Return of Russian winemaking ?
- From: darsiaubas@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:47:10 -0700 (PDT)
Step number 1 - call in a Frenchman.
For discussion purposes only...
Vidas
Russian renaissance
Free from Soviet restraints, winemakers seek a return to quality and
craft
By Alex Rodriguez | Chicago Tribune correspondent
September 17, 2008
SADOVY, Russia—For more than a century, vineyards that blanket rolling
uplands here in Russia's prime winemaking region have been afflicted
by a Soviet maxim long ago branded into the minds of local vintners.
More is better.
The Soviet Union was the world's fourth largest wine producer after
Italy, France and Spain, but the Soviets approached winemaking as if
they were making wing nuts. Grapes were harvested before they were
ready. Crude presses crushed stems and seeds into the must, giving
Russian wine a sour, woody edge. Few Soviet wineries bottled their
wine on-site, instead shipping it to faraway bottling plants by rail
in tanker cars that didn't safeguard against temperature changes.
But something has happened in the last few years that could one day
make this sleepy swath of Cossack hamlets along the Black Sea coast a
surprising source for sought-after chardonnays and cabernets. Wealthy
Russian investors have begun hiring French and Australian winemakers
to produce legitimate wine that they hope will one day put southern
Russia in the same echelon as BordeauxTracking change along the 45th
parallel The Wine Line: Tracking change along the 45th parallel
Five years ago, Frank Duseigneur, a wiry Frenchman with an acumen and
palate that comes from nurturing wines from vine to bottle in France's
Rhone Valley, answered a newspaper ad placed by wealthy Russian
businessmen who wanted to make serious wine in southern Russia.
Since then, Duseigneur has transformed an aging Soviet collective into
Chateau Le Grand Vostock, a maker of whites and reds that sell for as
much as $270 in some of Moscow's ritziest restaurants. Experts in
Moscow have marveled at Le Grand Vostock's wines, produced in a place
where vintners have been known to add alcohol to grape juice
concentrate and bottle it as wine.
"When I presented our wine in Moscow, people who write about wine
tasted it and said, 'You're from France—where in France did you buy
this wine?' " Duseigneur explains between sips from his Cabernet
Saperavi Selection, a well-rounded blend of cabernet sauvignon and
Georgia's saperavi grape. "I said, 'No, we did this in Russia.' They
said, 'OK, maybe you are not buying the wine, but you're buying the
grapes in France.' "
Duseigneur's winery is in Krasnodar province, Russia's top winemaking
region. Famous as the heartland of Russia's proud, centuries-old
Cossack community, Krasnodar straddles the 45th parallel, where—from
Oregon to Bordeaux to Italy's Piedmont—some of the world's greatest
wines are being made.
In Krasnodar, the soil is coal-black and layered on top of clay and
limestone—ideal for vineyards. The region's undulating knolls get more
than 200 days of temperatures above 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
All that's missing, says Duseigneur, is the know-how.
"You have to have more projects here like ours," Duseigneur says, as
he walks through spring rows of budding cabernet sauvignon vines on Le
Grand Vostock's 1,235 acres.
"We're the leaders right now. What we miss are 10, 20, or 100 projects
like ours. We just have too few people working in the wine business
here."
Modern winemaking in Krasnodar dates back to the 19th Century, when
Czar Alexander III's winemaker, Russian Prince Lev Golitsyn, enlisted
French specialists to help him produce sparkling wine at a vineyard
near what is now the seaside resort of Anapa. For a brief time,
Russian wine was turning heads; Golitsyn's sparkling wine won awards
at the 1900 Paris World's Fair. In nearby Crimea, Golitsyn produced
for the czar's court Madeira- and port-like wines that now fetch
thousands of dollars at auctions at Sotheby's.
Then Soviet collectivism came to Krasnodar.
"During Soviet times, the flavor of wine wasn't a decisive factor, and
there was no culture of winemaking or wine consuming," said Mikhail
Shtyrlin, an expert on Soviet winemaking and general director of
Legend of the Crimea Wines, a wine distributor based in Sevastopol,
Ukraine. "Soviet wine consumers drank wine not for bouquet or taste
but to get drunk."
Hampered by the same travel ban all Soviet citizens faced, Krasnodar
winemakers during the Communist era never learned better ways to
produce wine. Massive vinzavody, or wine factories, made adherence to
Moscow-ordered quotas their main aim. They cut corners by shipping
wine to separate bottling plants elsewhere in Russia, or bypassing
bottling by shipping straight to cities by railway car.
"Quantity always meant more in the Soviet Union," Shtyrlin said.
"Quality was always secondary."
The darkest days for Russian wineries came in the late 1980s, when
Mikhail Gorbachev's clampdown on alcoholism in the Soviet Union
included uprooting millions of acres of vineyards. By the 1990s, when
post-Soviet Russia careened through years of economic distress, a full-
bodied cabernet wasn't likely to make the shopping list of most
Russians.
Then, as Russia's economy surged on the shoulders of sky-high oil
prices under former President Vladimir Putin, wine culture here began
to flourish. Wine shops selling $440 Bordeaux reds and bottles of
$1,500 Dom Perignon Champagne opened in downtown Moscow. Russian
magnates began buying up vineyards in the province and luring European
winemakers like Duseigneur.
Moving to Krasnodar wasn't an easy choice for the 32-year-old
Frenchman. In Provence, he oversaw Rhone River Valley vineyards and
quality control at a winery that produced 9 million bottles a year.
The Mediterranean coast was a two-hour drive to the south.
"It was Provence—the light is so wonderful there," Duseigneur says.
His new home, Sadovy, is a tired, gray village of 1,500 decimated by
the economic doldrums Russia endured through the 1990s. Most of the
village's young men and women left for bigger cities years ago. On a
recent rain-soaked morning, Sadovy's main drag was deserted apart from
a pair of stray dogs and a huddle of scarved babushkas selling kefir
from a roadside folding table.
"It's peaceful here," Duseigneur says as he leaves an empty cafe and
opens his umbrella to fend off a cold rain. "Too peaceful."
Today, the only stir of movement in Sadovy happens in Duseigneur's
winery, a cavernous, hangar-sized building that's only a third
completed. In the winery's bottling section, a group of workers
chitchat in Russian as they pack bottles into boxes stacked on
pallets. Nearby, Gayane Saakyan scans every bottle in front of a
fluorescent lamp for traces of sediment or cork particles—a
meaningless flaw in the French wine industry but against the law in
Russia.
Across the room, Duseigneur draws chardonnay from a barrel with a
pipette and vigorously swishes a taste in his mouth. "It's really what
a bouquet should be," he says, leaning against barrels that steep the
room in the aroma of oak. "The oaky taste and the fruit are blended
well enough so that it's quite difficult to say, 'Here is the fruit,
here is the oak.' "
Duseigneur's first year in Sadovy was anything but easy. Neither he
nor his wife, Gael, spoke a word of Russian when they arrived in the
summer of 2003. Construction of the winery had yet to begin, so his
first batches of wine were produced outdoors, with presses and
fermentation tanks subjected to rainstorms and cold spells.
The villagers he hired had to be cured of their by-the-book, Soviet
work habits and an attitude that, no matter what the rest of the world
may think or do, Russia's way is always the best way. Accustomed to
harvesting in August, vineyard workers were aghast when Duseigneur
told them they had to wait three weeks so that the grapes' sugar
content could rise high enough to produce the right amount of alcohol.
"I told them, 'No, we won't harvest now—instead we'll remove leaves
that are shielding the grapes from the wind and the sun,' " Duseigneur
says. "They looked at me as if I were crazy. Me at 27, and they had
been working in the vineyards for 40 years."
Today, Duseigneur's winery runs like clockwork. He calmly issues
instructions in grammatically correct Russian to workers who smile
back without complaint. The Russians who run the winery's presses and
man its stainless-steel fermentation tanks may not know the jargon of
French winemaking, Duseigneur says, but they know how to do it right.
Wineries like Le Grand Vostock are becoming a template for wine
production in southern Russia, a region blessed with the kind of soil
and climate that yields world-class wine, but up until recently,
bereft of the finesse and nuance needed to tap its potential. Now, as
Moscow's millionaires lure French technology and expertise to southern
Russia, Krasnodar is slowly decoupling itself from its Soviet-era
preoccupation with output at full-throttle.
"In 10 years, there will be many wineries here in Russia able to do as
well as we are doing," Duseigneur says. "What they are learning here
is that if you want to do haute couture, you can't do mass production.
"For the French," Duseigneur adds, finishing a mouthful of cabernet
saperavi with a grin, "making wine is not like building a wall, it's
not like science. For us, it's culture. For us, to make wine is to
dance."
By the numbers
By the numbers
58,560 The number of vineyard acres in the Russian province of
Krasnodar
4 The number of wine regions in Krasnodar
.
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