aandfშეიძლება რამე შემეშალა, მაგრამ მაგ სათაურით სხვა სტატიაა 4 ოქტომბრის ვაშინგტონ პოსტში.
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Georgian Vineyards Hit by Russian Frost
Kremlin Embargo on Wine Imports Seen As Retribution Against Pro-Western State
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 4, 2006; A21
TELAVI, Georgia -- In the shadow of the Caucasus Mountains, the grapes are heavy on the vines and ripe for harvesting. Zurab Ramazashvili, owner of the Telavi Wine Cellar, cradles a bunch in his hand, plucks a single grape and savors its bursting juices.
"I'm very optimistic about our wine this year," he said, adding with a rueful smile, "But where to sell it?"
People have been making wine in this rugged and poor corner of eastern Georgia for millennia, a tradition that survived nationalization in the Soviet Union and the disarray of communism's collapse. But another storm has blown over the mountains from Russia and into Kakheti, Georgia's storied winemaking district.
Earlier this year, Russian health officials banned the import and sale of all wine from Georgia, citing impurities. It was a body blow to Georgia's second-largest export industry, which sold nearly 80 percent of its wine to Russia.
Georgians read the ban as political retribution for the country's increasingly strained relations with the Kremlin, which reached a new pitch of animosity following the detention of four Russian military officers, who were stationed in Georgia, on spying charges. The two countries have been at odds since Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili came to power in early 2004 and immediately adopted pro-Western policies that included a desire to join the NATO military alliance.
"This year the front line in the economic war is here in the vineyards of Kakheti," Saakashvili said in a meeting with ministers in early September.
The impact of the wine ban was immediate -- from the fields where the vines burrow deep into the parched earth to wineries that have invested millions of dollars in new equipment in recent years. Georgia's annual production has plummeted from nearly 50 million bottles in 2005 to a projected 20 million bottles this year, according to Georgian vintners, wiping out jobs and investments.
In 2005, for instance, the Telavi Wine Cellar sold nearly 2.5 million bottles of wine in Russia, about 70 percent of the winery's entire output. This year, with the Russian market lost, Ramazashvili projects that he will sell only 1.7 million bottles. "It hurts," said Ramazashvili, "and breaking into new markets is a time-consuming and costly process."
"You can't get a decent price for the grapes now," said Keto Boglotsishrili, 70, as she and her family harvested Rkatsiteli, a Georgian variety whose seeds were discovered here in clay jugs dating to 3000 B.C. Prices for the white grapes have fallen about 30 percent since last year.
"It's almost not worth being out here," said Boglotsishrili's husband, Shota, as he bent to cut bunches of grapes on a warm fall afternoon.
But the Russian ban could also help diversify an industry that had become too reliant on one market and paid too little attention to the quality of the wine it was producing.
"It will take a certain amount of time to recover from this slump, maybe some years, but this can be a blessing in disguise," said Zurab Chkhaidze, co-owner of the Askaneli Brothers winery. "We will have to find new markets and make new and better products."
Officials in Moscow said they acted because Georgian wine, as well as wine from Moldova, was laced with pesticides and other impurities. Russia also banned Georgian mineral water and agricultural produce and this week cut off all transportation links between the two countries.
More than 600,000 gallons of wine already in the country were destroyed, and vintners such as Chkhaidze, who had 40,000 bottles inside Russia at the time of the ban, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Georgian restaurants that dot Moscow were suddenly forced to serve wine from Western Europe and the Americas. "It's not a substitute at all," said Gocha Markelia, manager of Alaverdy restaurant in Moscow. "We grew up -- and I mean both Russians and Georgians -- drinking Georgian wine, and Chilean or French wines are very alien to us. Our clients don't like those wines and don't want them, but there's nothing we can do."
Vintners here agree that some of the wine sold as "Georgian" in Russia was impure. But they stress that it wasn't actually Georgian and that most of it was counterfeited in Russia.
Last year, 150 million bottles of "Georgian" wine, much of it plonk, was sold on the Russian market, although Georgia produced only 50 million bottles in 2005. Cheap Moldovan, Romanian, Hungarian and Bulgarian wine was relabeled as Georgian and sold in Russia, where Georgia's wines, particularly semisweet and semi-dry varieties, have been beloved since the armies of the czar swept in here in the 18th century.
"The Russian market was very easy -- too easy. You could sell anything," said George Margvelashvili, the president of Tbilvino, a winery based on the edge of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, that produces some of the country's finer vintages. "This crisis is forcing new ideas into the industry -- how to produce better and better wine and how to market it."
Margvelashvili's company and other vintners are now attempting to break into new markets from China to the United States, where he is currently negotiating with wine brokers. But he said it will be at least three more years before his factory is back to 2005 levels of production. Last year, he sold 1.5 million bottles, with 650,000 going to Russia.
"This year we'll be very, very lucky if we sell 800,000 bottles," said Margvelashvili, who has had to lay off 40 of the 125 people who worked at the winery. "Last year we bought 2,600 tons of grapes at harvest time. This year nothing, because we have enough stock to carry us."
To absorb this year's harvest, grapes are being diverted into the manufacture of juices and pure spirit, and Georgian companies have been buying some of the harvest, describing their purchases as a public service. The army is also buying grapes to feed its soldiers.
The Georgian government is also enforcing a quality-control system to root out the persistent problem of counterfeiting. Saakashvili complained at his meeting with ministers that he recently ordered a glass of Mukuzani at a Georgian restaurant in Krakow, Poland, but it bore no relation to the dry, deep red made from grapes grown in Kakheti.
"I tried the wine and it would have been better if I hadn't," said Saakashvili. "It was water with alcohol and dye."
The government has also begun advertising Georgian wine in countries such as Ukraine, where sales are soaring, and officials acknowledge that the standoff with Russia has drawn worldwide attention to the vineyards here.
"Russia has provided us with a lot of free publicity because of its actions," said Mikheil Svimonishvili, the Georgian agriculture minister, who is spending the harvest season from mid-September to mid-October in Kakheti. "We're coping, and I believe this is going to have a positive impact."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0301580_pf.html
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