As Crimean winemakers consider new options, Joy Neumeyer traces “Russia’s rocky history with wine”:
[It] started with Francophile Tsar Alexander II, who established the
country’s first vineyard in the late 19th century. Considered a drink for aristocrats, wine was a distant second to the everyman’s constant companion, vodka. A famous Russian saying goes, “There cannot be too much vodka. There can only be not enough vodka.”
After World War II, Stalin sought to make wine available to the masses, and charged scientists with developing hardy new types of grapes that could survive the winter and be produced in bulk. For decades, Soviet vineyards churned out sickly sweet swill, with grape sugar and concentrate added to disguise bad quality. While enjoyed by Russians on holidays, it would have made the average Frenchman faint.
But in the post-Soviet era, a flood of imports from Europe and South America made dry wine widely accessible, and it’s catching on with the growing urban middle class. Russia has seen the highest growth in wine consumption in the world, more than doubling, from around 3 to almost 8 liters per capita since 2000 (compared to a 67 percent growth in China, another emerging market). Meanwhile, production of Russian wine has also boomed, from 238.5 million liters of still wine produced in 2000 compared to 478 million in 2011.
Update from a reader:
Your post on Crimean wines reminded me that, a few years ago, I visited the famous “Valley of Death” from Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and was surprised to find that it’s now one big vineyard:
Very likely there are still cannonballs and other debris of battle still buried under the vines, but it goes to show that despite wars and transient political dramas, wine springs eternal.
Another from a history professor in California wine country:
Joy Neumeyer’s piece on Crimean wine contains a significant factual error.
The first Russian wine vineyard was planted at least two hundred years earlier than Neumeyer indicates, when German merchants, on their way to and from Persia, cultivated Vitis vinifera in the vicinity of present-day Astrakhan (which was incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1556). Moreover, at the time of its annexation by Russia in the 1780s, viticulture in Crimea, where Greeks, Tatars, and Jews had long lived, was at least two millennia old. Similarly long pedigrees characterize viticulture and winemaking in Georgia and Bessarabia (Moldova), which were incorporated into the Russian Empire at roughly the same moment as Crimea.
Russian elites were not unaware that Tsarist imperialism along the Black Sea brought them into contact with deeply entrenched wine cultures and economies. At a nationwide viticultural congress in Moscow in 1902, Russia’s most celebrated vintner, Prince Lev Sergeevich Golitsyn, stretched the truth only a little when he claimed that Russia’s first winemaker was Noah, who reputedly planted grapes on the slopes of Mt. Ararat.
(Image of Russian wines via RealUSSR; “Valley of Death” shot via Wiki)
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