Wine Law

494 WINE LAW backed entity for the testing and quality verification of goods and services – the Russian Quality System ( Roskachestvo ) –, in its 2020 annual report concerning the Russian wine market (“The Russian wine guide” 47 ), described a stable trend, in its third consecutive year, towards a decrease in the consumption of spirits in favour of wine 48 . In this perspective, the task of Federal Law No. 468 was also to help the wine industry to compete in the internal market with the domination of the strong spirits and slowly achieve a reversal of the existing tendencies. The law has a codifying essence, as such, it regulates all key activities in the wine sector – from the specificities of the grape growing, through the particularities of the wine production, with its quality control and classifications, until the state policy in the field of viticulture and winemaking and the law enforcement of the regulative framework. Although Federal Law No. 468 has only 49 articles, divided into seven chapters, its provisions are sufficiently elaborated and exhaustive. The “General provisions” (Chapter 1, artt. 1-9) define the scope of the regulation, limit its application to the commercial only wine-related activities, delineate the hierarchy of the other applicable norms to be later adopted within the federal legal system, define 80 basic concepts to be used in this economic sector and state the goals for the government policy to be achieved as well as the necessary for this achievement measures. Consequently, powers are conceded to government and regional bodies to realise control, measurements or other types of verification of the origin, quality and authenticity of the grape plants and the wine itself; special attention is paid to “the self-regulatory organisations of winegrowers and winemakers”, to which the local productive network is consigned. Chapter 2 deals with the grape growing (artt. 10-17) in the following details: the recognition of the plantations as grape growing, their registration in a special federal register and the concession of passports for each one with their particular data. A further measure of verification is the creation of an inventory of the grape plantations in order to monitor the possible discrepancies between the actual state of the grape plantations and the data available in the federal register. The agricultural activity is also subject to phytosanitary control over the grape plantations and to cataloguing the grape varieties, a preference being given to the autochthonous ones, as well as the varieties of domestic selection. To keep truthful statistics, grape harvest declarations are to be submitted annually, indicating the grape volumes harvested from each grape plantation. A system of 47 Source : https://rskrf.ru/tips/spetsproekty/vinnyy-gid-rossii-2020-reyting-samykh-kachestvennykh-vin- strany/. 48 Source : https://retailer.ru/rosstat-otmetil-snizhenie-potreblenija-krepkih-napitkov-v-polzu-vina/.