Everybody knows that
Russians like their
vodka, but fewer people
know that they also have a love affair with
champagne, or
that
Communist-era
Советское
Шампанское --
Sovetskoye Shampanskoye -- was and remains not only very
cheap
but surprisingly
drinkable.
Aristocratic Champagne
Russian champagne production goes back a long way, with the first
winery established back in 1799 to serve the
Tsarist aristocracy.
However, this first attempt failed, and only in 1891 was the first
successful winery established at
Abrau-Durso (in present-day
Ukraine) by
Prince Lev Golitsyn. Demand boomed almost
immediately and at the
Paris World Fair in 1900, Golitsyn's
Novy Svet won the
Grand Prix for champagne, bringing recognition
abroad.
Revolutionary Champagne
But this association with the elite almost led to the destruction
of the fledgling industry, since its products were
hand-crafted
and
expensive and hence not suitable for the
workers' paradise
where
all are equal.
After the
October Revolution,
Golitsyn's student
Anton Frolon-Bagreyev (who barely escaped
execution by hiding behind barrels when the
Red Guards came
to confiscate the Tsar's wines) started industrial
mass production
of champagne, cutting maturation times from three years to
one month and churning out batches of up to 10,000 liters at a time.
World War II was tough on the champagne industry, but according to
legend Stalin himself decreed that the people must have champagne
to celebrate their hard-earned victory: the wine makers did not
disappoint him, and the engineers behind the improvements --
who tried hard not to sacrifice quality, and mostly
succeeded -- were
awarded the Order of Lenin.
Capitalist Champagne
The dissolution of the
Soviet Union also resulted in the independence
of the
collective farms whose previous aims had been to fulfill
quotas and retain an identical taste across the board. Due to
pressure from
France, which has the EU-awarded monopoly to
call sparkling wines from the region of the same name "champagne",
bottle labels these days most often use the words
vino igriskoye, "sparkling wine". Oddly enough, while
the
CIS is busily eradicating most traces of its
Soviet past,
the "Soviet" part of the label has for most part stayed put:
its brand recognition is unparalleled and, even during the
Communist days of long queues, the label meant the bottle was cheap
and the contents dependable.
So How Is It?
Being the only game in town for nearly a century, Soviet
champagne has definitely drifted away from Western norms in taste:
whereas nearly all French champagne (and most
sparkling wine) is
brut,
dry, Soviet champagne is
extremely sweet. The most common type
by far with an 80% market share is
polysladkoye, which
means "semi-sweet", but even this is more
akin to the "sweet" of a
Tokaj dessert wine than the
"not-so-dry" of what Westerners call sweet
white wine. While
Western wines (and French champagnes) are now widely available,
Russians are used to the sweetness and find imported fare much too
dry -- not to mention expensive.
And expensive, mind you, is not how one would describe Sovetskoye
Shampanskoye. 0.75L bottles of Latvian-bottled perfectly decent
shampanskoye sell for around €2, and even the more
prestigious "luxury" brands from Kharkov in the Ukraine go for
no more than twice that. (Even cheaper are sparkling wines produced by
carbonating ordinary table wines, but this stuff is not
shampanskoye and is not sold as such by reputable dealers.)
However, Golitsyn's Abrau-Durso remains a major producer, and
they are trying to regain the world-class standards they had
reached in 1900 by hand-crafting dry champagne the way they used to.
In all, if you need a cheap bottle of bubbly for something
like New Year's Eve or Wappu, you could do far worse than pick a Russian sparkling wine. I would still
recommend springing for a Dom Perignon on your wedding night though...
References
http://www.businessreview.ru/stories/34/1.html