Wine press in Russia seizing

Sun, 17 May 2009 13:03:45 +0000

Russian wine magazines continue to disappear. At the end of 2008 several wine magazines were struggling to survive in a crisis meltdown and lack of advertising. If we look into the past we can categorize the wine magazines in Russia as virtually “independent” and the ones belonging to big wine importers. Obviously the latter always have been using these magazines as their PR and educative force on the wine market. But among their advantages always were good quality and circulation consistency. Because of their big supporters they could survive during all the uncertainty of the Russian financial policy.

The most known “independent” wine magazine Magnum was gone in the beginning of 2009. It was the last time I saw it. Its editor in chief and co-owner Igor Serdyuk is now writing for lots of glossy magazines not related to wine and also for some leading Russian business newspapers. Which is good: at last some wine knowledge will go into the masses.

Another long-living project – Vinomania – had to reduce the magazine volume dramatically. Its March 2009 issue is a 64-pages-only edition compared to 100+ in the recent past. Not only the magazine has decreased in volume – it is obviously economizing A LOT on the quality of photographs and articles. Almost a third of the magazine is devoted to a rewrited translation of a Wine Business International article and trying to repeat the article experiment in Moscow wine shops. Good idea with actually a very bad implementation. Being unable to attract any top-notch advertisers the magazines fall into pieces: the magazine contains 4 (!) full-page advertising modules and a dozen small modules. Not sure, how many of them is actually paid advertising.

The third young project that suffered the economical grip is the one belonging to a wine importer – United Distributors – based in Moscow. Honestly, the magazine called Fine Wines (a reference to the wine world famous The World of Fine Wine?) was a concept plagiarism of the existing Simple Wine News magazine, published in collaboration with another well-known importer Simple. Fine Wine started at the end of 2007, made four issues in 2008 and… vanished despite the financial support (or failure to support) of UD.

I would say the only quality magazine that’s left on Russian wine scene is Simple Wine News. For now it’s the only edition successfully going through the economic situation without any significant quality / circulation loss and without firing its own editors.

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Wine press in Russia seizing