Sovetskoye Shampanskoye - History

History

Russian Tsar Pavel I first brought together Crimean vines and French master Champagne-makers but it was a Russian aristocrat, Prince Golitsyn, who established the first economically successful Russian sparkling wine at Abrau-Dyurso. So successful was Golitsyn that in 1900 at the Paris World Fair, Novy Svet champagne defeated all the French entries to claim the internationally coveted 'Grand Prix de Champagne'.

When the Russian revolution swept the Bolsheviks to power in October 1917 the brand name-industry was nearly washed away. But as the Soviet Union developed in the early 1920s, the government asked the Russian wine-makers to devise a recipe for a new 'champagne for the people' that would be cheap, quick to produce and accessible to the working masses. The new brand, named "Sovetskoye Shampanskoye", was created in 1928 by a Sovnarkhoz team. The "father" of the new technology was Anton Frolov-Bagreyev, a former employee of Prince Golitsyn at Abrau-Dyurso. Interestingly, in a dramatic incident during the Russian civil war, Frolov-Bagreyev had nearly been killed for refusing the demand of a proletarian squad to yield all of the factory's wine stock. He only survived because of the help of the factory workers who hid him behind the wine barrels and alerted the Soviet authorities. Frolov-Bagreyev went on to receive a number of state scholarships, academic degrees, and the Stalin Prize for his work in Soviet wine-making. The technology of production was further improved and made more economical in 1953 by Professor Georgy Agabalyanc, who received the Lenin Prize for that achievement. In 1975 Moët & Chandon bought licence of production of sparkling wine by Soviet method.