at in Polish … and have to talk my way out of trouble.”
Noticing a dearth of Ukrainian wine and spirits in American stores, Lerman reflected, blueprints for Spyrt Worldwide began to materialize. In January 2023, he arranged a meeting between two military contacts – a U.S. Marine and former workplace superior “with a huge amount of logistics and operations experience” and a Ukrainian veteran from the 2022 stay.
Research and brainstorming led Lerman and his contacts to Father’s Wine, a small family winery in western Ukraine, whose owner, Oksana Buyachok, was receptive to Lerman’s importing vision. But through initial conversations, it became clear the rather limited and localized commercial scope of Father’s Wine would not be able to sustain the overseas imports to the U.S. Lerman was envisioning.
However, Buyachok’s family told Lerman it saw the simmering potential for an imminent, larger-scale opportunity.
