KOROLYOV, Russia (AFP) — Elvira Kovtun made her first cheese in a pot in her kitchen four years ago.
Kovtun, a housewife and mostly self-taught cheesemaker, became so good that she and her husband decided to turn her passion into a business.
Last month, the high-school sweethearts and parents of three became the first Russians to win a gold prize at the World Cheese Awards, with their "Peshernyi" hard cheese taking the honor at the industry's equivalent of the Oscars.
"I didn't think this was possible," Elvira's husband, Vyacheslav Kovtun, told AFP at their small creamery in the industrial town of Korolyov, outside Moscow.
"Now I believe in everything."
The family's success shows how far Russia's cheese-making industry has come since President Vladimir Putin banned Western food imports in 2014 in a tit-for-tat measure over the Ukraine crisis.
Many Russians had developed a taste for French and Italian cheeses prior to sanctions, and Moscow seized the opportunity to put in place an "import substitution" strategy.
This supported local entrepreneurs trying to set up businesses to replace imported goods.
The results were often mixed, however, with many customers complaining of the higher price and often inferior quality of the Russian-made products.
But dairy farming and cheese-making have become a bright spot.
According to Russia's National Association of Milk Producers, production of cheese and cheese products grew by a third to 670,000 tons a year between 2013 and 2018.
Last week Putin confessed he was "somewhat worried" when the first punitive measures were introduced, but the events of the past few years proved that the sanctions had worked to "our economy's advantage.”
'Ground-breaking'
Hundreds of artisanal creameries have cropped up across the country and some, like the Kovtuns, are winning top marks from international critics.
Elvira and Vyacheslav, who are both 40 and opened their Korolyov creamery in 2018, had not expected success to come so quickly.
When Elvira called her husband to break the news of the award last month, she was sobbing, Vyacheslav said.
"I got scared. I thought something terrible had happened," he said with a smile.
Their creamery's website crashed from interest after the awards were announced and the winning cheese sold out until April.
More than 3,800 cheeses from 42 countries were in competition at this year's World Cheese Awards in Bergamo, Italy, where products are awarded supergold, gold, silver or bronze prizes.