Moldovan Wine

Moldovan wine — just because you sampled some in Stoughton once, don't give up on it. On Thursday we took a tour of the Cricova Winery near Chisinau. (Our English-speaking guide called it a wine factory. Why did that sound funny? Do we call it a factory?)

This is the largest underground wine "city" in the world. I think that's what the guide said. The whole winery is completely underground, using tunnels that were initially dug out by miners extracting the limestone which was used to build Chisinau and other cities in Moldova.

Here's our cheerful Moldovan guide.

Some barrels are very large! Some are not so large. Why? I asked that question twice and he answered twice and I still don't get it.

I wasn't supposed to take a photo of the top-secret machinery but I didn't know that. So here is an innocent photo. The process is just like they use in France to make champagne, we were told. Very special, it has to do with sediment settling in the neck of the upside-down bottle, then the neck being frozen for ten seconds, and then the bubbly action pops out the frozen "cork" and... voila! Clear sparkling wine!

I think this is another forbidden photo. Women in babushkas work here, turning the bottles from time to time, and doing quality control. Later, in the tasting room, I asked our guide how much these women get paid. He said this question was forbidden.

The rest of the tour revealed startling opulence. We entered the visitors' areas, where thousands of bottles of wine are stored.

Somehow this all seemed bizarre. Obviously, there was much I didn't understand that got lost in translation. Various countries had a few bottles of their own wine displayed here.

Ha ha! Putin has his own private stash here, and so does Angela Merkel.

There are dusty bottles here from 1941. Our guide said they have historic value because of the dust, but if you opened one it would be just vinegar inside.

And then we got to view the tasting rooms, which also double as meeting rooms. I was dismayed that we were not invited to sit down in "the presidential room" or in this one:

We did finally get to sit down in only slightly less elegance and sample four wines. They were very fine. Truly. 

Our companions in the tasting room included a guy from Pennsylvania who had been born in Transylvania. He speaks perfect American English and is also fluent in Hungarian. He hates Communism. He used to make wine with his father in Pennsylvania. The other two friends for the moment were a man from Greece and his Moldovan sweetheart. We talked about ouzo and Santorini, and had a thoroughly enjoyable time. 

On our way out, we passed a tribute to Yuri Gagarin, who was in this winery in 1966. Gagarin was quoted as saying that more difficult than going into outer space was leaving this tasting room. 

We got off the bus from Chisinau and had a happy walk for over an hour along a rural road. More about that in the next post.