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finished wines elsewhere for
bottling, which would often
ruin them. Things did not get
much better once the Iron Curtain
collapsed. Most vintners’ equipment
had been seized and they were reliant
on concentrates and juices from other sources to
make up for the lack of technology. In the 1980s, leader
Mikhail Gorbachev imposed a prohibition, and most
of the agricultural areas that had once been vineyards
had been re-purposed.
Since the 1990s, the Russian wine industry is
slowly recovering with a focus on quality. On the
plus side, since most winemakers have histori-
cally been unable to afford chemical additives
and fertilizers, most Russian wine is tradition-
ally organic.
The founder of modern commercial
winemaking in Russia was Prince Leo
Galitzine (1845-1915), who established
the first Russian factory of champagne
wines at his Crimean estate of Novyi
Svet. In 1889,
the
production
of this
winery won
the Gold Medal at the Paris ex-
hibition in the
nomination for sparkling wines, although several years previous-
ly the wine regions of Russia had been devastated by the Phyl-
loxera epidemic. In 1891, Galitzine congratulated himself on
becoming the surveyor of imperial vineyards at Abrau-Dyurso,
where the sparkling wine was produced throughout the 20th
century under the brand of Soviet Champagne, or “champagne
for the people”.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the French wine-savvy
professionals fled Russia, but the industry was gradually rees-
tablished, starting from 1920. The wine industry experienced
a rebound in the 1940s and 1950s during the Soviet era until
the domestic reforms pushed by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985
as part of his campaign against alcoholism. After the fall of
the Soviet Union, the transition to a market economy with the
privatization of land saw many of the area’s prime vineyard
spaces being utilized for other purposes. By 2000, the entire
Rus-
sian Federation had only 72,000 hectare