Russia Bans Georgian and Moldovan Wine

April 9, 2006
In Russia, Buying Wine Takes a Delicate Nose for Fraud
By C. J. CHIVERS

MOSCOW, April 8 — Dry young Saperavi, a wine so tannic that Georgian winemakers often call it not red but black, can be one of the great pleasures of the former Soviet world.

It is a wine with origins reaching back thousands of years, and whose rich and varied flavors have been newly coaxed by a generation of post-Soviet winemakers who are reviving the Caucasus' ancient culture of grapes and wines.

The trick has always been to find a bottle — a real bottle.

Since late March, Russia has barred the import and sale of Georgian and Moldovan wines, citing concerns over pesticide content that both Georgia and Moldova insist have been a pretext to punish the former Soviet nations for aligning more closely with the West.

But long before the trade dispute with those countries, it was a challenge to find many of their most common and delicious wines. The problem was not bans, but fakery.

Officials and importers here say that half to 80 percent of the wine sold as Georgian is cheap wine with counterfeit labels or not wine at all, but alcoholic cocktails laced with dyes and flavors, and perhaps a trace of fermented grape to try to fool the inexperienced nose.

"This is an aggressive theft with a special cynicism," Valery G. Draganov, head of the commission in Russia's lower house of Parliament that covers alcohol legislation, said in an interview. "We have been devouring this bitter pill for several years."

In the tale of post-Soviet wine fraud can be found many of the hustles and deceptions that have characterized this region's shift from a listless planned economy to a corrupted brand of capitalism.

Georgia regards itself as the cradle of world winemaking, and has a wine culture dating at least several thousand years. Many of its varieties and blends are distinct, and small plots in valleys have earned names of their own, like Mukuzani in the Alazani Valley, where some of the finest Saperavis are harvested.

But the Soviet system emphasized quantity, not quality, and during the decades when wine was made to the plan, Communist winemakers cheated, spiking grape juice with sugar to increase its alcohol content after fermentation, then cutting the wine with water to increase production volume.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Georgia's vast valleys of vineyards were left struggling to find cash flow, fresh expertise and new equipment. And yet the soil and climate were still capable of producing fine vintages, and the new market wanted them.

Georgian wines had always been the most popular in the Soviet Union — Stalin's taste for them was famous — and demand continued in the mid-1990's, when Georgian wineries were barely able to produce.

"This is when the falsification really began," said Tengiz Javakhishvili, director of the Telavi Wine Cellar, one of the top wineries to open since the Soviet period and to begin reclaiming the Georgian name.

The first fakes were simple, Mr. Javakhishvili and Russian and Georgian officials said. Vats of low-quality table wine from Bulgaria, Moldova, Romania and Russia were bottled under false labels and passed off as famous Georgian wines.

"It ruined the reputation of high-quality Georgian wines," Mr. Javakhishvili said.

What followed was worse. As demand for wine grew in Russia, Russian and Georgian businesses began mixing grain alcohol with fragrances and dyes to make a cocktail faintly resembling wine, or fermenting concentrated juice and bottling it as if it were a vintage. Then a Georgian label was applied.

Such crude fakery has endured, wine importers say, because many Russian consumers have limited experience with wine. In Russia, vodka is still king.

The frauds are highly profitable. Per capita wine consumption has been climbing as much as 25 percent a year in Russia as the middle class grows and new habits take hold, Petr Kanygin, chairman of Vinny Mir Holding, one of Russia's largest wine importers, said last month.

Victims abound, starting with consumers. Mr. Draganov, the leader of the parliamentary alcohol commission, said they can risk poisoning while being exploited.

Importers suffer as well. The fakes, Mr. Kanygin said, have slowed the market's growth and sophistication. "These situations have been taking shape for 11 years, and hurt our development of sales and a wine industry in Russia," he said.

A larger victim, Georgians say, has been their industry itself, which has been rebounding in recent years. At least 130 Georgian wineries operate now, Georgia's agriculture ministry says, many newly equipped and harvesting from vineyards planted after the Soviet Union's demise.

Although many of the early frauds were committed by Georgian businesses, the Georgian government has moved against the falsifiers in recent years, and last year forced at least two wineries to dump their supposed vintages when inspectors found fakes wines.

Inspections are now common, said Mikhail Svimonishvili, the agricultural minister, and Georgia has begun registering all of its vineyards, assigning them registration numbers, known as passports, and compiling data on their yields.

Wineries must now show where they have bought grapes, and growers must keep records, to prove the origins of each year's vintage. The passports cover newly designated appellations, with micro-zones of some of the finest regions.

"The Soviet system, for 70 years, was terrible for the wine industry," Mr. Svimonishvili said. "But now we have working in a better way, and with this system we can make something good for our country."

One of the stranger and perhaps counterproductive elements of Russia's recent ban on Georgian and Moldovan wines is that it overlooks that a large fraction of the faked wines bearing Georgian labels come from inside Russia, Georgian and Russian officials. These wines, and their risks, are not affected by the new policy while the best wines from the region are blocked.

Mr. Kanygin said the Russian faked wines, principally made in vodka plants, were among the most dangerous and unregulated, because they pass no borders and, consequently, have no natural checkpoint for inspection.

Mr. Svimonishvili said his registration system has shown that the Mukuzani region produces enough grapes to make about 1.4 million bottles of wine each year bearing the Mukuzani name.

But each year in Russia, he said, more than 10 million bottles sell.

"Most of these falsified wines come from within Russia, under our name," he said. "We would like to see Russia work against that."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company