ABSTRACT
While vodka has been famed as the alcoholic drink of preference in Russia for centuries, the lands of the former Soviet Union also boast a proud heritage within the global history of winemaking. The Soviet Union’s southern republics of Georgia and Armenia have both laid claim to being the birthplace of wine, with some archaeological evidence supporting these claims.1 In addition to the Southern Caucasus, wines of less renown but in much larger quantities have been produced for centuries in Moldova, Ukraine, Russia itself and Central Asia. The drive to increase the production of Soviet wines in the 1950s led to an increase in vineyard area from 400,000 hectares to 1.1 million hectares by the early 1970s, making it the second largest grape producing country in the world. Partly because a large proportion of these grapes were devoted to the production of raisins, and partly because of low productivity in many regions where vineyards were subject to harsh winters, the actual production of wine was less impressive. But the Soviet Union was still the fifth largest wine producer in the 1970s.2 Towards the end of the Communist period, the Communist countries of Europe were producing between them 16.5 per cent of the world’s total wine, about half of this in the Soviet Union.3
