Fine wines from Russia, spiritual home of vodka? Country sheds its Soviet-era reputation for plonk, hoping to become a major player

Russia’s reputation for poor quality and adulterated wine stems from the Soviet era, but things are changing

It has passed a new wine production law and French and Italian wine experts have been enlisted

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Vineyards of the Abrau-Durso winery. Russia wants to make a name for itself on the global wine market as a quality producer. Photo: Abrau-Djurso group

Published: 8:45pm, 12 Aug 2020Updated: 8:45pm, 12 Aug 2020

Russia, a vodka superpower, is aiming to make a major splash on the international wine market with reds and whites from its temperate southern regions along the Volga river and near the Black Sea.

Russian vintners are now specialising in first-class wines, with a little help from experts from France and Italy. The grapes are busy growing, and the vineyards are expanding. Moscow has also passed a law that establishes Russian wine as a brand and regulates production for the first time.

“We have all we need to make wine our most important export,” says Dmitry Kiselyov, who is not only a major figure in state-run media and the Kremlin’s foremost propagandist, but now chief of the winegrowers’ association as well. He has made a documentary film called It’s enough to poison the people, which describes how Russia wants to rid itself of the image of a nation that adulterates wine, an idea that dates back to the Soviet period, and is also clamping down on cheap imports.

The new law, which came into force this year, stipulates that Russian wine may be made only from local grapes, prohibiting the use of imported grape must in future.

Dmitry Kiselyov is chief of the Russian winegrowers’ federation. Photo: Mikhail Klimentyev/Ria-Novosti/AFP

Kiselyov himself produces an expensive sparkling wine in Crimea, which was Ukrainian until it was annexed by Russia in 2014. He says he wants to continue the tradition of Lev Golisyn, a prince who lived from 1845 to 1915 and brought Western wine and sparkling wine culture to Russia.

It has been a quiet century for Russia for viticulture, says Kiselyov, yet the nation’s wine growing tradition dates back hundreds of years, as in other former Soviet republics such as Georgia and Moldova. A major loss was the destruction of large areas of vineyards 30 years ago, as part of an anti-alcohol campaign under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. “That was suicide under Gorbachev,” Kiselyov says in his film.