![MYSTORY](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/IVOHLOLJG33GPQLQSQC6PAPOTI.jpg?auth=20ade349196e6579027c7a58c29267dfb6ca914fcf6a849c0c8d7ced0be890c2&width=16&height=2&quality=70&smart=true)
Once a nuclear power engineer, today Ukrainian Alex Kirichuk operates the world's only solar-powered organic distillery. Together with wife Iryna and daughter Victoria, their bespoke spirits and herbal tonics have found favour around the world. They now also manufacture hand sanitiser.
I grew up in USSR in the region that is now Ukraine. All our lives we were dictated to by the Communist Party, but there were minuses and pluses to that system, including free education. During childhood, part of that free education, everybody was welcome to make sports training for free. At school most people wanted to play soccer, basketball or volleyball, but I am crazy and make sailing my sport, even though nobody respects sailing in 1968 because communist ideology was totally against sports like golf and sailing because they are considered bourgeois. But USSR also wanted Olympic gold medals - if golf was an Olympic sport, they would make a golf school, and Olympic sailing did exist. I had never seen a yacht except on the horizon, so when I joined sailing school at 14 I was very happy to have such luxury. Even if my parents did not eat or drink or spend any rouble from their salary, they could never buy a yacht, because in USSR private yacht was forbidden and you could only sail if you were training for the Olympics.
We sailed on the Black Sea in Odessa, where there was a population of about one million and maybe only 100 people sailed. If our results were good, the next season we would have a better yacht and better sails, but if we showed a bad result, the coach would give us the worst yacht and worst sails. We also made everything by hand, painting, sewing sails, making repairs so I became a very skilled handyman - but I did not go to the Olympics.
I met my wife Iryna when she was at medical university. After graduation she worked as a paediatric cardiologist then she became the doctor for our yacht club, and looked after the Olympic sailing team when they visited Odessa. This was top secret but, back then, the USSR allowed selected doctors to use herbal medicine called adaptogens, but only for cosmonauts and Olympic sportsmen, and this helped USSR avoid doping tests because adaptogens are a natural way to improve performance and Iryna became the Olympic Sailing team's secret weapon.