Translated material
Prime Ministers Are Asked to Taste
Negotiations on the quality of Moldovan wines at the expert level are suspended
Only negotiations at the highest level can radically change the situation with the supply of wines from Moldova to Russia, exporters of problematic alcohol believe. According to market participants and experts, after yesterday’s statement by Russia’s chief sanitary doctor Gennady Onishchenko, who declared the negotiations on the quality of Moldovan wine that had begun just a few days earlier untimely closed, it became finally clear that the problem can only be resolved politically.“The problem can now be resolved at a level no lower than the prime ministers of the two countries,” Valery Katukov, president of the Association of Alcohol Market Participants (AURA), told Vremya Novostei yesterday immediately after announcing the failure of negotiations at the so-called expert level. Participants in the association of exporters of Moldovan wine products, headed by Mr. Catukov, believe that now the process has finally reached a dead end, and it is possible to get out of it only with the political will of governments.
Let us recall that after the beginning of 2007, Moldovan wines, cognacs and wine materials, after an almost year-long pause , again “flowed” into Russia , until the beginning of 2010, the Russian sanitary and epidemiological services had no special complaints about Moldovan products. It seemed that during the almost year-long excommunication from the Russian market, some positive changes had occurred in the quality of wines from Moldovan suppliers. But in recent months the situation has changed. If you believe the statements of the leadership of the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare (Rospotrebnadzor), there is no need to talk about the quality of wine materials, since they “can be used to paint fences.”
In the only Rospotrebnadzor laboratory working on Moldovan products, located at the Borovsky customs excise terminal near Moscow, batches of low-quality products have increasingly begun to be identified. The main complaint is the presence of impurities and chemical compounds that are unacceptable in food products. So, earlier this week, traces of dibutyl phthalate and pesticides were detected in samples. In total, over the past ten days, more than 220 thousand liters of bottled wine and over 23 thousand deciliters of wine materials from Moldova were rejected for this reason. At the same time, 32 batches of Moldovan wine, cognac and wine materials with a total volume of 297,575 liters, as well as 15,913 decalitres of wine materials were allowed into our country without problems.
But the specific reason for the suspension of the negotiation process was what Gennady Onishchenko considered an unconstructive remark from the Moldovan Minister of Agriculture and Food Industry Valeriy Kosarchuk. In his speeches in response to criticism of Russian sanitary services, he denied the presence of harmful substances in wine samples. “He claimed everything was fine. His statement can cause nothing but bewilderment. Misunderstanding of this demarche forces us to take a break from the consultations that have begun for an indefinite period,” the chief sanitary doctor of Russia said in response.
But this demarche, as Mr. Onishchenko put it, could also be caused by purely technical differences in control methods, believes Valery Katukov. “I myself was once a deputy minister and I can imagine how information flows and how decisions are made,” he told Vremya Novostei. “The fact is that in Moldova there is not a single laboratory as modern as the one located, say, in the Center for Hygiene and Epidemiology in Moscow, where dangerous impurities were identified.” According to the expert, we are not talking about unscrupulous Moldovan winemakers, but rather about the shortcomings of the quality control system as a whole. Most Moldovan wineries make wine from raw materials that they purchase from scattered farmers, and due to the lack of modern laboratory equipment, they are not able to control its quality at the entrance to the workshops. “That’s why we tell them: take your bottles and come with them to Moscow, to our laboratory, and see for yourself whether there are impurities there or not,” notes the head of AURA.
But the pride of Moldovan leaders, apparently, was wounded in this production conflict - they are not going to come to Russia yet. Meanwhile, the department of Gennady Onishchenko equipped two more modern laboratories - in Bryansk and St. Petersburg - precisely with the prospect of servicing the supply of Moldovan wine materials and wine products. There has been a need for them for a long time, taking into account even the current volume of supplies and the specifics of this import direction. “There is a special regime in place now. Moldova is the only external supplier, each batch of wines of which is examined for quality,” explained Mr. Onishchenko.
Thus, we are not talking about a new boycott of Moldovan products, but we cannot expect an expansion of supplies against this background. The trickle of alcoholic beverages from Moldova will continue to trickle out, periodically drying up, unless a decision is made to unify quality control methods, market participants believe. “We have methods of different generations and lack the political determination to agree on such seemingly obvious issues,” concludes Valery Katukov.