Now that the new year has started, some figures about the 2011 wine market in Russia are available. This is the second time since 2008 that the market has shrunk, but only by 1% compared with...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Bisso Atanassov sends us this translation of an article he has just published in Russian in Simple Wine News about the chaotic goings-on in Russia.   The new Spirits Circulation...

The following fascinating report has just been sent to me by Anne Popoff, a Canadian wine lover currently working in Russia whom I met in Toronto last October. It's enough to make those of us...

Moscow-based wine writer and importer Bisso Atanassov has kept us informed of the absurdities and frustrations of the Russian wine market in the past. Here he tells us of the latest,...

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...