The global financial meltdown caused a serious damage to some of the major players in wine imports in Russia. Several small and middle-size wine importers have already stopped their operations and the producers they deal with have to seek new importers. Quite a known company Magister Bibendi used to import New World and Spanish wines and stopped operating on the market some time ago. Its director, Oleg Osipov, a former head of a leading wine importer Whitehall, had to close the business down and even sell some of the private assets to cope with the situation. The Saint-Petersburg importing company Svarog seized its operations in Moscow too. Some of the other leading wine importers do lose their producers to the crisis natural selection – if you can’t sell the wine, get rid of it faster.