RussiaWines

(Passport Magazine October 2007)
By Charles Borden
This month’s wine tasting, one of our most interesting, started with a comment from John Ortega about a deprecatory Moscow Times article about Soviet ‘Champagnes’. I responded that “the Soviet Shampnskoye” produced throughout Russia is primarily made from imported ‘vino-material’; cheap imported bulk wine that is processed through the ‘reservoir’ method to create a sparkling wine This probably accounts for 99 percent or more of the sparkling wine produced in Russia. However, there are a couple of wineries, like Abrau Durso on the Black Sea, that make at least part of their production from local grapes and locally produced wine according to classic methods.”

A few days later John asked about a wine subject for the October issue. I proposed, “Passport Birthday Party: Sparkling Wines – Classic Russian, Crimean, and a Touch of the Real Thing.” The response, “нет – Russia has a long way to go on sparkling wines, they still don’t have the méthode champenoise system down to a science nor the bulk method charmat and do we want to associate Passport Magazine with poor quality??”

After another exchange, I finally got, “Ok Charles, you win! You pick Russia’s four best Champagnes and I will pick the four best that I can find and we do a Champagne Sparkling Wine tasting out of it! ! Passport’s own Russian French Champagne Shootout!”

So we end up at Bistrot, ensconced at one of the coveted big center tables on the patio, and on a Friday night; very hard to accomplish. John has picked up five top Champagnes from DP Trade’s Magnum shop on Kutuzovsky, including his favorite, Salon Blanc de Blancs Brut. I went to the Massandra shop on Komsomolsky Prospekt, which sells a wide selection of wines from “real wineries” of Russia and Ukraine, meaning those around the Black Sea. I picked four of the best from the three wineries in the CIS that still produce sparkling wines according to the classic methods developed in France: Novy Svet on the Crimea peninsula, Abrau-Durso on Russia’s Black Sea coast, and Artyomovsk Winery in Ukraine’s Donetsk oblast. I had to search further for a bottle from one of my favorite Russian sparkling wines, a red from Tsimlanskoye Winery in eastern Rostov region, but I found one at an AM shop but couldn’t find one of their best, which is apparently made in accordance with an “old Cossack” method. All of the wines, French and Russian, were brut with the exception of the Tsimlanskoye.Read more…