In an effort to reduce the presence of wine from EU nations such as France and Italy on its supermarket shelves, as well as reducing its domestic wines' reliance on old world grape seedlings, the Kremlin's department of agriculture has announced that it will invest $100 million in cultivating Crimean wine, Decanter.com reports.
At present Russian wine is to a considerable degree dependent on French and Italian seedlings. The new project, which will result in the production of seedlings in the region subsumed by Russia last year, is planned to be completed by 2020. The Crimean governement says that it at present can only produce about 16 per cent of the grape seedlings it needs by itself.
Vitaly Polishchuk, Crimea’s minister of agriculture, said, “We have completed all the needed calculations and found out that everything should be implemented in time.”
Indeed, at the nadir of the current EU-Russia conflict late last year, Russia considered an outright ban on French wine. If the Crimean operation is successful, similar undertakings may occur throughout Russia, according to Decanter.com.
© 2015 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Peter Donnelly.
