Wine News (11)

"бар веэде, где ты", meaning "the bar is where you are"

Moscow, Russia.
This giant advertising poster for a beer brand could also illustrate the growing appetite of russians for wines. Russia is as you know primarily a vodka-drinking country but the vodka here has new competitors, first with beer, then with wine. Vodka consumption reached a low in 2002 with 19,7 liters of hard spirits (source : Vedomosti), even if the official stats show only part of the reality because of the scale of home-brewed vodka (samogon) in Russia. Beer and wine made respectively 49 L/capita and 5,5 L/capita in 2003 according to the Russian daily Vedomosti, and growing. With the present robust growth, Russia could be only a few years away from reaching the US level (9 liters/capita), France being still far with its 57 liters per capita. With the booming economy and a middle class with an ever-growing disposable income, wine sales have seen a sustained growth even with the difficulty of importing in Russia and the implementation since july 1st 2006 of a special tax stamp on each bottle of wine or spirit.
Welcome to the New Frontier for wine producers of the world...

Link to the Video News-Stream of Ros Business Consult
You want to check the popularity of President Putin in Russia? Look at the sales figures of the vodka bearing his name: Putinka (here with Roman-alphabet labels_but most bottles are in cyrillic) which was launched in 2003 makes now the 2nd best vodka sales in Russia with 8 million bottles in 2006, which is not bad for a new product in this vodka-drinking country. The vodka is made by Vinexim without direct approval from the Head of State (but without opposition neither). Of course the love story of Russians for their president is only part of the story here and the quality of the spirit also helped make it become the 2nd best selling vodka.

Yulia and Olga. The Volga in the backgroundSunday and the weekend in general in Russia, friends and family often go out to enjoy the beauty of their hometown (here, Nizhniy Novgorod). Yulia and Olga sat along the stairway on the slope from the City Kremlin to look at the astounding view on the Volga, and they brought along a bottle of Russiiskoye Champanskoye (Russian-made sparkling) with them. The Russians like to drink together for such weekend- and freetime strolls and the locally-made Champagnes are often of the preferred drinks for these improvised gatherings. Russians love being together with friends in the outside and you will often see them chatting and drinking, but it hasn't the negative connotation that it has in our repressive-minded Western countries (even in France), where drinking in public (other than on a cafe terrace) is sometimes viewed as misconduct. it is also cheaper than to order it at a cafe terrace (which are still rare in general) and offers more privacy.The closest you can get from a fermented beverage. Kvas IS a fermented beverage, but it has virtually no alcohol. Russians have always loved Kvas and drink tons of it, especially in summer. It is a refreshing, low-sugar drink similar to root beer. In the Soviet era, these yellow wheeled tanks were a familiar view all over the country, and thanks God, they are still there, even though you may have a hard time finding one in Moscow proper.
Kvas is a very healthy beverage full of good things and there are many different recipes to do it. All Russian children stop at the Kvas tank for a glass and if you spot grown-ups there, they must be undercover children (as all Russian grown-ups are)...

Sarkozy-Putin: Too Much Vodka?

After a long meeting that he had with President Putin a couple of months ago for the G8, Sarkozy appeared smashed at the press interview that he gave immediately after it [see video]. The French journalists (who are overwhelmingly on the opposite side of the political spectrum) were quick to call it a faux-pas. I don't know it is is a faux pas in France, but in Russia, all the people to whom I showed the short video (and all were middle-class, educated people) took it as a gold-proof of friendship: there's a sentence in Russia saying that only true friends can get drunk together.
The Belgian journalist later apologized for his comments. He is heard on the video saying: "apparently they didn't drink only water", which in french means virtually that they drank over the limit. He also compared Sarkozy to Michel Daerden, a belgian conservative politician whom the journalists there love to deride by poking fun at his supposed drinking-habits. Sarkozy denied having drunk anything that day.

A proof that wine raises more and more interest in Russia can be found in the very existence of articles like this one: Published in досуг в нижнем (Dosug V' Nijnem) in Nizhniy Novgorod, a small-format Culture & Dining magazine, it features an interview of sommelier Serguei Kiselev by journalist Elena Jarkova. The interview explores several important issues about wine(s), including the issue of half-sweet wines (they're mainly Russian and are produced in the Kuban region near the black sea), which were not long ago basically the only type of wine that Russians drank. Asked by Jarkova if women still prefer sweet wines in Russia, he says that until recently not only women but men also used to prefer sweet wines, but due to changing conditions, tastes are changing. The sommelier envisions several steps for the Russian consumer who still drinks primarily ordinary sweet wine: 1st, move to white dry wine, 2nd to tannic, astringent reds, 3rd to elegant, delicate reds, and last step, he can appreciate the best of the sweet wines that the World can offer.You can still find herborists on some Russian markets like here in Nizhniy Novgorod, and you can find at their stalls different herbs and dried plants to cure all sort of ills. Stopping there to find something to fight a cold and a hurting throat (swimming in cold lakes has a toll), you guess my surprise when I spotted this "от вина" (ot vina) dry-herbs mix which is supposed to cure hangouts and even help stop wine addiction (Vina is here a generic word, meaning wine and spirit at large)...The first Samogon of my tripKudos to the one who made this Samogon (Samogon is moonshine vodka in Russian).
The distiller, who was among us this evening, is working in the science field and made his samogon meticulously and with the rigor of a trained scientist. Samogon-making is widespread in Russia and moonshine vodka can be divine if well made. Much of the moonshine vodka is made for personnal consumption, not for sale, and the Russians often make the necessary steps to have a good final product, like using good water and ingredients and filtering correctly the alcohol. This particular one was very strong, something like 50° but felt silky on the throat and went down so smoothly. Our friend said that the most important thing for a good Samogon or vodka is filtration. This one, he said, went through 2 successive filtrations with charcoal filters. Made from fermented dog-rose fruits, its color and taste result from berries having marinated in the distilled alcohol a few days. Definitely the best vodka I drank during this trip. We downed the bottle that evening...
More on Samogon in a future post.

Comments

[William Patton]

Dear Bertrand, thanks once more for a fascinating post.