Chateau Chizay in Ukraine. (Photo credit: Wines of Ukraine)

Ukrainian resistance can be found in the most unexpected places right now. Among the more surprising areas is within the country’s wine industry. In Euronews, Paul Stafford reports on how Ukranian winemakers are standing up in the face of Russian aggression.

Retailers around the world are dropping Russian products from their shelves, but many are aiming at the wrong targets, says Don Kavanagh in Wine-Searcher. “Well-meaning retailers across the US and in parts of Europe have been taking vodka brands like Smirnoff and Stolichnaya off the shelves in solidarity with Ukraine, even though those brands no longer have any connection to Russia. Indeed, Stolichnaya went to the trouble of publicly announcing over the weekend that it was definitively NOT a Russian product and was instead a Luxembourg-registered company that makes its spirit in Latvia.”

New energy, a return to indigenous grape varieties, and experimental techniques make it high time to explore the full spectrum of Lebanon’s wines. In SevenFifty Daily, Courtney Schiessl Magrini explores the world of Lebanese wines beyond Chateau Musar.

“German Crémant is one of sparkling wine’s best-kept secrets,” writes Nicole Wolbers in TRINK. “The high-quality classification requires strict hand harvesting and whole-bunch pressing to ensure that only the purest juice is used. Since its legalization over a decade ago, it has built a sparkling identity for itself, separate from its more established cousin Sekt.”

On the Wine Gourd blog, David Morrison looks at wine consumption data and finds that global wine consumption has actually been declining for a long time.

In Wine Enthusiast, Anna Lee C. Iijima on what “lanolin” means in wine.

In Wine-Searcher, W. Blake Gray offers an update on last week’s 2022 Premiere Napa Valley auction, which “showed that the appetite for expensive Napa wine is unabated. Despite concerns over 2020 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons, the average bottle price at the auction was $230, higher than it has been in at least five years. It’s not 2015, when the average peaked at $286, but it’s a step up on last year’s $227.”