Little-known to us is the fact that Russians are fond of making wines for themselves, wether from a few vines grown in their garden or from fruit purchased around. This has been going on for ages and is not only rooted in the supply deficiencies of the socialist regime a few decades ago, deficiencies that pushed many Russians to rely in part on their
home-made groceries. I wrote a story a few years ago about Russia being a forgotten giant in organic production, thanks largely to the fact that people learned
to grow things without chemicals, and beyond the Soviet aspect of the cause, the other is that the people of this region have a deep, almost-religious love for Mother Nature and regularly go for walks in the wild foraging for food . You'll see people of all kinds of walks of life walking through the notoriously-endless forests to pick mushrooms and other berries.
But for wine Russians also often kept this do-it-yourself approach, as you can check on these few Instagram peeks into the private life of ordinary folks (some of these views include Russian-speaking neighboring countries), people just make a bit of wine for the fun of it, and most of the time very natural even if they may use some kind of hybrid varieties. Even during the boring years of the Soviet Union, people loved wine, not just vodka, and in cities where people hadn't their own couple of rows of vines, they'd rely on the wine shops, at least when these had goods. In this 1989 movie named Glass Labyrinth by director Mark Osepian which describes a story happening in 1980, you can see at one point a bunch of unruly teenagers joining a queue starting outside a wine shop (picture on left), the queue going all the way around the building to the courtyard behind, obviously because a sudden shipment of wine had people ready to spend whatever time needed to get a few good bottles (and in some cases sell them back on the black market). Watch the scene on Youtube (full movie) at min 23:10. This movie sheds light on the quiet despair of youths who were between staggering mainstream living and hooliganism, at a time no sign of change was really showing at the horizon. Later at min 31:40 they trick their entry into a fancy restaurant with live music. This was another era indeed, now in early-21st-century Russia sophistication setlles in gradually and божоле нуво (Beaujolais Nouveau) has become trendy.
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