After Losing $1 Billion, a Russian Exile Rebounds With Bond’s Favorite Bubbly

Evgeny Chichvarkin has been many things over the past two decades: a billionaire mobile phone retailer, a jetsetter who plays polo with princes, a wanted man in his native Russia, a political exile. These days he’s a shopkeeper—though at the kind of venture you’d expect from a man with his resume: a store with more than $20 million worth of wine and spirits and customers that include A-list celebs such as David Beckham and Mark Wahlberg.

Chichvarkin, 44, owns Hedonism, an over-the-top emporium that has shaken London’s staid wine scene since it opened in 2012. The place has a giddy, funhouse atmosphere. A chandelier of Riedel wine glasses hangs over a cast-iron staircase. The walls of an alcove sprout dozens of hands, claws, and tentacles clutching bottles of Sine Qua Non, a California cult wine. A see-through panel in the floor reveals a gyrating mobile sculpture meant to look like tree roots.