Shadows are lengthening. The air turns soft. Autumn is here and in the vineyards of Crimea, grapevine leaves have turned red and yellow. Soon, Massandra, a winery near Yalta built in the 19th century to supply wines for Nicholas II, the last Russian tsar, will begin turning this year’s harvest into bottles of nectar, like the desert wine that beguiled me called “Seventh Heaven.”

Though it is four months since I was in Crimea—now part of Ukraine, once part of the Soviet Union—the thought of the harvest summons the lovely afternoon I spent tasting wines with Galina Ivanovna Myayeva, Massandra’s deputy director of international trade. Galina, who is 72, was “born among the barrels,” she says. Her father and mother were in the wine business. As you might expect, she has a well formed opinion about each and every grape that comes on to the premises, and each and every bottle of wine that gets shipped out.

She offers a Muscat that tastes of raisins; a topaz colored Riesling with the scent of alpine meadows and port the color of rubies with the fragrance of violets.

Winemaking in Crimea is more than 2500 years old, which makes Massandra a relative newcomer. The Greeks, who colonized the Crimean coast, grew grapes in the rocky limestone soils that overlook the Black Sea. Crimea’s average of 300 sunny days a year and the dark shale soils that hold heat during the day and radiate it back at night provide the perfect combination for Crimea’s trademark desert wines.

Galina Ivanovna, a large woman who stands foursquare on thick, stocky legs, is ferocious in her passion for the wine produced by this flinty soil--as the Soviet Politburo discovered 25 years ago.

In 1985, the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, launched an anti-alcohol campaign conceived with good intentions, but with negative consequences that far outweighed the gains. Between 1985 and 1987, vineyards totaling 265,000 hectares of land were destroyed. Wine production fell by more than half.

“Gorbie’s edict undermined the whole industry. but Massandra did not cut one single vine,” Galina informed me. “Those were the times when a wedding party would serve milk or juice.” Her scowl telegraphed exactly how she felt about that.

Galina wasn’t about to let the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union have the last word. She and the chairman of the winery came up with a clever strategy: if they couldn’t sell wine in the Soviet Union, why shouldn’t they be allowed to export it? So they leaned on a bigwig boss in Kiev with connections in Moscow, and took 24 samples of their wine to the agriculture committee in charge of such matters. “At first no one wanted to taste them,” she said. “Finally a phone call came from the Kiev boss and they tasted. Later a letter came saying we could continue to produce our wines as long as we sold them abroad.”

There was one catch: “We also had to produce grape juice,” Galina said. Her scowl deepened. “Our wine maker was having a heart attack.”

Can you blame him? Would you ever ask Horowitz to play "Chopsticks"?

“I calmed him down,” Galina said. “I told him: ‘Nowadays, every aircraft factory has to produce skillets. Let this be our skillet.’”

Massandra survived. “But I will never forgive Gorbachev. He tried to forbid what was created by God.”

“The edict was a Pyrrhic victory,” say Andrei Vroublevsky and Judith Harwin in the book, Alcohol and Emerging Markets: Patterns, Problems, and Responses. Official figures inflated the drop in consumption, illicit spirit production shot up, people turned to drugs or drank fluids like window cleaner, and commercial relations with wine producing countries like Moldova and Georgia were damaged.

Among the more poignant losses from the edict was Pavel Golodriga, a specialist who worked for the Research Institute on Winemaking in Yalta. He was an expert in grape hybridization and selection; when told to stop his work, he became distraught. One night he stayed late at work. In the morning they found his lifeless body hanging from a rope. He left a note for his wife saying he had no reason to live.

“There are very few people for whom their occupation is more than their life,” said Valentina Voronyu, a winemaker at Inkerman, another of Crimea’s premier wineries. She added quietly: “I do understand. They are rare people.” —Cathy Newman

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