The Russian wine market continues to be an unpredictable concoction of local producers', bottlers' and importers' interests, mixed with ever-changing state regulations, weak distribution channels...

Soviet wine archive - the video explains the background to an extraordinary tasting of 120 of what were supposed to be the finest wines produced in the Soviet Union between the early 1950s and...

I described in Soviet wine archive – the video , the extraordinary tasting of 120 'treasures' from the Soviet era that I took part in during my recent visit to Russia's Black Sea coast. Below...

My recent Russian trip yielded many strong impressions.  (Click on the Russia tag below for some of them.)  But perhaps the strangest experience was my descent into the most...

I feel rather ashamed of my recent trip to inspect vineyards in Russia. Firstly, and most unusually, I went at the invitation of some wineries there. I usually insist on paying my own way but my...

For the first time on a wine trip I felt rather like an explorer on my recent visit to Russia (see From Russia with love ). See Russian wine gets real for an overview of what I discovered in...

Here's a very brief foretaste of my tales of a recent trip to Russia, described more fully in Russian wine gets real . It's just a spin around one of the main squares in Krasnodar, the...

I'll be writing about my trip to Russia's Black Sea coast in much more detail the week after next, but here's a visual flavour of Fanagoria, a winery in the most wonderfully atmospheric location...

I'm sitting in Vienna airport on my way home from a most surprising trip to the winelands on Russia's Black Sea coast . The most surprising thing of all was how unexpectedly normal everything was...

Here's a short video shot in the offices of the general director of interesting 'New Russian' winery Fanagoria (about which more later) on the Black Sea coast in which the company's PR director,...

Here's a little quiz. I'm currently in Russia, learning about the wines produced in the far south of the country on the shores of the Black Sea, just east of the Crimea. The fortunes of...

Bisso Atanassov, himself a Moscow-based wine importer as well as wine writer, so arguably less detached than ideal contributors to this site, sends this report on the volatile Russian wine...

Bisso Atanassov, longstanding purple pager who was for long based in Moscow but who is now studying for a master's degree in viticulture and oenology in Montpellier, sends this report on how the...

Imagine starting up a wine business where there is a 400-year history of viticulture but vineyard land can cost as little as $1,160 a hectare, or $470 an acre! This is the recently renascent...

Bisso Atanassov of Simple Wine News sends this report on recently released figures on wine in Russia last year. It sounds like a market that could interest producers of the cheapest possible...