OREANDA-NEWS. August 25, 2008. Gennady Onishenko – the Head of the RosPotrebNadzor [Russian federal supervisory agency for consumer goods quality] and Russia’s Chief Federal Sanitary Inspector – has stated "a growing dissatisfaction" over contacts with the Moldovan authorities, and this, he said, "may lead if not to a return to the 2006 situation then to a sharp deceleration of the positive dynamic".

According to the Russian mass media, Gennady Onishenko preferred to not elaborate on the details of his dissatisfaction with such a low quality of cooperation with Chisinau. Instead, he only provided statistical data saying that since the wine embargo lifting, Moldova has already exported to Russia 2,091 consignments of wines totaling 19.9 million liters and 280 lots of brandies exceeding 3 million liters.

Recently, RosPotrebNadzor decided to take examples of wine and cognac produced by another 9 Moldovan companies, which will be checked in Moscow laboratory and then may be let onto the Russian market. In addition, the federal agency is considering a list of Moldovan companies seeking permission to submit their produce specimens for appropriate laboratory analyses.

In March 2006, Onishenko banned the imports and selling of Moldovan wines in Russia under the pretext that they were allegedly of low quality. Then, hundreds of thousand bottles of Moldovan wines were withdrawn from Russian shops and warehouses and crushed by bulldozers.

All that happened right after Chisinau had introduced a new regime of exports of Transnistria-made goods – exclusively through customs registration with the Moldovan central authorities. Some experts perceived that wine embargo as "a show whipping of Moldova" for its turning its face toward European integration, for its demanding to pull out Russian troops from Transnistria in accordance with the 1999 OSCE Istanbul Summit accords, and for its attempt to put Transnistria’s exports under centralized customs control.

The wine exports were resumed only in November 2007 when bilateral relations between the two countries grew warmer. The Moldova-Vin Agri-Industrial Agency has not till now received from RosPotrebNadzor any documentary proof of the low quality of Moldovan wines.