It’s not a secret that weaker companies lost some of their producers during the financial downturn 2008-2009. Another big established importer — Simple – for a long time was known for its aggressive behavior on the market. Just recently Simple has taken two famous Champagne brands from other importers – Laurent-Perrier from Kazumian and Gosset from Graft Trading (seems like they went bankrupt, their web-site not responding).

And that’s not all. Another established importer Vinicom seems to be losing some of its producers. The very same Simple has just overtaken the imports and distribution of the famous Cognac house – Hine. My sources told me the cognac house was very unhappy of the way Vinicom staff works and obviously not happy with the sales in Russia.

And this is not the first time Simple attracts a producer from Vinicom – Villa Sparina from Italy’s Gavi was taken on board just about a year ago.

Still, on Vinicom’s poor web-site anyone can see that both Villa Sparina and Hine brands are still on the list. I even don’t think that this is done on purpose to delude its customers – they just don’t care about their customers coming to their web-sites. The same way you can see the strategy of Kazumian – Laurent-Perrier Champagne still listing on their web site.

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.