Moldova records 790-thousand-dekalitre wine exports to Russia since early 2013

Moldova exported 1100 batches of wine and brandy on the Russian market since the beginning of 2013 until 18 March, which amounts to 792.5 thousand dekalitres, the Rospotrebnadzor Russian Federal Sanitary Service has reported.

According to the Russian sanitary service, all of the Moldovan spirits and wine samples that had been subject to expertise in Rospotrebnadzor’s laboratories in January-March 2013 complied with the hygienic norms.

Rospotrebnadzor said «only 16 Moldovan companies» are currently exporting wine on the Russian market. Almost 50 Moldovan companies are now delivering alcoholic goods on the Russian market, after several wine producers received authorisation to export their goods to Russia in 2012. Rospotrebnadzor announced in late 2012 that it requested samples and documents from four more Moldovan companies in order to register them in compliance with the state registration procedure, so that their goods would be authorised to be exported on the Russian market.

Acting Agriculture and Food Industry Minister Vasile Bumacov said the low amount of exports in early 2013 was due to the relatively small number of Moldovan companies, which export their alcoholic products on the Russian market. Thus, Rospotrebnadzor checked 1155 batches of almost 89 thousand dekalitres of alcoholic beverages at the Russian customs in the first quarter of 2012.

«Wine producers are obliged to perform certain procedures and buy excise stamps, which naturally diminishes the number of exporters,» the chairman of the Moldovan Oenologists Union, Gheorghe Arpentin, said. He added that the wine crisis in 2006 had influenced Moldovan wine producers to be more careful and to consider export markets other than the Russian one. Therefore, the amount of Moldovan wine exports on the EU market has doubled.

The Rospotrebnadzor Russian Federal Sanitary Service had recently announced that it had started to examine the opportunity to diversify the trademarks of Moldovan alcoholic beverages exported on the Russian market, due to an increased demand coming from several Moldovan companies. «We keep receiving requests from Moldovan wine producers. More than 10 Moldovan companies are planning to extend the list of products they export on the Russian market,» the institution’s press release reads.

According to Rospotrebnadzor’s data, Moldovan companies exported more than 36 million litres of alcoholic beverages on the Russian market in 2012.

Adapted from Moldpres