Soviet sparkling wine

Soviet sparkling wine is a specific term which, in tune with eu law, replaced the term Soviet champagne, or champanskoe, in the early 1990s. Although bottle-fermented sparkling wines have been made in what has variously been called Russia, the Soviet Union, the CIS, and the ex-Soviet republics since the 18th century, consumer demand for sparkling wine was most notably demonstrated at the end of the 19th-century, when the imperial court of Tsar Nicholas II regularly imported 800,000 bottles of, usually sweet, champagne a year. (The late-19th-century Champenois defined champagne sweetened to satisfy the goût russe as one with 273 to 330 g/l of residual sugar, as opposed to the goût anglais of 22 to 66 g/l for the English.)