Catastrophe. These days you can hardly find a bottle of wine in Russia’s restaurants and supermarkets. They say it’s because imported wines must carry a new sticker and, due to an official screw up, there aren’t enough stickers to go round.

But others see it clearly related to last month’s politically inspired ban. The system is designed to prevent Georgian and Moldavian producers circumventing the ban and selling their wines as Bulgarian, Chilean or what have you.

It’s a hard life in a country where beer is considered a soft-drink and not worth buying a bag of peanuts for, let alone getting a glass out of the cupboard.

Russian booze kiosks face a long lasting Tekhnicheskii Pereriv

According to Vilhelm Konnander:

Retailers expect a loss of some 900 million USD in revenues and that up to a third of Russian liquor stores might close indefinitely.

Previously I suggested that Krasnodar wines might fill the void, but in the case of an all-out drought you will have to start making cocktails from beer to get a hit.

Yerofeyev suggested some in his book, Moskva-Petushki.