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HISTORICAL VITICULTURAL APPELLATION OF PHANAGORIA

Fanagoria Wine Company - No. 1 Russian producer of estate grape wines, is located in the Taman Peninsula between the Black and Azov Seas. The Winery is named after the ancient Greek polis of Phanagoria founded at this place cca. in 542 BC by the refugees from the Hellenic Theos headed by Phanagor after their mother city had been seized by the Persian King Cyrus II.

It was the ancient Greek settlers who first noticed that the climatic, geographical, soil characteristics of the region were propitious for viticulture. The earliest wineries found by archeologists at this place, date back to the 3rd century BC. Moreover, the historical viticultural appellation of Phanagoria is located at the foothills of the Main Caucasus Range known as the cradle of the world's winemaking, in close proximity to the Crimean Peninsula with its renowned dessert wines and Abrau-Durso viticultural appellation famous for its Soviet Champagne.

The appellation of Phanagoria is located in latitude 45° North, as famous Bordeaux and Torino are. It benefits from fresh breezes from the nearby 2 seas, abundant sunshine, and warm fall lasting until grape harvest has been collected. It is these factors as well as grape-friendly soil and human care that shape the uniqueness of the Fanagorian wines.

The ancient polis of Phanagoria was situated on an island called Isle of Phanagor. Finds of painted pottery, amphorae, and terracottas have proved the data from the written sources stating that the polis had been founded somewhere in the third quarter of the 6th century BC.

A fragment of a silicon tool, a silicon arrow-head, and a fragment of a stone axe found in the most ancient cultural layers of the settlement, have proved that the area of what later became the ancient Greek Phanagoria, had been inhabited long before that. Many classical historians mentioned the tribes that had settled in the Taman Peninsula, although they referred to the latter as to an island, or even an archipelago. Strabo, for instance, wrote that at the beginning of the 1st century AD, there had been 5 islands there separated from one another by sea gulfs, bays, and branches of the Kuban River (Hipanis in Hellenic), and later merged together by the alluvia from the Kuban estuary. At that time, the main branch of the river flew into the Black Sea, while its several other branches emptied into the Sea of Azov. It was not earlier than in the 11th century that that united island called Isle of Phanagor, had merged with the mainland. Some sources (Pseudo-Scilak) informed that Phanagoria had been part of Sindica, while according to Strabo, Phanagoria and the nearby city of Kepoi (the present-day town of Sennoi is located on the sites of these two ancient cities) had been located on the land of the Maeotian tribes later assimilated with the Alani (in some historians' opinion, a Germanic-Sarmatian people, or, according to others, the ancestors of the modern Ossetians) and had never belonged to Sindica. One thing is indubitable - before the Greeks appeared in the Taman, that land had already been inhabited by some agrarian tribes.

Agriculture, viniculture and wine-making formed the economic basis of ancient Phanagoria. As early as in the 6th century BC, painted pottery, terracottas, wine and oil were imported there from the Ionic cities. In amphorae, the traders imported Chiosan wine famous all around the Mediterranean. From Phanagoria, the ships exported bread, meat, fish, and leather. At the end of the 5th century BC, Phanagoria had its own mint producing silver coins. In the 4th - 2nd centuries BC, Phanagoria ranked high among the major economic centres of the Kingdom of Bosporus. The earliest finds of grape stones refer to the Phanagorian layers of the 5th - 4th centuries BC, while the earliest dishes, terracottas, tile, pithoses and amphorae for wine may be referred to the second half of the 4th century BC. Finds of measuring vessels meant for the retail sale of wine, and images of a grape bunch minted on the coins, serve evidences of the fact that viniculture and wine-making were habitual for the inhabitants of Phanagoria. At that time, the city streets were paved, mainly with cobblestone imported from Greece, in the city there were numerous stone wells, public buildings, temples, a statue of Aphrodite Urania Apatura, and one or two sanctuaries devoted to Apollo. Phanagoria had brisk trade relations with Heracleia, Panticapaeum, and also with the settlements of the Kuban riverside, to which wine, oil and pieces of art were transported from the Greek cities. Finds of amphorae made in Sinope, Thasos, Rhodes, Chersonessus, and the Bosporus have proved broad scope of the Phanagorian trade in the 4th - 2nd centuries BC. The Kingdom of Bosporus then used to be a major state formation in the Northern Black Sea area. It was located on both sides of the Cimmerian Bosporus (now - the Strait of Kerch), occupying its European (the East Crimea including Theodosia, and the whole Kerch Peninsula) and Asian (the Taman Peninsula and the adjacent areas up to the foothills of the North Caucasus, and the area around the Tanais - Don estuary) parts. At the beginning of the 1st century BC, the Pontic King Mithridates VI Eupatorus united the Greek colonies of the Northern Black Sea area under the common name of the Kingdom of Bosporus. At that time, Phanagoria had its acropolis or fortress later burnt out during the rebellion of Phanagorians against Mithridates. After the citizens' victory and Mithridates' death, Rome insisted upon granting Phanagoria autonomy, as the city had contributed much to the death of the Roman enemy, and to the Romans' strengthening in the Bosporus. However, in the middle of the 1st century BC, Mithridates' son Pharnaces besieged and ruined the city. During Queen Dinnamia's fight against the Roman influence in the Bosporus, Phanagoria took the side of the Queen. Rome had to acknowledge the new Bosporan dynasty, and Dinnamia, in her turn, as a sign of her loyalty to Rome, gave Phanagoria a new name - Agrippia. In the first centuries AD, three wineries - cemented or stone grounds meant for grape juice pressing, were erected amid the residential houses. The grapes used to be pressed by feet, and the remaining pulp was additionally squashed in sacks or hampers. One of the wineries (100 m2) had 5 pressing grounds and 3 tanks joined together by means of a sophisticated system of surface and underground drains. It is the biggest among those known in the Northern Black Sea area. A significant part of the pottery of the 2nd century BC were amphorae. At that time, Phanagoria remained a major trading centre keeping contacts with the poleis of Asia Minor and Alexandria.

Viniculture and wine selling into the Kuban River area were significant branches of the economy of Phanagoria, Panticapaeum, and other Bosporan cities. Strabo wrote of that period that in the Bosporus, grape vine was grown with great care, earthed up for winter, and therefore we may guess that in that area some peculiar trailing grape varieties used to be cultivated. In the 3rd century BC, on the place of the public edifices in the city centre, was erected a winery whose remnants (fragments of 2 tanks - reservoirs for drainage of the pressed-out juice; and of 7 pithoses) preserved until now. It is noteworthy that originally, in the northern Black Sea area aboriginal grape varieties had been cultivated, whereas at the beginning of AD, due to selection and imports from Greece, there appeared grapes with bigger seeds and fruit. Most likely, grapes used to be predominantly grown in the areas adjacent to the Greek poleis.

In the 4th century AD, Phanagoria still remained an important city, while many other Bosporan cities had by that time been ruined by the Goths. At the end of the 4th century, the Huns encroached upon the Bosporus. Their first wave went westwards, while the other, having turned round the Sea of Azov, attacked Phanagoria. Since then, the Bosporan Kingdom had ceased its existence, but the city itself was later rebuilt. Excavations unearthed fragments of constructions dated the 5th - 9th centuries.

In the Middle Ages, the Taman Peninsula was the location of the old-Rus Tmutarakan Principality. In 965, the Kyiv Prince Sviatoslav attacked the Khazars living along the Don and the Donets, whereupon the ex-Bosporan lands became a colony of Kyiv (Kiev). Sviatoslav's son Volodymyr (Vladimir) baptized in Crimean Chersonessus, shared his lands to his 12 sons begotten in paganism, and sent away his former wives with them. One of his younger sons - Mstyslav - was granted the far-away Tomatorkan (the Greek Tamatarkha on the site of the present-day Cossack village of Taman 23 km off Sennoi). After Volodymyr's death in 1015, Mstyslav's principality became an independent state that broke off its relations with Kyiv. Such state of affairs lasted for cca. 100 years, and then the area was conquered by the Adygei. Byzantine, Venetian merchants used to trade there, but in 1395 the city was thoroughly devastated by the army of the Mongol Khan Tamerlane (Timur), and in 1486 - by the Muslim army...

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In the Russian Empire, under Catherine Great, a nursery garden was founded in North Caucasus which had 25 thousand vines brought from the Crimea. Viticulture in the Taman Peninsula re-established in the 70's of the 1th century. From 1875 until 1894, the acreage of the vineyards in Kuban Oblast (Region) grew from 600 up to 6,875 acres, i.e. over 10 times. First Phylloxera-resistant cuttings were brought from France. They were mainly white varieties: Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Clairette blanche. The Temriuk Viticulture and Winemaking Administration was opened to control nearly 60% of all vineyards in Kuban Oblast. At the end of the 19th century, the annual grape yield in Kuban Oblast equaled to 526,000 poods (approx. 8.6 thousand tons), with additional 84,000 poods (approx. 1.4 thousand tons in Blask Sea Province). Before World War I, the yearly grape yield in Kuban area totaled at 1 million poods (16.3 thousand tons). At the end of the 19th century, just in Black Sea Province nearly 100 thousand buckets of grape wine were annually produced. The grapes were used not only to make wine: part of them were dry-cured to make raisin, others were consumed as fresh fruit. The vineyards were constructed according to the Burgundy pattern (both row-spacing and distance between two neighbouring plants equaled to 1.5 - 2 m, with a 40 cm high stem).

From the 20's until the beginning of the 50's of the 20th century, the Taman vineyards' acreage had practically not been growing, nor wine bottling industry had been developing. Only in 1959, according to the Order of Krasnodar Krai Agricultural Administration, 14 specialized winegrowing sovkhozes were organized (in 1983 - 23 specialized state farms). The area of the vineyards in Temriuk Rayon grew from 3,500 hectares in 1957 ã. up to 30,700 hectares in 1983. At the same time, however, the previously applied French planting system had been replaced by the Californian one (row-spacing - 4 m, distance between 2 plants - 2.5 - 3 m, a 1.5 m high vine stem). As a result of that, the gross yield grew (reaching 140,000 tons a year), but the sugar contents in a fruit declined, and, consequently, the wine acidity rose.

By the end of the 70's, the fruit-bearing rootstock vineyards had been destroyed by Phylloxera, the fruit yield had reduced drastically, and the only feasible remedy was a replacement of those vines with phylloxera-resistant American rootstocks on which European grapes could be grafted. The use of the grafts, irrespective of its high labour cost due to the necessity of production of grafted cuttings, selection of disease-resistant rootstocks, additional care required by the vineyards, has proved to remain the most reliable way of planting lasting high-yield vineyards. In the mid-80's, over 60 grape varieties were cultivated in Temriuk Rayon, among them 22 were table varieties (15% of the total stock). Most popular winemaking varieties were Rkatsiteli (20.7%), Riesling (10.4%), Traminer (9.2%), Cabernet (5.2% of the total vineyards area).

With the approach of the Law on Struggle with Alcoholism in 1985, many wineries began to go out of business; the winemakers having lost their jobs, moved into other fields, and at the time of "Repeal" which coincided with the collapse of the USSR, the wine distribution system had broken down. So, in 2001 in Temriuk Rayon 81,059 tons of grapes were gathered (in total, Krasnodar Krai yielded less than 120 thousand tons), while in 1983 the yield in Temriuk Rayon had exceeded 112 thousand tons. Currently, the winegrowing farms are facing the necessity to stub out its old vines as well as to significantly increase the area of new plantings. By 2007, it is estimated to allocate 26 thousand hectares for the new vineyards.

Uniqueness of the terroir of the Taman Peninsula (fresh breezes blowing at once from 2 seas, the number of sunny days higher than in Yalta or Sochi, lengthy warm autumn, the soil good for vine-growing), makes it possible to grow there such high-quality grape varieties as Cabernet-Sauvignon, Merlot, Aligote, Saperavi, as well as the "Champagne" varieties: Traminer, Pinot-Noir, Chardonnay, Pinot-Gris, Pinot-Blanc, Sauvignon.
Similarly to Bordeaux, the fruit in Taman need heightened sugar contents, therefore the farms in the area have lately resumed using the French planting system with a low stem. The Cabernet-Sauvignon, Merlot plantings whose cuttings had been bought by Fanagoria Wine Company several years ago in one of the French nurseries, gave their first yields. It is from these grapes that Fanagoria hopes to have its first "Appellation of Origin Controlled" wines in a near future: the corresponding selection work is being carried out; these vineyards have been acknowledged the most pure-varietal and virus-free in Krasnodar Krai. However, such plantings are an exception rather than the rule, for the French technologies are quite expensive and labour consuming.

… In the 3rd century AD, there was a big winery in the centre of the polis of Phanagoria, with many smaller ones in the yards of its dwellers. During the archaeologist seasons of 2001 and 2003, 2 small wineries obviously dated 3rd century AD, were found in 500 m from the present-day Fanagoria winery. One of them will this year be reconstructed in the Company's yard, and will be available for numerous visitors of Fanagoria Tasting Hall.