Sparkling Bisser from Ukraine

The Plachkovs founded their family winery in 2005 in order to produce premium local wines. Kolonist winery is situated in a famous Ukrainian wine producing region – Danubian Bessarabia (south of Odessa region), where viticulture has been a long established tradition ever since the Greeks and the Thracians for the first time have discovered these fertile soils.

In 2007 a famous enologist from Bordeaux, France, Mr.Olivier Dauga joined Kolonist and today Kolonist wines can be found not only in the best restaurants, various wine shops or wine bars in Ukraine, but also abroad.

Kolonist creates a brand of the Ukrainian wine, making two wines from Ukrainian grape varieties: Sukholymansky white and Odessa black. The company focuses its attention on high-quality dry wines as well as produces semi-dry and sweet wines.

The land of Danubian Bessarabia, where Ivan Plachkov comes from, has always been involved in vine growing and winemaking. All ethnic Bulgarians who live there for several centuries were producing good quality grapes and were making good wines at home. Ivan Plachkov founded a family winery, built it from scratch, with the purpose to show an enormous potential of the land and the people who live and work there. And he named the winery Kolonist in honour of the Bulgarian colonists who came to these lands several centuries ago.

Total annual production does not exceed 200 000 bottles, which allows paying more attention to the quality of wine and innovations.

At the end of 2016 the first tirage of Kolonist sparkling was finally presented for the audience. Kolonist called its sparkling Bisser. In Slavonic language – the word bisse is associated with the beads or marbles for embroidery. The word brings the image of multi-coloured tiny beads for embroidery when you see the play of bubbles – perlage – in your glass.

Bisser is a sparkling white brut, made by the methode traditionelle, with the ageing for 1.5 years on lees. It is the first trial of Kolonist with sparkling. The first tirage is only 3500 bottles, but a big part of bottles was not disgorged and was left in the cellars on lees for longer period. In the future they would like to produce 50,000 bottles. In addition, they would also like to produce brut rosé, extra brut white and vintage sparkling wine.

Written by Tatiana Mann