Vines at Beykush Winery in Ukraine.
Since 24 February 2022 the world has quickly learned a great deal more about Europe’s second-largest country, Ukraine.
Most notably will be our profound admiration for the Ukrainians’ continued resistance to the invading Russian Army. This is but one item on a long list that includes such things as Ukraine being one of the world’s top exporters of wheat, barley and sunflower seeds. However, many people are also now learning that Ukraine not only has a thriving winemaking sector, but also a rapidly-growing wine-consuming public.
A European history of wine
Given that Kyiv sits at the 50th parallel, the vast majority of Ukraine, down to the Black Sea in the south, sits within what had been traditionally thought of as the optimal climate to cultivate grapes for wine.
The Crimean Peninsula has seen wine presses and amphorae discovered that were from the 4th century BCE. In the following centuries, there would be wine production all along the coast thanks to the establishment of Greek and then Roman towns.
Historically, there has also been winemaking in the Transcarpathia region (Zakarpattia in Ukrainian) which shouldn’t come as a surprise given that it’s a region only 70km away from Hungary’s Tokaj.
But the winemaking through most of Ukraine’s history was largely for personal consumption. Things would change a great deal with the creation of the Soviet Union.
Wine gets big
In the 20th century wine in Ukraine grew massively in terms of volume, but not in terms of quality.
While Georgia has seen the most amount of attention in terms of wine from a former-USSR country, it was actually Ukraine that was the biggest producer. It’s estimated that in the 1980s, before Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign arrived from 1985-1988, Ukraine laid claim to 250 000ha of vineyards. This means that it was an even larger producer of grapes than Languedoc, France’s largest region.
To accomplish this, vineyards were located primarily down around the Black Sea regions where the landscape is flat and easy to work with tractors. Given the deep, rich, alluvial soils, production was massive. These choices in the vineyards, combined with winery facilities that were focused on quantity over quality, led to a massive decline in the perception of domestic wine.
Following the breakup of the Soviet Union the collectivised wineries collapsed, vineyards either died or were grubbed up for the more sensible production of grains and the industry shrank on all fronts.
The seeds are replanted
Today, while yet to form a central wine body at a governmental level, Ukraine categorises its wine regions into four parts:
- Transcarpathia (which borders Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland)
- Bessarabia (which sits between Moldova and the Black Sea)
- The overall Black Sea region (running across the south of the country)
- The peninsula of Crimea
The illegal Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 had a profound effect on Ukrainian wine production. Currently, unoccupied Ukraine holds 41 000ha of vines; about the same as all of Piemonte, Italy. In Crimea there is an additional 30 000ha of vines where wineries from all over Ukraine were sourcing grapes. This included one of the main sparkling producers, Artwinery, despite them being located in the caves of an old salt mine very close to the frontlines in Donetsk.
Also getting many of their grapes from Crimea was Chizay in the Transcarpathia region, sitting just 5km from the Hungarian border. But as the export manager, Ihor Radomyselskiy told Decanter, "We needed to have a more stable supply of grapes and more control over the process, so in 2006, we planted 242ha of our own grapes..."
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