Wine Law

4 Several years later, in 2014, the authorities officially “set the aim of boosting the total territory of Russian vineyards to 140,000 hectares in 2020 from 90,000 hectares now”. Such a substantial increase was planned tomatch in the near future at least the vineyards’ area of the Soviet times at its height – in the early 1980s in the then Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic they reached about 200,000 hectares 8 . The envisaged objective was not met and in the following years the planting of new surfaces stagnated as the decision to take more active efforts shifted to the legislative sphere. The first-ever law on the viticulture in Russia was adopted in 1914, shortly before the collapse of the empire. Despite the parsimonious wording its mainmerit was to create the formal basis for the respect of a genuine wine production through regular control and law enforcement 9 . Already in 1902 the established in the previous year Viticulture and Winemaking Committee convened the first Congress of Winegrowers and Winemakers with representatives from all the interested regions 10 . The law of 1914 attributed controlling activities to this committee and its subsidiaries. The viticultural guild was consolidated. The short-lived first epoch of the Russian winemaking had just the time to receive some international awards as well. The most clamorous was the “Grand prix de champagne” taken in 1900 at the Universal exposition in Paris by the founder of the Crimean wine industry prince Lev Galitzine 11 . A century later the vicissitudes recall the same necessity for a new legal framework aimed to reestablish a modern Russian viticulture. This process was initiated in 1995 with Federal Law No. 171-FZ of 22 November 1995 on the state regulation of production and turnover of ethyl alcohol, alcoholic and alcohol-containing products and about restriction of consumption (drinking) of alcoholic products. Its text dealt with the wine and the wine related products amid all the other alcoholic drinks. The wine was defined as “the alcoholic products with content of ethyl alcohol from 8,5 to 16,5 of 8 Source: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2014/05/28/medvedev-plans-to-restore-vineyards-to- soviet-glory-days-a35939. 9 Source : http://rusvina.ru/wineopedia/spravka/index.php?SECTION_ID=8&ELEMENT_ID=631. 10 Source : https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/selskohozyaystvennye-obschestvennye-organizatsii-v-poiskah- putey-preodoleniya-agroekonomicheskoy-otstalosti-na-donu-i-severnom/viewer. 11 Source: https://www.austinwineguy.com/awg-blog/can-you-name-either-the-vineyard-winemaker- year-or-even-the-region-that-beat-the-french-in-paris-for-the-first-time-at-a-judged-wine-tasting.