Sanctions imposed after President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine in early 2022 have reshaped Russia’s consumer habits, driving up prices of foreign wines and narrowing brand availability of imports. Russian wine sales have surged to make up around 60% of the market, up from about 25% 10 years ago.

“Russian wine has gained a very high share of the Russian market,” said Yury Yudich, the head of the Federation of Restaurateurs and Hoteliers’ committee on Russian wine making, citing higher taxes on “unfriendly countries.”

“Gradually the market began to change, and wine prices began to rise. Imported wines have probably increased (in price) by30-40%,” he said, though Yudich added that consumers were still “getting used to” local wine flavors. In Moscow supermarkets, Russian, Georgian and Armenian wines dominate where previously French, Italian and South American brands took pride of place.

Western countries have imposed more than 25 000 different sanctions on Russia since Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014, with the lion’s share coming after the Ukraine invasion in 2022. Grapes have been grown around the Black Sea for thousands of years but the travails of revolution, civil war and later Soviet anti-alcohol campaigns, particularly under Mikhail Gorbachev in1985, destroyed many Russian vineyards.

But as the economy emerged from the decade of chaos that followed the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, some pioneering investors began to buy up land in southern Russia and bring back top-level vintners from France and Italy.

–Reuters–