Commerce

Russia’s ‘passage through Armageddon’—seven years of war, revolution, and civil war—destroyed almost entirely the empire’s vinicultural economy. Wartime prohibition, territorial losses, vineyard neglect, and the priorities of the new Bolshevik government harkened a crisis worse than phylloxera. Yet many prominent persons in the wine industry, who cut their professional teeth during the tsarist years, and who were often so-called ‘former people’, aristocrats or members of the bourgeoisie, found common cause with the new Soviet government during the 1920s. Because they thought the wine industry was too important to be ignored, these persons welcomed the regulatory gaze of newly activist Soviet state, even as that state sought the destruction of so many of them.

Terroir

Chapter 1 follows the life and career of Mikhail Ballas, a Bessarabian nobleman and late-tsarist Russia’s most influential wine writer. In the early 1900s, Ballas received the prestigious Emperor Alexander IIII Prize in Viniculture for authoring a six-volume set, Winemaking in Russia, which laid out in exacting detail the history of winemaking in the tsarist empire, the present state of the industry, and the quality of wine it produced. Long before the idea of terroir emerged as the essential characteristic of fine wine, Ballas described something that resembled modern notions of terroir: the geographical and climatic diversity of empire, the vinicultural possibilities inherent in that diversity, and most important, the ways that human ingenuity and ecology intersected in unexpected ways in vineyards to produce fine wine.

Authenticity

The modern science of oenology emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, as vintners learned to remediate flawed grape must with sugar and a preservative to produce better wine. The advent of oenology was at the heart of an acrimonious dispute that pitted against each other two of Russia’s most prominent and influential vintners: Prince Lev Golitsyn, whose estate vineyard on the southern shore of Crimea produced some of the best wines in the world around the turn of the century, and Vasilii Tairov, the editor of the journal Winemaking Bulletin. At issue were the characteristics that made fine wine authentically European: was it appropriate to take oenological shortcuts, or was the production of fine wine a form of artisanship, done by methods passed down over many generations?

Conclusion Rebirth

After restating the central arguments, the conclusion takes the story of Russian and Soviet winemaking into the post-Soviet years. It describes the near destruction of the former Soviet wine industry amid the economic chaos of the 1990s and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Amid this destruction, Western wines reappeared in the post-Soviet marketplace after a seventy-year hiatus. Moreover, Western wine connoisseurs discovered Georgian wines and traditional Georgian production methods. The book ends with Vladimir Putin’s 2006 ban on the import of wines from Georgia and Moldova, and the emergence of a genuine culture of connoisseurship among young, educated, and worldly Russians and Ukrainians, who were far more prone to choose a high-quality imported wine from Australia or Europe than a more potent bottle of bormotukha.

Hospitality

During the late 1940s, several prominent vintners at Massandra—the former crown estate outside of Yalta—were imprisoned on trumped up charges. Unusual their fate was not—thousands of Soviet citizens met similar demises in the post-war years—but the reasons why they came to the attention of the procuracy and the police in the first place. Vintners were participants in a ‘gift economy’, in which they used the wine they produced to celebrate old alliances and create new ones. Their behaviour had roots in the war years, when the formal ways of getting things done fractured in the face of evacuation and retreat. As Moscow tried to rein in the centrifugal forces unleashed by war, vintners at Massandra discovered that the wine was never theirs to give.

Quality

The final chapter traces the emergence of a Soviet culture of connoisseurship in the 1970s and 1980s. It highlights efforts by Soviet vintners to improve the quality of their wines and to ween consumers from so-called bormotukha, low-quality wines sweetened with beet sugar and strengthened with grain alcohol that comprised the vast majority of Soviet production. Vintners were motivated by concerns that alcoholism was becoming a principal threat to public health, and that bormotukha, which often had an alcohol content as high as 19%, was contributing to the epidemic. The solution, in their view, was to encourage Soviet consumers to purchase conventional dry wine, which they presented in the press as a more cultured and refined drink than vodka and bormotukha.

Taste

In the decades following Stalin’s death, Soviet vintners returned to the European wine circuit—the international tasting competitions and trade associations that were the domain of Western connoisseurs. Among the persons who became familiar with Soviet winemaking during these years was Maynard Amerine, an extraordinarily influential vinicultural scientist and connoisseur from California. Amerine made three trips to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, recording in his journals the quality of wine he encountered on carefully regimented scales. Chapter 6 seeks to describe how Soviet wine tasted to someone who had a basis for comparison. While Amerine’s appraisal was overwhelmingly negative, he came to believe that Soviet failings in winemaking had less to do with a flawed terroir than the perverse incentives of socialism.

Introduction Identity

After laying out the principal arguments, the introduction surveys the history of wine consumption from Kievan Rus in the tenth century to the Soviet embrace of Georgian foodways and wine toasting in the twentieth. It highlights the role of Peter the Great, who encountered fine European wine during travel abroad, and who forced the Russian aristocracy to adopt European modes of consumption. By the early nineteenth century, European wines were common fixtures on elite Russian tables, and domestic wines from the Don region, Crimea, and the Caucasus began to appear as well. Wine thus spoke to instabilities in Russia that vodka could not, particularly the tension between a narrow elite that had been acculturated to European modes of consumption, and broad masses that remained oblivious to them.

Science

Chapter 2 traces Russia’s response in the 1880s and 1890s to the ‘great wine blight’, the phylloxera epidemic that nearly destroyed European viniculture entirely. Long after a French botanist, Jules-Émile Planchon, devised a sure-fire solution—grafting the scions of endangered European vines onto the rootstock of immune American vines—Russian scientists persisted with the use of an ineffective pesticide. The reasons why they persisted had a lot to do with the unusual views of Aleksandr Kovalevskii, a pioneering natural scientist and chairman of the Bessarabian Phylloxera Commission. Kovalevksii argued that the ‘struggle for existence’ envisioned by Darwin’s theory of speciation was occurring on the inter- rather than the intra-specific level, between different species of grapevines. Planchon’s grafting, in Kovalevskii’s view, thus constituted choosing sides in the existential struggle between American and European vines.