You, Bordeaux, are a friend In misfortune, and in sorrow, Ready to serve, today, tomorrow, Always faithful to the end. – Alexander Pushkin, Yevgeny Onegin (IV.46)
A table stands in the center of a flawless lawn, along the shore of a mirror-smooth lake. A gentleman is sitting at the table with his lady friend. They seem entirely unbothered by the frequent droplets of light rain that drip down the collar of the gentleman’s red sweatshirt, plunge into his lady’s revealing neckline, and plink into their wine glasses.
It is ten in the morning, and the imperturbable couple is enjoying a chardonnay breakfast.
Suddenly, the woman jumps up from her seat with a blissful smile and runs off somewhere. The gentleman lazily crumbles some bread, offering it to the ducks that have surrounded his table.
“They’re stalking me,” he says, half-apologetically, as he meets my gaze.
“You should dip the bread in wine,” I jokingly suggest.
“Already have,” he replies.
The lady returns at a trot. She is carrying an uncorked bottle of white wine. The ambulatory foie-gras respectfully parts to allow her through, yet they do not depart.
It became popular last year to book a getaway to a Russian winery. The country’s borders were closed and seaside hotels were overbooked. So it was an extremely wise choice to spend one’s weekend in a small chateau on the side of a mountain, watching the wind stir the young vines, and admiring how the sun dances in a glass of white wine. And then red. And then sparkling, dessert, and semi-dry…
And, it turns out, there were so many wise Russians doing this that it became very difficult to purchase such a wine tour or excursion. One often had to wait a week to partake in a tasting at a winery. And a room in a rural guest house (true enough, with a vineyard view) cost as much as a hotel room at a seaside resort.
The gentleman and his lady surpassed all in their wisdom. They had come to the vineyards of Semigorye, near Anapa, in Krasnodar Krai, just after the grapes had been harvested, the wine had been poured into barrels, and the pools of grape blood had been swabbed from the cellar floors. They arrived on a Monday, in the rain, and reveled in their solitude, doing their best to ignore the curious gazes of ducks and journalists.
“I have a French accent, if you didn’t notice,” Olga chirps. “And I will speak truthfully, because I cannot do otherwise. I love this place. I simply adore it. I am resting my mind. The first time I was here was 25 years ago. There was nothing here then, just a lake, a forest, and a clearing. And three days later my son was born.”
Olga Popova lives in Anapa, and this summer she won a winery tour, lodging included, because she is a very zealous customer of this particular winery. Yet she only redeemed her prize now, in the middle of autumn.
“So it is you?” says the winery’s owner, Gennady Oparin, honestly surprised. He has only just approached us, and overheard the tail end of what his young guest was saying. “Here we thought that someone had won the tour and wasn’t coming! What can I pour for you?”
“We buy our own wine. We can afford it,” Olga replies with pride.
Oparin asks me to write in my article that he is a seer. That he predicted that Russia would regain its status as a Great Wine Power. Yet I had no idea that it had ever possessed such a title. Sure: a great power on the sea, in the cosmos, in faith, and in nuclear weapons. But I had not heard anything about wine. Apparently, it is a new thing, promoted by the fact that Dmitry Kiselev is now chairman of the Russian Union of Winegrowers and Winemakers. Hated and despised by many, yet possibly beloved where it counts, Kiselev is State TV’s main propagandist.
Suffice it to consult Wikipedia and you’ll learn that our country was long ago one of the world’s top three producers of wine. And even on occasion the top producer. After the Great Collapse of 1991, that record-breaking production was spread across several independent states.
“Russia is quietly regaining its status as a great wine power,” Oparin says. “And as soon as we undertook the task of restoring that status, we realized we needed to get rid of the Europeans and their shnyaga [dregs, poor quality products].”
“Why shnyaga?”
“I will explain. There is wine that our European wine partner-competitors (I don’t know what else to call them) produce honestly. And there is wine that they produce in Poland and the Baltic countries. They produce wine there that, to put it crudely, is made from all the things that wineries have harvested but don’t want. Every winery has bad wine, and normally they would just dump it, throw it out. But then suddenly Russia appears, where you can dump anything.”
“Are you talking about nuclear waste?” I say, making a mental leap.
“No, no, nuclear waste is standard technology. We take it in and process it. We are the only country in the world that does this.” And then, as intelligently as he spoke previously of Russian wine, he talks about Russian fast neutron reactors. It turns out he once participated in building one.
It is difficult to blame foreigners for exporting millions of liters of worthless wine to Russia, transformed into what we have sleekly dubbed “wine materials.” Thanks to this unquenchable river of red and white, Leningrad Oblast rose up to become Russia’s leading wine appellation. (And here I remind the reader that, after the fall of the USSR, the city of Leningrad had its former name, St. Petersburg, returned to it. But Leningrad Oblast kept its Soviet-era designation.) And so, on the outskirts of the Northern Capital, in a rather inhospitable agricultural region, wine is being crafted for the entire country.
It is easy to understand Petersburgers and their regional neighbors. Potatoes don’t grow so well there, to say nothing of grapes. And so, they’re compelled to purchase grapes in liquid form, from countries that have no problem producing such things. Yet why is Russia’s southernmost region following suit?
Krasnodar Krai is a bit like California in a Russian overcoat. Grapes have been growing here since the time of the Ancient Greeks, who long before the birth of Christ colonized these rather dry and northern (from their perspective) climes. It can get cold here, and it even snows, though there is no true winter. Yet there is also no stifling heat. The sun warms the gentle slopes of the multitudinous hills, but the climate is mild, thanks to the proximity of the sea. And it is hard to cultivate anything in the rocky soil here. Except grapes, of course.
And yet local wineries are committing the sin of pouring imported “wine materials” into bottles, which they then brand as Russian wine. It’s not that anyone is seeking to deceive or, worse, poison buyers: the liquid is more or less harmless (to which an accompanying certificate attests). It’s not personal, it’s just business. All the more so given that the ultimate consumer is, for the most part, simply choosing the price tag with the smallest numbers. “Does it get you drunk? Then why pay more?”
Starting last June, however, it became illegal to put the word “wine” on bottles of imported “wine materials.” Instead, they must be labeled “wine drink.” Will buyers be turned off by bottles sporting such labels? Time will tell. But the new law was a win for small wineries that craft wine from their own vineyards. So we may be witnessing the birth of a world famous brand known as “Russian wine” that one day will compete for notoriety with Russian rockets and Russian vodka.
At 8:30 the following morning, on a different shore of the very same lake, my breakfast is a glass of cabernet. By now, this seems perfectly appropriate, and, what’s more, I receive no judging glares from passersby.
Today I am visiting a classic winery. It has yet to open, but promises to be incredibly modern, witnessed by the fact that the young owner, Natalya Zavgorodnaya, offers no directions on how to find her, but just sends map coordinates.
We circle through some villages, then drive along an excellent road that winds through a forest and empties out into a boundless agricultural expanse. After about 40 minutes of driving, we are lost – our cell signal has disappeared. And this is strange, because the road is lined with homes, and even a rural store. We hop out of the car and climb the nearest hummock, attempting to grab a signal by thrusting our arms toward the heavens with hope and a prayer. The GPS locates signs of life, then informs us that our destination is just a five-day drive away. In Azerbaijan.
Confounding Fate, we succeed in getting a call through to Zavgorodnaya. She drives out to fetch us and then we trundle along behind her white ATV – a rather useful vehicle here, since the pavement ends about a mile short of her winery.
We stop in front of a charming chateau. The building has a tiled roof. Wild grapevines, their leaves gently touched by the red colors of autumn, climb its pale-yellow limestone walls.
“Such beauty! You have a marvelous winery,” I exclaim, not because I want to flatter the hostess and root out any initial awkwardness (although that was part of it.) No, I was sincerely delighted by the grounds. I imagine living out my sunset years at such a chateau, writing my memoirs, sipping cognac from a crystal glass.
“This is where the security guard lives,” Natalya replies delicately, in a tone that suggests I have eaten fish with a dessert fork at a dinner party.
The real Chateau André is a rather larger building that is cleverly hidden behind a rise, and it appears dramatically as we round another turn in the dirt road. The building, as well as the square in which it sits, is constructed of the same pale-yellow limestone – stones excavated when they were preparing the ground for planting the vineyard. The winery’s roof tiles were scavenged from throughout the region, bought up from owners of ancient Cossack huts that were being demolished. These 150-year-old tiles were sorted, cleaned, and turned into a brand-new roof. In the same way, they sought out red bricks for the walls and ceiling of the wine cellar, disassembling old homes and the stoves they contained. As a result of this architectural scavenging, the new building acquired an august patina of history at a rather reasonable price – less in fact than if they had purchased new building materials from a factory.
Local winemakers tell an amusing anecdote. When they came around, in a neighborly way, to inspect the construction underway here, they were shown, far from the main building, a cute little structure with a patio. It was beautiful, like a hotel or small restaurant, only the rooms were tiny, and the ceilings very low. So they asked the owner, “What is that going to be?” And he answered, “Our rabbit house.”
The winery was built in the space of a year, without taking on any loans nor sparing any expense. The investor, for whom the chateau is named, is the owner of a small but successful pharmaceutical company. He is also, coincidentally, Natalya’s father.
I ask if said investor has hopes of recouping his investment.
“At the beginning, that was not a concern,” Natalya says. “It was all done for the soul, as a family thing.” She explains how the plan for a dacha and planting some grapes gradually turned into a 120-hectare winery. “But now we see that we will make good wine, and even some money. So we are turning it into a business project, so that it can be profitable. And particularly now, given the quarantine situation, it is something that is good for our region. All the tourists are coming here; my telephone is ringing off the hook. Many people want to visit, and they are willing to pay for delicious wine, to do a tasting, walk around the grounds, and spend a weekend here.”
I understand this to mean: they had not planned to recoup their investment, but now there is reason to suspect that they might even turn a profit. At which point I should mention that the chateau has only just been built and the vineyard barely planted; there has yet to be a harvest or any winemaking; they also have yet to receive a license to produce wine. Therefore, the first fruits can only be judged, at best, after the next season. So, for the time being, the winery is still just “for the soul.”
One of the walls of the spacious – yet also empty and unpeopled – tasting hall is made entirely of glass. Through it, one has a fantastic view of a still more spacious, even grandiose, hall. There, new stainless steel tanks gleam. Towering at twice the height of a human being, they will soon be full of grape juice as it turns to wine.
Alongside one of the tanks a smiling technician makes mysterious adjustments. He is from Austria and has been sent here for a week to install the equipment. A young girl – a diminutive version of the winery heiress – watches him pensively, while holding a glass full of red liquid. I know for certain that this is recently squeezed juice; it has not a drop of alcohol in it.
Natalya, speaking for the family, says that they want to create their own brand and pass it on to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. This is how they will make their mark on history. She refers to Europe, where a family winery is less a business and more a hobby that warms the heart and carries family memories through the ages.
All of the best that Europe has to offer has been brought here, to unnamed hills in the Kuban: vines, equipment, specialists, architectural inclinations, a general aesthetic, and the entire concept of agritourism. I have no doubt that they will create something here that is no worse, perhaps even better, than what is in Europe. But can they create something different, something that is ours?
They call Vadim Berdyayev a natural.
He has no roots in the area, did not grow up among the vines, did not ingest southern wine culture through his mother’s milk. In fact, he did not even imbibe wine until he reached middle age. It’s not that he was a teetotaler. It’s just that he lived in Surgut, the Siberian city that fashions itself as the oil and gas capital of Russia. While it is completely unfounded and unjust to joke that Siberians drink only vodka, Vadim says that in his circles there was a definite preference for strong alcohol, and wine got no respect.
The Berdyayev family moved from the North to the South nearly 15 years ago, for professional reasons – both husband and wife are architects, and they were offered work in Anapa. And it was here that Vadim first dove into wine (figuratively speaking, of course). His investigatory winetasting began with rather crude wines sold in boxes rather than bottles. Then he tried a friend’s homemade wine and was happily surprised. So he took the recipe, created his own must, and created something that he found to be rather drinkable. Hooked, he gave up architecture, planted a vineyard, and became a winemaker.
Notably, he also convinced his wife Olga to give up architecture and take up a new profession: “wife of a winemaker.” No irony is intended. In fact, winemaker’s wife is an extremely demanding job. It means taking on all of the difficult and thankless work of communicating with the regulating authorities, keeping up with tons of paperwork, licenses, excise stamps, and coping with the drudgery of accounting. In general, it is what we journalists coquettishly call a muse. And, if it is done well, it allows the winemaker husband to devote himself to the creative part of the process: becoming a shaman among the vines, a wine sorcerer.
Vadim, it turns out, is the face of his brand. Literally. His face adorns every bottle of Berdyayev wine. It is hard to imagine something less appetizing than an owner’s full-face portrait on his wine’s label. But for the Berdyayevs, it helps, because when presented with a shelf teeming with hundreds of other brands, I would purchase theirs, even if it were empty. This is because the images are actually more than mere portraits. Long before it became a coronavirus meme, Vadim impersonated personalities from famous works of art in photos, and then put the images on his labels. He is a rather colorful character, and those he brings to life in his labels are something else. My favorite is The Absinthe Drinker (his take on Picasso’s painting), where he wears tights on his head. I don’t care what kind of wine it contains.
For the sake of fairness, one of the wines, a soft pink cabernet franc prepared by gentle crushing, is adorned with a portrait of the winemaker’s muse, who is aptly crowned with a wreath made of wine corks.
We park in front of an unsightly iron gate painted a garish green. It is a typical street in one-storied Russia: high fences, walls made from sand lime bricks, small windows that reflect only darkness. We suspect that our next winemaker does not want to see us and purposely gave us the wrong address.
But no, he is waiting for us.
The gate is opened by the head of the peasant farm society himself, Alexander Zvyagintsev. Simply dressed and sincere in his mannerisms, he leads us hastily through a narrow and dusty labyrinth of rooms. And, as a first order of business, he shows us a tiny storeroom, hidden behind two sets of doors – one of which was unpleasantly evocative of prison cell bars, and featured a serious tamper-proof lock. This is where Zvyagintsev, as prescribed by law, stores the excise stamps that get affixed to his bottles.
“This is what we came up with,” he says, spreading his arms. “As if someone is going to steal excise stamps.”
It is not clear whether he is showing us this pantry to prove that he is on the up and up, or in order to complain about a callous and pointless bureaucracy.
Zvyagintsev was one of the first in the region to obtain a license for production of alcohol. Not without incident, of course. A few years ago, he planted a vineyard, built a winery right next to it, and purchased and installed the necessary equipment. Then he sent in his licensure documents and received this reply: we cannot give you a license because you don’t have a postal address, and we cannot affix an address to your newly built winery because the building is, as it were, in the middle of an empty field. Meaning of course, right where it should be, alongside the field where the grapes are growing.
Generally speaking, in order to acquire an address, he would have needed a second life span, or maybe a doppelgänger. Lacking such a cosmic twin, Alexander simply opted to rent a space from his wife – a store on the first floor of their village home – and that became his winery.
The rented room is so small you have to go outside to turn around, yet there are all the necessary services: running water, gas, electricity, and the internet. And plugging into such fruits of civilization in an empty field would have required passing through all of the seven circles of Hell.
After a short and impressive excursion through the newly excavated basement (“You are the first to see this”), we sit around a table in a back room. Zvyagintsev rattles about with glasses in the next room and then returns, of course, bearing gifts.
“I have been drinking all my life. And I like it.”
I could not help laughing and offering a caustic remark.
“I’m not an alcoholic. I am a winemaker,” he replies with a touch of resentment.
Zvyagintsev is a winemaker by birth. He came into the world in Abrau-Durso, a town famous as a former tsarist residence and the historic and modern center for Russian sparkling wines. He trained as a winemaker and has been working as such for over three decades, first in large factories, then for himself. And he has also sent his son to train as a winemaker.
According to the terms of his license, Zvyagintsev can produce no more than 66,666 bottles of wine per year (the result of dividing his allowable 50,000 liters into 0.75-liter bottles). How many he actually produces is a commercial secret. But it is hard to believe that his nano-factory, even though it is packed to capacity with stainless steel tanks, oak barrels, boxes of boxes, boxes of corks, and other sundry goods, is capable of producing several dozen tons of wine. Yet Zvyagintsev says that he can haul in two tons of grapes from the fields in a single stint and crush them. Three weeks of work at that pace and he’s hit his license ceiling.
“This is our production facility. No one needs it. No one is interested in a volume of 10,000 bottles.”
I don’t see a single one. It is possible that this is a magically expanding facility that also contains a warehouse that can hold 66,666 bottles. But what Zvyagintsev is really saying is that a small winemaker such as he cannot break out onto the market. And opening a boutique, self-styled wine, even as a part owner with other garagistes, is not profitable.
People, in general, like complaining to journalists. And so that is how things start out with Zvyagintsev. But the further our conversation flows, the more lively his eyes become, and the more he smiles and offers a young, unexpectedly booming laugh. I attribute this, of course, to my innate charm, but perhaps the real reason is that he keeps leaving the room, returning with more and more wonderful wines to share – wines that he creates for himself, for his friends, and for those who understand.
Finally, he brings out some cognac, his treasure, which he retrieved (God knows how or when) from the winery in a metal can. What can I say? It was a nice cognac.
It’s nice to drink something my own age.
“Will I ever get out of here?” This cowardly thought flashes in my thoughts as I enter Sergei Palladichev’s lair.
It is a gloomy den, more like a hunting lodge – where women are forbidden – than a winemaker’s tasting room. Out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of a firearm lying on a rough, wooden table, before the owner removes it. Things are getting a bit crazy.
“This place is not mine, it’s Timothy’s,” Palladichev says, nodding at the young and seemingly harmless owner of the den, who is sitting in a far corner. “Timothy is studying to be a winemaker. Once he finishes, we’ll free his head of all the nonsense they are teaching him and make some real wine together.
Palladichev’s ancestors owned a distillery in some central Russian gubernia. As usual in such stories, the family lost everything in 1917, but the memory of the family business and the anxious pride of the ancestors somehow passed down to the grandson. Palladichev has been making wine for 20 years, in his own vineyards north of Krasnodar Krai. Then, several years ago, he acquired land in the Wine Village cooperative, planted vineyards, and is now making rare wine. Notice I don’t say “elite” wine, because I have no idea how it tastes, and because the winemaker himself feels that he is only starting his path toward perfection.
Palladichev is inspiring and emotional as he talks about grapes and the beverages one can make from them. He rails ruthlessly at winemakers who are all about quantity over quality, and harshly disses so-called wine experts. And he levels scathing criticism at the powerful who planted vineyards for their own amusement, which is the only reason the laws regulating winemaking were loosened, like a crumb falling from the table of oligarchs to the small-time vintner.
Palladichev gives the impression of being willing to destroy the world in pursuit of the ideal wine. He could easily play the role of an evil genius in a Hollywood blockbuster. At the same time, he also has the stereotypical look of a cinematic hero: the one who throughout the film runs first after the villains, then from them, and then in the final scene kisses the girl while behind them the city burns.
Palladichev’s girl is the vine. He sees – not with his eyes, but with his heart – how painful it is for her to press her roots through the stones in search of water, to reach layers of soil that were once the bottom of an ancient ocean. He coddles and cherishes her, and does not allow her to raise her head too high, so that all the best from the earth that flows through her passes through to her children – the bunches of grapes, so that they in turn will give birth to living wine. He lops off their excessively prolific cousins at a very young age, so that they will collect all the juices and aromas. He places the golden berries beneath a homemade press, which looks a bit like a medieval instrument of torture, and slowly, very slowly, squeezes the life out of them, drop by drop.
I gather you can guess the value and price of such a wine. But the surprising thing is that this virtuoso-winemaker revels in poking fun at serious winetasters, those who adopt a serious air when discussing a wine’s depth of taste and aroma.
“Words don’t mean anything,” he says. “And it doesn’t matter how much it costs, if you drink a mouthful and don’t like it, just pour it out!”
This strikes me as blasphemy, and I vow to drink, reverently, without spilling a drop, the entire bottle of collectible raisin wine that Palladichev has casually handed me. I promise to call and tell him what I think.
He shrugs: “Don’t bother, I don’t care.”
The sun moves toward the horizon. I stand atop a hill, and below me rows of vines stretch off into the distance. Meanwhile, there is a colossal, round hole yawning at my feet. Palladichev is digging, and he is not yet done. He is excavating down to where the temperature is unchanging year-round; there he will construct his wine cave. A spiral staircase will descend here, as if to the depths of the underworld, yet it will instead lead to heavenly groves of green bottle-glass.
I started out afraid I would never get out of here. Now I only want to return.
A moniker (garagistes) that originated in France’s Bordeaux region in the 1990s and signifies very small winemakers – usually operating on less than a hectare – who generally process their own wine (vins de garage) the old fashioned way, making it “out of their garages.” Garage wine is generally made in very small quantities, and thus the price for the best of it is very high. In France, the wines made are big, bold, fruity red wines with higher alcohol content – winemakers’ wine.
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