№ 55 (3205)

11.04.2006

Moldavian and Georgian wine disappeared from most of the stores in Kazan.

According to the phoned messages from Consumer Rights Supervision (Rospotrebnadzor), the bottles were hidden in the warehouses and the resellers demanded from their suppliers to take the unmarketable goods away.

"As far as I know, all the letters by Gennady Onishenko about ban of selling Moldavian and Georgian wine are just letters of recommendation. In other regions, in Bashkiria, for instance, wine is still sold, yet our sanitary inspectors are always ready to serve the authorities" - the head of the Alcohol Association of Tatarstan Alexander Ustinin says.

"Consider that the quality of all spirituous liquors in the Republic is proved before selling it by retail. It turns out that supervise organs do not trust themselves". Certainly the suppliers of wine incur great losses in this situation. "The hidden motive of this wine scandal is political", - Artem Tyumenev, the director of "Real" holding company is fully confident. "I have been to Moldavia and I have seen that they grow the vine without any fertilizers, and many Moldavian wineries work according to the highest standards and by the way many of them belong to Russian business".

"It is not clear what pesticides Onishenko started to talk about. At first you can determine the presence of pesticides just on the early stage of wine producing during the primary fermentation. The representatives of the Russian Consumer Rights Supervision work in Moldavia and if they accept bribes it is only Mr. Onishenko`s problem.

You cannot examine the ready-made wine for pesticides at all: such analysis is impossible in Russia. We are writing a letter to the Russian Consumer Rights Supervision of the Republic of Tatarstan, where we ask to analyze our wine, we shall see what will the answer be... We really do not know how to solve this problem".

The National Alcohol Association examines different choices from court hearings to free distribution of wine. Why not? We cannot just poor out good wine and sending it back to the producer is too expensive. The possibility of such "protest action" must not be ruled out - it is not forbidden to give the wine to drink for free.

"The Evening Kazan" promises to control the situation; we are going to let our readers know there and then if such "Bacchus festival" will take place. Especially since the red wine helps heavy metals out of the organism and this metals are much more dangerous than pesticides yet they are very much on the streets of our city.

Olga MACHNEVA.