History of Wine in Russia

Russia is not the first country most people associate with wine — yet it has an extraordinary wine history, from a prince who beat the French at their own sparkling game to a dictator who ordered “champagne” for the working masses, to a leader who very nearly tore the whole industry out of the ground¹.

Vines on the Black Sea

Wine came early to the lands of the Russian Empire, carried by Greek colonists who planted vines along the northern Black Sea coast — above all in Crimea — more than two thousand years ago. Warmed by the sea and sheltered by mountains, this coast would remain the heartland of Russian and, later, Soviet winemaking, even as the vine spread to the Don and the Caucasus¹.

The prince who made Russia sparkle

Modern Russian wine has a father: Prince Lev Golitsyn. From 1878 he built the Novy Svet (“New World”) estate on the Crimean coast, tunnelling deep cellars into the mountains and mastering the traditional method of sparkling wine. He also developed the vast Massandra cellars near Yalta into the wine estate of the tsars, whose collection of rare bottles became legendary².

Beating the French in Paris

Golitsyn’s triumph came in 1900. At the Exposition Universelle in Paris, his Novy Svet sparkling wine was entered in a blind tasting against the great names of Champagne — and won the top prize, the Grand Prix de Champagne. For a Russian wine to beat the French on their own ground, in their own city, was a sensation, and it remains a point of Russian pride to this day³.

A Russian sparkling wine, judged blind in Paris, was crowned above Champagne itself.— the 1900 Exposition Universelle³

Champagne for the masses

After the Revolution, the Bolsheviks turned wine into a tool of the state. In 1936 Stalin ordered the creation of “Soviet Champagne” — Sovetskoye Shampanskoye — a sparkling wine every worker could afford. Golitsyn’s former pupil, the winemaker Anton Frolov-Bagreev, made it possible by fermenting the wine in giant pressurised tanks rather than individual bottles, cutting years of work down to weeks⁴.

Wine under the Soviets

Under this system, sparkling wine that had once graced imperial tables poured out by the million, cheap and reliably sweet, a small taste of luxury in a planned economy. Vast state farms across the south turned out oceans of everyday wine, and Sovetskoye Shampanskoye became a fixture of every Soviet New Year’s celebration — a role its successors still play⁵.

Gorbachev’s axe and after

Then came near-catastrophe. In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev launched a sweeping anti-alcohol campaign, and in the drive to cut drinking, huge areas of vineyard across the south were uprooted — there was even talk of destroying the priceless Massandra cellar. The industry took decades to recover. Today the revival centres on Krasnodar, on Russia’s Black Sea coast, where a new generation is once again making serious wine⁶.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• When wine nearly derailed the Russian Revolution
• The French Champagne Russia set out to rival
• The story of French wine

References

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Crimea. www.britannica.com ↩
2. Russia Beyond — Why did Russian rulers want their subjects to drink fine wines? www.rbth.com ↩
3. Wine Enthusiast — War, Revolution and Tsarine: How Russia Shaped Champagne. www.wineenthusiast.com ↩
4. VinePair — In 1936, Joseph Stalin Created the Proletariat’s Very Own “Champagne.” vinepair.com ↩
5. Atlas Obscura — How Stalin and the Soviet Union Created a Champagne for the Working Class. www.atlasobscura.com ↩
6. Seventeen Moments in Soviet History (Michigan State University) — The Anti-Alcohol Campaign. soviethistory.msu.edu ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
Covers Russia’s imperial wine estates and the sweep of Eastern European wine.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
Useful on wine under the Soviet Union and the politics of drink.

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