History
A wine culture existed in today's Ukraine already in the 4th century BC at the south coast of the Crimea. Presses and amphoras were found from this period. Wine cultivation in the northern part of the country (around Kiev and Chernihiv) however only started in the 11th century by monks.
Under Catherine II. (1729–1796) in 1783 the Crimea became a part of the Russian Empire. Count Mikhail Vorontsov planted the first wine gardens in 1820 and established a large winery near Yalta. The viticulture research institute Magarach was founded then in 1828. The founder of the famous sparkling wines is prince Lev Golitsyn, who for the first time manufactured Russian “Champagner” after the Crimean War (1854 to 1856) on his property Novyi Svet near Yalta. Later, under the last Tzar Nicholas II (1868–1918) the today's state winery of Massandra was founded. During Soviet times Ukraine with 2,500 km2 (965 sq mi) was the largest supplier of the wines in the USSR. It came to a disaster in 1986: about 800 km2 (309 sq mi) of the vineyards were destroyed, when Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev started a campaign for the delimitation of the consumption of alcohol in USSR. Since 2000 the production as well as the export of the wines increased rapidly.
Read more about this topic: Ukrainian Wine
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
—Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)