Wine Production and Culture in Tsarist Russia

FAIN: FA-251394-17

Stephen Vincent Bittner
California State University (Rohnert Park, CA 94928-3609)

A book-length study on the wine economies and cultures of the Black Sea during Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.

"Whites and Reds: Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar" examines the two centuries of interaction between Russia and the wine economies and cultures of the Black Sea--Bessarabia (Moldova), Crimea, and Georgia. After the Russian Empire annexed these territories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, wine became an increasingly important part of Russian and Soviet culture--as a luxury item, a mark of refinement, and an object of connoisseurship. Consequently, by the mid-1980s the Soviet Union was the world's fourth largest producer of wine, trailing only Spain, France, and Italy. "Whites and Reds" contributes to two of the most active arenas of debate in the historiography of Russia and the Soviet Union: studies of imperialism and consumption. I intend to use an NEH Fellowship to complete the research and writing of this untold and significant history.

Associated Products

Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar (Book)
Title: Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar
Author: Stephen V. Bittner
Abstract: Whites and Reds: Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar tells the story of Russia’s encounter with viniculture and winemaking. Rooted in the early-seventeenth century, embraced by Peter the Great, and then magnified many times over by the annexation of the indigenous wine economies and cultures of Georgia, Crimea, and Moldova in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, viniculture and winemaking became an important indicator of Russia’s place at the European table. While the Russian Revolution in 1917 left many of the empire’s vineyards and wineries in ruins, it did not alter the political and cultural meanings attached to wine. Stalin himself embraced champagne as part of the good life of socialism, and the Soviet Union became a winemaking superpower in its own right, trailing only Spain, Italy, and France in the volume of its production. Whites and Reds illuminates the ideas, controversies, political alliances, technologies, business practices, international networks, and, of course, the growers, vintners, connoisseurs, and consumers who shaped the history of wine in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union over more than two centuries. Because wine was domesticated by virtue of imperialism, its history reveals many of the instabilities and peculiarities of the Russian and Soviet empires. Over two centuries, the production and consumption patterns of peripheral territories near the Black Sea and in the Caucasus became a hallmark of Russian and Soviet civilizational identity and cultural refinement. Wine in Russia was always more than something to drink.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/whites-and-reds-a-history-of-wine-in-the-lands-of-tsar-and-commissar/oclc/1268402606&referer=brief_results
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780198784821
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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