But it hasn’t always been a luxury for the elite. Along the Caspian, fisherman farmed Caviar as far back as the 12th Century and it was long thought of as a peasant food - permitted by the Church on days when eating meat was forbidden and with the leftovers fed to the livestock.

Legend has it that Caviar’s popularity began to grow when Ivan the Terrible developed a taste for it (and who would argue with him?) to the extent that Churches along the Volga were forbidden to ring their bells when the Sturgeon surged up the Caspian, for fear they might disturb their spawning.

But still, its fragility meant it didn’t transport well and its appeal remained limited until the Industrial age.

Sadly for the Sturgeon, it didn’t take long to make up for lost time. By the end of the 1800s, it had become the expensive, elite delicacy we know today and was being zealously overfished in all its natural habitats.

In the Delaware River, American Sturgeon catches dropped by 50% over a 7 year period, with similar figures in the Elbe and Danube.

It is thought that the Russian sturgeon were saved from the fate suffered by their American and European cousins by the First and Second World Wars, with a third respite granted by Soviet Russia, who ran the Caviar business as a monopoly with strict controls on production, price and who they would sell to. When manmade river building and damming had a significant affect on breeding grounds, the state opened hatcheries to help restock the populations in the Caspian.

However, the dismantling of the Union brought poaching, smuggling, competition and corruption to this lucrative trade, and the hatcheries, no longer State funded, gravely faltered.