The region's most famous wines and one of its greatest prides comes from another palace, Massandra, just outside Yalta. Sweet, strong and sticky, and heavy to Western palates, many of them are imitations of such wines as sherry and port. At least they are cheap. Crimea has been a centre of civilisation since at least the sixth century BC, when Greeks and Scythians coexisted there. Since then it has been controlled by, among others, Romans, Polovtsians, Tartars, Turks, Genoese and Venetians, Russians and now Ukraine.
Every culture is represented.
The choice of Yalta, where so much of European culture has merged, by the allied powers as a site to debate the future settlement of Europe, seems as good an option as any. While many locals bemoan the latest transfer of control over the peninsula, and many Russians insist Yalta's glory days are over and the city is going to the dogs, to the first-time visitor it is at least the equal of any Mediterranean resort. For 70km, the battered old vehicle connected to gleaming copper cables slung above the road, climbed laboriously up through the high mountains of the Crimea, passing vineyards where workers were busy getting in the crop of grapes. At sunset, we crested the col, and there below lay the dark misty mass of the Black Sea. As the bus, with brakes squealing, wound down the mountain side the lights of Yalta came on twinkling like a string of pearls along the coast.