October 2021 • v. 61, n. 5
NewsNet News of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Russian Winemaking: Back to the Future? Stephen V. Bittner, Sonoma State University
While visiting Crimea in 1837, Semen Alekseevich Iur’evich, tutor and traveling companion to the heir to the Romanov throne, described in his correspondence the new vineyards and wine cellars near Oreanda. “Crimea,” Iure’vich confidently predicted, “will soon make us forget Champagne and Bordeaux.” I thought of Iur’evich earlier this summer as social media wags skewered an unlikely target—the Russian wine industry. The cause for their sarcasm? On July 2, President Vladimir Putin signed amendments to a federal law regulating the production and trade of alcohol. Among the changes was a restriction on the use of the term shampanskoe on wine labels. The most famous houses of Épernay and Reims—among them, Moët et Chandon, Louis Roederer, and Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin—are now required to identify their Russia-bound bottles as igristnoe vino, sparkling wine. As one Twitter comedian pointed out, it is as if the cheesemakers and dairy farmers of Parma stamped “processed cheese food” on their wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano—like Champagne, a “protected designation of origin”—before export to America.1 Russian vintners were mostly embarrassed by the unexpected attention. After the Washington Post sent its Paris reporter to an outdoor cafe with a few bottles of sparkling rosé from Abrau-Diurso, a former crown estate near Novorossiysk, the president of Abrau-Diurso reassured the Post’s Moscow reporter that, in his opinion, “real champagne” could come
only from the Champagne region. It is important for Russian vintners to learn “to work in the overall landscape of the global wine industry,” he said. Yet in the capital of discerning wine drinkers, there was no denying the results of the Post’s impromptu dégustation. The Abrau-Diurso was sweeter than a French champagne, one cafe patron noted, but also “softer and more flowery.” Another remarked, upon learning that she was drinking a Russian champagne. “I don’t feel like I’m having a champagne from Russia. . . . Congratulations! Congratulations, Russia!”2 The Post’s attempt to find humor (or at least a few more website clicks) in the news from Russia was reminiscent of a more famous moment in Russian winemaking. In 1900, a sparkling wine from Prince Lev Golitsyn’s Novyi svet estate, located in the hills outside of Sudak in Crimea, won the grand prix at a tasting competition at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Upon the conclusion of the judging, Raoul Chandon de Briailles, of the house Moët et Chandon, invited participants and judges to a celebratory lunch at the Eiffel Tower. Given the honor of the first toast, and believing he was drinking a champagne from his own house, Chandon raised a glass to his employees, the producers of the “pride of France.” In Chandon’s hand was the unannounced grand prix winner, a wine from distant Russia. Golitsyn later remarked that he could imagine no better endorsement; the president of Abrau-
Inside this Issue • October 2021 • v. 61, n.5 Russian Winemaking: Back to the Future? by Stephen V. Bittner, Sonoma State University ASEEES Congratulates the Winners of the 2021 Prizes The Making of a Modern Digital Archive by Julie Reines Chervinsky, Blavatnik Archive Foundation What Does Post-Socialism Taste Like? by Tyler Adkins, Princeton University
October 2021 • NewsNet
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2022 ASEEES Convention Theme 18 Publications 20 Institutional Member News 24 Personages 27 Affiliate Group News 28
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