Russian wines – tasting notes

For the first time on a wine trip I felt rather like an explorer on my recent visit to Russia (see From Russia with love). See Russian wine gets real for an overview of what I discovered in the Kuban region across the Black Sea from the Crimea to the east. Below are notes on about half the wines I tasted when I was there. I also tasted another 120 from a quite extraordinary collection of supposedly the best wines made in the Soviet Union during the Soviet era.

One major endemic problem in Russia is sorting out which wines...