The country looks like it’s still going through an economic boom, it’s like if the financial crisis and oil-prices crash of 2 years ago never happened, there’s construction going on in cities and villages and a general feel of optimism and growing real revenues, including in the back country even if on on a more modest scale.
The wine sector of Russia is changing too, albeit very slowly. Russia's problem is that it lacks small and medium wineries (the winery size where you find the best wines everywhere else in the world) because the law makes it almost impossible for a small winery to open shop.
Plus, Russia’s wine regions are still trying to recover from the heavy downsize of the vineyard surface which happened under Gorbatchev when he launched his anti-alcohol surge in the 80s’. His demise of the Empire which followed a few years later also resulted in a severe loss in the wine sector for Russia, as it lost 3 major wine regions that were until then part of the Russian Empire, sort of : Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova were cut off from mother Russia when these Soviet Republics became independant. Another, older setback deprived the newly-independant Russia from an important wine region : Krutschev decided in his time for some reason to take Crimea from the Soviet Republic of Russia and to give it to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. This wasn’t too much a problem at the time, as Russia virtually controlled everything, but when each republic became independant countries in 1991, Russia realized it had lost a land which had always been Russian, a strategic area for its navy... and an important wine region : Crimea
Today, Russia has also difficulty to recover from the disastrous wine culture and winemaking practices of the soviet era (picture on left : wine bottle from the soviet times). It still has wineries which are conceived like chemical-industry heavy weights, and some of the wines made here are not really wine in the usual sense of the word.
But their are signals that things could change, some people in the trade want to work differently, on a smaller scale, and these people can change Russian wines for the best. On the big wineries side, even though the regulation is still lax and allows cheap foreign bulk to be bottled here as Russian, many industrial wineries understand that they need to use Russian-grown grapes to be credible and they have planted large surfaces of vineyards. Important investments have also been made in the winery tools and foreign enologists have been hired to improve the winemaking. Many wineries still have very high yields (like between 120 and 150 hectoliter/hectare) and use vineyards planted on agricultural flatland though, making it difficult to produce quality wines. But it takes only a few daring individuals to change trends, and Russia has few of these rebels.
Sometimes it just takes the intervention of an influential politician to accelerate the things and help improve the laws, and if my following information is right, Russia's winery landscape could change soon : I got the tip from a trustful person well-positioned in the trade : Prime Minister Vladimir Putin bought very recently some 100 hectares of land near the village of Divnomorskoe, south of Novorossiisk and Gueledjik (near the black sea), with the intention to plant vineyards (if you later read that info elsewhere, remember it came from Wineterroirs)...
These thin, angulous leaves aren’t from the ubiquitous green plant you think of (at least I don’t think so) The greenish drink which is named Tarkhun (тархун) tastes weird, somewhere between a root beer and an anise drink. According to this well documented page in English on Russian sodas, it is made with estragon and existed already under the soviet regime. It has probably a good customer base here, maybe children, but when you're not used to it, the first sip is a surprise. But it lets itself drink and could be a Russian response to a famous soda which happens to have been made initially from a south-American plant with also other, sulphurous uses...
The Lower-quality industrial wines in Russia are often not even made with grapes, but from conzentrat and added aromats. Several Russians in the trade here say that an overwhelming majority of Russian wines aren’t made like elsewhere with the basic process of harvesting grapes and vinifying them : they are either cheap imported bulk wine bought in Europe or South America in tank ships and later re-corrected, re-sulfited and bottled here as Russian, or they are made with concentrated extracts mixed with water and yeasts, plus lots of other additives intended to make it taste like wine (not always with success if I remember some cheap booze that I bought here...). The only thing the people I spoke to disagreed about, is whether these unspeakable industrial wines (bulk or conzentrat) represented 70 %, 80 % or more of the whole. This mind-boggling issue dwarfs the debate and controversy found elsewhere between the natural-wine amateurs and those who shrug it off as hype...
On a recent program on the Russian TV (click on left), this question of the obscure winemaking-type of many wines sold here was addressed by the journalists. After an interview of Eduard Alexandrov, the energetic co-owner of a new Russian winery who works with Alain Dugas of Chateau la Nerthe in Chateauneuf du Pape and whom I happened to have met and visited a couple of weeks before [soon on Wineterroirs], the journalists looked into the dark side of doctored wines in Russia, with several experts and insiders giving a frightful insight on the practices in use. They showed this diagram on the right (sorry, it's not sharp) : the figures displayed here help compare side by side the volumes (in decaliters) of wines made with Russian-grown grapes (top left), the ones of wines made from imported bulk wines (top right), and the total of wines on the market (on the bottom). Arithmetics show that 22 millions decaliters are unaccounted for (center of the diagram). If they're not made with imported bulk or with Russian grapes, how has this huge volume of wine been made ?, asks the voice on the program. Its obvious that some wines are made in this country without grapes, like it was pretty common in the soviet era (there's also a short extract of period soviet news about these artificial-wines sovkhozes), and the law hasn't put some clear rules in that regard yet. Several insiders confirm in the TV report that other ingredients mixed withchemical products are used to make wine, not grapes, in a sizeable share of the wine production here. And in this other Russian TV report, you will see a sommelier demonstrating how wine can be made from concentrate, sugar and other stuff... It seems that some courageous rebels in Russia want to put the spotlight on those practices and help stop them, or at least let the consumer know who makes what [note that the Youtube ID of the person who put these videos online is Elixirnatural ]...Natural-wine freedom fighters are everywhere...
Here is a small anecdote on that subject : I was in the Krasnodar region with my friends, and we met someone who asked to my friends why I was interested in Russian wines. I heard his exchange with my friends, and he didn’t know that I listened to their conversation. He seemed upset and quite negative about Russian wines, saying that they were all doctored and full of non-grape aromats and other things. With a very serious look on his face, he said that the company for which he worked was making apple conzentrat (the Krasnodar region is a big producer of fruits) and that they were shipping lots this conzentrat to Fanagoria (Russia’s biggest winery). That’s all I can say, I hadn’t a conversation with this person but I felt that what he said was true. Now, it doesn’t mean necessarily that the apple-juice conzentrat is used in the winemaking, maybe Fanagoria has an apple-juice department...
I already wrote on this subject but I can do it one more time, especially when there's a picture to illustrate my prose : cemetaries can be beautiful places and I hope that my images will prove it. In France (except for the Père-Lachaise in Paris), the cemetaries are often really sad and boring, full of square marble monuments and without free-growing plants (herbicides companies make lots of money with the French cemeteries, I’m sure...). Here in Russia, it’s messy, unkempt and with weeds and trees growing without control, but it has a soul and it’s beautiful. See this video of mine that I shot further north in central Russia.
__ To your associate when you’re about to sign a contract and have doubts about his loyalty.
__ Christmas gift to your boss when you didn’t get the expected bonuses or raise.
__ (variant of the latter) From caring clients visiting Bernie Madoff in jail.
__ An arms-dealer’s gift to Ahmadinejad following the signature of an important weapons sale (could backfire as a fatwa, though).
__ From a Ciudad-Juarez-based importer to a food-plant director near Medellin, Columbia, just to let him know that the canned-strawberries container better arrives as scheduled, or else...
Watch your vodka grow ! This thing is poignantly beautiful, this green frail grass which raises on this dark rich soil and prepares itself for a walk through the Russian winter... Also a nice picture for vodka lovers : this is where your favorite Russian vodka begins, at least if it’s a good-quality vodka, say, a Russian Standard (I don’t have financial help for this publicity...) for example. The good Russian vodka is made from winter wheat grown on the famous Chernozem (чернозём), the rich black earth found in some parts of Russia. Witnesssing the autumn raise of these young, green wheat sprouts is heartening, the contrast between this black soil and the tender grassy wheat is poignant. When you’re not used to this Chernozem, the fields look like burned land from afar. There's sometimes an even more stricking contrast between the remaining blond straw of the last harvest and this grainy black earth...
Speaking of burned land, I didn’t come across many burnt-out forests in spite of having made between 3000 and 4000 km on the roads through areas supposedly devastated by the catastrophe. Much of the fires occured away from the main roads,it seems. We just saw some blackened forests at a point near Volgograd (the former Stalingrad) and an area along the highway between Moscow and Nizhni Novgorod.
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