Moscow’s wine production surges amid Putin’s drive to revive a flagging economy, boosting domestic consumption
For its Victory Day parade in May, Moscow welcomed world leaders with wines from southern Russia and Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula it illegally annexed in 2014.
There is no record of what China’s President Xi Jinping or his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva made of the wines, but their selection was not accidental. In a meeting with Mikhail Razvozhayev, the governor of the biggest Crimean city, Sevastopol, President Vladimir Putin emphasised that “only Russian wines” had been served at the event marking the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Wine production has jumped by a quarter since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV), an intergovernmental body that monitors global standards for wine production. Wine is a small sector of the Russian economy, but the business forms part of a broader patriotic effort employed by Putin to push for economic self-sufficiency as Moscow tries to both outwit Western sanctions and revive a flagging economy.
Production is at its highest in a decade with over a third of the Russian wine coming from the Krasnodar region on the Black Sea. Domestic consumption has also increased, reaching 8.1 million hectolitres, or more than 1 billion bottles, in 2024.
