Over the past two decades, Moldovan wines have become one of the key elements in the geopolitical war between Chisinau and Moscow, but also a symbol of Moldova's attempt to escape the Russian influence.
2006: The firs wine war
The first wine war began in April 2006, when the State Duma of the Russian Federation banned wine imports from the Republic of Moldova and Georgia. We will not dwell here on the reasons why the imports of Georgian wines were stopped. As for the Moldovan ones, it was alleged that they contained inadmissible amounts of pesticides and other harmful substances.
The reply of a Russian deputy who tried back then to prove that some of the pesticides that the Moscow authorities had claimed to have discovered in Moldovan wine could not even be used for vines didn’t stand a chance before the “intransigence” of the Chief Sanitary Inspector of Russia at that time, Gennady Onishchenko, the author, at least formally, of the sanctions imposed on Moldovan wines.
Another Russian deputy, Aleksei Mitrofanov, openly stated that, in fact, he was not even interested in the contents of the Moldovan wine and that he voted for the embargo for purely political reasons. “It’s not the grapes that should be tested, but first secretaries like President Voronin”, said Aleksei Mitrofanov, who had called for sanctions against what he would call “anti-Russian regimes”.
The decision to ban wine imports from the Republic of Moldova was taken against the background of the continuing deterioration of the relations between Chisinau and Moscow, after November 2003, when the then Moldovan president, Vladimir Voronin, refused to sign the Kozak Memorandum. This memorandum was a document setting out the criteria for settling the Transnistrian conflict and was drafted by the Kremlin representative Dmitry Kozak. According to the memorandum, the Republic of Moldova was to become a federation, in which Tiraspol would have, among other things, a veto over any decision on the foreign policy of the state, and the Russian troops in Transnistria would have been granted the status of military base for the next 20 years at least. This would have significantly increased Moscow's influence in the region and would have blocked any attempt to bring the Republic of Moldova closer to the West.
Although he had initially accepted Moscow's plan, just hours before the signing ceremony, which was to be attended by the Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, President Voronin decided not to sign the document, following a closed-door discussion with the US Ambassador to Chisinau, Heather Hodges. It is still unknown what the two discussed. What is certain is that Russia's plan failed, and Moscow's relations with the Republic of Moldova turned rather cold. In 2004 and 2005, Chisinau took certain steps towards the West, while also trying to internationalize the settling of the Transnistrian conflict. On 23 March 2005, the Council of the European Union appointed a special representative to the Republic of Moldova to determine the extent to which the EU could contribute to resolving this conflict.
And on December 30, 2005, the prime ministers of Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova, Yuri Yehanurov and Vasile Tarlev, signed an agreement by which the two countries, assisted by a European Union observer mission, pledged to control the goods from Transnistria. These goods did not have the customs stamp of the Republic of Moldova, and therefore were to be considered smuggled goods. The agreement started to be implemented in March 2006, and in April of the same year the first war against the Moldovan wines began.
It should be noted that the first economic pressures on Chisinau were recorded, however, in the spring of 2005, when the Russian authorities banned the import of meat, fruits and vegetables, and on January 1, 2006 they stopped, for about two weeks, the gas supplies to the Republic of Moldova. The ban on Moldovan wines was the culmination of these pressures from Moscow, in an attempt to bring Chisinau back into its orbit and control any developments in the Transnistrian issue.
It looked like they eventually succeeded, as after 2007, Vladimir Voronin began to move further and further away from the West, trying to reconcile with the Kremlin leader and find a solution to the Transnistrian conflict that was agreed by Russia. Thanks to the new approach, wine exports to the Russian Federation were partially resumed, but only if endorsed by the health inspectors in Moscow.
In 2009, the Party of Communists, led by Vladimir Voronin, lost the parliamentary elections after holding a majority in parliament for 8 years. A pro-European alliance came to power in the Republic of Moldova, and the relations with Russia entered new phase of stagnation.
2013: The second wine war
After the total embargo of 2006, important batches of Moldovan wine were again blocked in Russian customs in 2010, after the then interim president, Mihai Ghimpu, signed a decree declaring June 28 as the day of the Soviet occupation. (On June 28, 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, until then territories of the Romanian state.) Moscow denied the political nature of these sanctions, again citing quality reasons.
Against the background of Chisinau's unprecedented rapprochement with the EU, after 2009, in September 2013, Russia completely banned the import of Moldovan wines again. This time, just two months before the signing of the Association Agreement of the Republic of Moldova with the EU, claiming, again, the unsatisfactory quality of the Moldovan wines.
Following this embargo, the European Commission proposed the full opening of the European Union market for Moldovan wines, starting January 1st, 2014, right before the coming into force of the EU-Moldova Association Agreement and the Free Trade Area Agreement.
In fact, this opening of the EU market for Moldovan wines was a blow to the Russian Federation, as Moscow had nothing left to blackmail the Chisinau government, which had gained access to an alternative market.
Russia later opened its market for certain Moldovan wines, in particular for those produced by some companies in the Gagauz region or close to the Party of Socialists, a pro-Russian and anti-European party, whose leader, Igor Dodon, was president of Moldova between 2016 and 2020. These exports have been maintained to this day.
In conclusion
The embargoes imposed by Russia in 2006 and 2013 undoubtedly affected the Moldovan wine producers. Many wineries went bankrupt, others have gone through painful processes of reform or restructuring. While in 2005, the Republic of Moldova exported 280 million USD worth of wine, in 2021 the exports stood at some 157 million.
Generally speaking, 2005 was the peak year of the Moldovan wine exports. Three-quarters of all these exports went to Russia. It is true that there were people in Chisinau at the time bad-mouthing that a large part of those wines was not Moldovan, but was shipped to Odessa (Ukraine) from Spain, then transported to the Republic of Moldova, where the wine would get, not so legally, a certificate of Moldovan origin, to be further exported to Russia.
But how has the situation changed in the 16 years since the first embargo?
Although the quantity of exported wines has dropped, their quality has increased considerably. Until 2006, Moldovan wine exports were mainly directed to Russia, but also to other ex-Soviet states, such as Belarus, Ukraine or Kazakhstan. In 2021, Moldovan wines were exported to 71 countries. The most important market was Romania, where Moldovan wines worth about 22.5 million USD were sold. The structure of the vineyards has changed. The hybrid varieties left over from the Soviet period were abandoned and high-quality technical varieties were planted, mainly local ones such as Feteasca Neagră, Albă or Regală, Rara Neagră (Băbeasca), but also the local selection varieties like, for example, Viorica.
In 2021, the wines produced in the Republic of Moldova won over 1200 medals at international competitions, and in 2022, at the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles, for the first time, a blend of Fetească Neagră and Rară Neagră from the year 2017, produced by a company from the Republic of Moldova, was declared the best red wine in the world.
So, although they initially strongly affected Moldovan wine producers, in the end, the Russian embargoes had the opposite effect . By applying these sanctions, Moscow wanted to keep the Republic of Moldova in its sphere of influence, but now, the Republic of Moldova has become a candidate for EU membership and has also been recognized worldwide as a major producer and exporter of wine. Of course, these achievements would not have been possible without support programs funded by the European Union and the United States.
Post Scriptum
While 8-9 years ago, Russia still used the import of wine as an instrument of geopolitical influence, today it uses energy resources - gas and oil, gas in particular – to the same end. And not only in the case of the Republic of Moldova, but for the whole of Europe, which is blackmailed that it could run out of Russian gas. Exceptions are probably Hungary and Serbia. However, these pressures from Russia may have the opposite effect, as it happened with the Moldovan wines. After the initial shock, other suppliers will appear to replace Gazprom. New gas pipelines will be built, more liquefied gas will be brought in, other types of energy will be used, such as the nuclear one, etc. The United States has already become the largest supplier of gas to the EU, replacing Russia, which used to dominate the EU market. What else will Moscow blackmail the West with then?
