Moscow Says Bottoms Up for Crimean Wine

(TIME) - The region’s wine is now being promoted by a Russian government to a nation increasingly thirsty for the stuff. For the future of the region’s bottles, that may not be such a good thing after all.

In the era of Czar Nicholas I, Crimean wine was treasured by Russians as the best in the empire. Now those bottles are making their way back to the Kremlin’s cellar.

“Crimea was the jewel in the Russian wine crown when it first belonged to Russia,” Jancis Robinson, co-author of the World Atlas of Wine, told TIME.

And now that that jewel has been taken back, it’s getting the star treatment. Russia’s annexation of southern Ukraine has seeded a new opportunity for Crimean winemakers. Wineries are optimistic that the change in political leadership will help their businesses. Not too long after Russian troops arrived in the region, government officials began asking retailers to promote Crimean wines in their stores. Last week, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said the government would support the Crimean wine industry in his plan for the region’s economic overhaul.

While Ukrainian and Russian wines are well-known in their immediate area, “almost none of these wines reach the U.S., and most that are seen here are in local ethnic markets,” says Christy Canterbury, one of 312 Masters of Wine, a group of international wine professionals. In 2011, 26.7 million liters of wine were produced worldwide, 225,000 of them in Ukraine and 575,000 in Russia. Those bottles have little presence outside Eastern Europe, and many nations whose production levels fall in between—Brazil, Austria and New Zealand for example—are much better-represented on international shelves and menus.