Centre for Wine Education "Laboratory of Wine - WineLab" supports Russian Wines Competition 2020
The Wine Laboratory was founded in 2015 by Dmitry Kovalyov-Fedosov and Alexei Sapsay in the form of offline seminars to support the educational sections of the Our Wine portal.
It developed the country's first crash course for novice winemakers and wine investors. The first courses were held over five days in Gelendzhik in November 2015 and brought together more than 30 winemakers from the South of Russia, including such well-known masters as Dmitry Gusev, Valery Nesterov, German Valdheim, Sergey Dubinin and many others.
Over time, the programme developed into a 200-hour course, "Management of a wine enterprise", which comprises three modules: "Viticulture", "Winemaking" and "Marketing". During the course, students are not only trained by leading young Russian specialists, many of whom have themselves been trained and educated abroad, but they also taste dozens of international and Russian wines, and visit the best small and medium-sized wineries that have been established in the last few years. The course’s main goal is to give the investor and the winemaker-grower (this is generally one and the same person) a complete picture of the current challenges in the industry, help them draw up a detailed concept of their project and ultimately realise the complexities of the integrated management of a modern winery, while enabling them to make effective management decisions. Similar courses have been held in Gelendzhik, Novorossiysk, Sevastopol and Koktebel. The students included winemakers from Crimea, Don, Kuban, Dagestan and Stavropol, as well as representatives from neighbouring countries and such nascent Russian wine regions as Voronezh and Samara.
In 2016, a training programme for sommeliers, wine merchants and restaurateurs was added to the "Management of a wine enterprise" block. Courses are held in Sevastopol each spring and autumn. This is a project under development, designed to take a fresh approach to the training of wine service personnel. Gastronomic master classes conducted by qualified cooks and sommeliers such as Nikolai Skiba and Alyona Zhelobkova play a key role, as does the author’s course “Physiology of Taste” by Jan Kaurov, which has no parallel in Russia. Students visit over ten modern wineries during their training and also the Summit of Russian Winemakers during the autumn course. In particular, students directly observe certain winery processes and participate in the harvest. Leading sommeliers and teachers from wine schools in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Rostov-on-Don are involved in the training.
The Laboratory of Wine’s corporate clients include Abrau-Durso, Solnechnaya Dolina, Satera, Simple company, Mriya hotels, Crimean Breeze and Aquamarine, as well as many others.
“We are happy to support Leonid Fadeev’s noble initiative, Russian Wines Competition 2020, and hope that he is able to turn it into a regular expert platform for assessing the quality of Russian wines. One important aspect is that all samples are Russian wines that are currently on the market; these are purchased from retail outlets for the competition. When evaluating Russian wines, a certain categorisation has been developed that considers “supermarket” wines separately to “premium” ones. The latter receive high scores both domestically and internationally, but are not physically accessible to most Russians. Thus, it is in the public interest to compare wines that are completely different in terms of price and to see them through the eyes of the world's leading professionals gathered together in a tasting jury.”- Dmitry Kovalev-Fedosov, Co-founder of the Wine Laboratory - WineLab.
I would like to express my gratitude to Dmitry Kovalev-Fedosov for his support of the Wine Laboratory - WineLab.
Competition sponsor: Cote Rocheuse JSC.
LEONID FADEEV, Stage 2 MW Student, WSET/IWSC “The Future 50 Awards” winner, Weinakademiker, DipWSET, WorldSom Magister Sommelier.