Maryna Revkova writes Maryna Revkova is the Best Sommelier of Ukraine 2021, an ASI Diploma holder, and a current DipWSET candidate at the Austrian Wine Academy. She has worked as a sommelier in Portugal, completed a harvest as a cellar hand at Château Latour, and is now the director of a winery in the Odesa region. Passionate about storytelling, local grapes and Eastern European wine identity, she advocates for Ukraine’s native varieties.
Odessa Black: the grape that waited
In the summer of 2021, I was judging the annual Ukrainian wine competition in Lviv, along with several of my colleagues. We were nearly finished with the tastings and waiting for the final red variety, the one always saved for last — Odessa Black. It had the intense taste of a young, unruly wine, packed with tannins that scraped the palate, an aroma somehow reminiscent of borscht with strawberries, and a deep violet-ruby color that stained absolutely everything it touched.
It always saddened me — and moved me a little — to realise that our own native grape was still performing worse than something like Zweigelt or Cabernet Sauvignon.
As usual, after scoring the last sample, I went back to my hotel to brush my teeth (after the final few glasses, we all looked like Gollums from The Lord of the Rings) and drink a cold beer. I didn’t think about Odessa Black again for nearly a year.
Then, in 2022, everything changed. And somehow, fate brought me back to that same wine — same producer, same vintage — at ProWein in Düsseldorf. Maybe it was the crisis of emigration, or grief for home, or a sudden emotional hunger for something truly mine, in a time of injustice and loss. But the wine had changed.
In the bottle for just a year, it had softened. The tannins were no longer so abrasive. The aroma, once vaguely vegetal, now spoke of ripe, warm black berries. I took a few bottles back to Portugal and poured them proudly for my colleagues.
It turned out Odessa Black simply needed more time.
The problem was — time is what Ukrainian wine often doesn’t get.
The grape was created in postwar Soviet Ukraine, in 1948, at the Tairov Institute in the Odesa region, by crossing Alicante Bouschet and Cabernet Sauvignon. If those original vines had been planted widely and taken seriously, they’d be over 50 years old by now. We could already be drinking truly great wines in the 21st century. But Odessa Black was never treated as a serious variety. It was seen as a colouring grape — an “ink” to darken blends — not as a standalone variety with potential and voice.
In the USSR, wine wasn’t about expression. It was mass production — “people’s alcohol” made in giant factories whose only goal was to hit targets measured in hectolitres. Everything was regulated by the state: alcohol levels, sugar content, acidity, colour.
Grapes were divided into categories: “technical” (for colour, sugar or acid correction), “aromatic” (like Muscat and Riesling), or base blending grapes (like Cabernet or Saperavi). Odessa Black was filed under “technical.” Its role was to intensify, not to speak.
There was no room for individuality. It didn’t fit the standard profile, and as a new variety, it wasn’t trusted. Most Soviet wines were fortified or sweetened to hide flaws. Odessa Black was too wild for that world.
Until 1985, private winemaking — in the European sense — didn’t exist. Even if someone wanted to make a high-quality, expressive Odessa Black, it would have been illegal. Then came the anti-alcohol campaign, and vineyards were ripped out across the USSR. Many of the early Odessa Black plantings were lost.
After Ukraine gained independence in 1991, privatisation of wineries began, and craft winemaking slowly emerged in the mid-2000s. Only after 2010 did a new generation of producers appear — focused on terroir, quality, and native grapes.
The first Odessa Black vines were planted by these new producers around 2012. The first mono-varietal wine appeared with the 2017 vintage. Just a couple of years later, two different producers won gold medals at Mundus Vini for their 2020 wines. It was only the beginning.
Odessa Black is a resilient grape. It survives winters, heat, drought, disease — and still gives quality fruit. It’s a Ukrainian grape in every sense.
All it needs is time. And patience.
The image, of harvesting Odessa Black in Bessarabia, is the author's own.
