Massandra winery

The winery was founded by Knyaz Lev Golitsyn in 1894 under the aegis of Czar Nicholas II. In 1922, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, the winery was nationalized, and it was protected by a law passed in 1936 that offered state protection to its cellars. The guestbook of the winery was stolen by the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War. The winery was exempted from the uprooting of Russian vineyards that occurred in the wake of anti-alcohol laws passed by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. In the present day, the vast majority of the winery's output is exported to Russia. The ownership of the winery was illegally transferred to Russia from the Ukrainian government with the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. The enoteca of the winery contains about one million bottles of wine.