Hitler’s right-hand man Hermann Göring survived. His wine bottles are part of a collection confiscated by the Soviet army as war trophies at the end of World War II and stored in a labyrinthine underground cellar in Moldova, where they are still on display.
The 460 bottles given to then-Secretary of State John Kerry during his visit to the former Soviet republic in 2013 are also there, kept in a small room in a vast tunnel in Kerry’s name. (The State Department reports their value at $8,339.50, which may explain why Mr. Kelly chose to keep them.)
But Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, who twice visited cellars run by the state-run Kulikova winery, was expelled. His wine bottle, along with his photo, was removed from view in a vast complex of underground tunnels that wind and twist for more than 75 miles beneath vineyards north of Moldova’s capital, Chisinau.
After Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Moldova’s neighboring Ukraine in 2022, the winery received “many questions we couldn’t answer about why he was still here,” director Sorin said.・Maslo said.
Maslo said the wine collection given to Putin by Moldova’s former communist president had not been destroyed. The bottle had been moved to a dark, sealed corner of the basement “so no one would have to interact with him,” he added.
For a country that takes its viticulture very seriously, Putin’s expulsion of Bottle is a blatant divorce in a long and strained relationship, which Moldova recently declared doomed due to irreconcilable differences. I sent you a message.
This is part of a decisive rupture in which voters in October, albeit with a narrow majority, voted to change Moldova’s constitution to lock in the country’s exit from Moscow’s sphere of influence and align it more closely with Europe. I supported it.
The policy was first established in 2006, when Russia, previously Moldova’s largest wine export market, banned imports from Cricova and other Moldovan wineries for two years during early negotiations between Moscow and Chisinau. .
Russia said at the time that the ban was necessary to protect consumers from adulterants, but it was widely seen as retaliation for Moldovan demands that Russia stop supporting the breakaway region of Moldova in Transnistria. It was accepted.
Russia lifted its ban on Moldovan wine the following year, but reimposed it in 2013 after Moldova expressed its desire to forge closer ties with the European Union.
The 2006 embargo forced Moldova’s wine producers to look west for markets, convincing them that “our future is definitely not in Russia,” said Stefan, director of the National Grape and Wine Office in Chisinau.・Mr. Iamandi said. Russia once accounted for 80% of Moldovan wine sold abroad, but now it buys 2% and more than 50% goes to the European Union. It meant a shift from sweet “semi-sweet” wines made to suit Soviet palates to high-quality wines that regularly won international awards.
Georgia, another former Soviet republic, was hit by a similar ban in 2006, and its winemakers began to look west.
Wine has played a big role in Moldova-Russia relations for centuries, lubricating and sometimes poisoning relations between the two countries, which were two parts of the same country until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Moldova has traces of viticulture dating back thousands of years, and mass exports of wine to Russia began in the 14th century. This trade expanded dramatically during the Soviet era, when vineyards in Moldova and Georgia supplied much of the wine consumed in Russia.
Moldovan wine enjoyed a particularly high reputation. In 1985, when the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev identified alcoholism as one of the Soviet Union’s most serious problems and overzealous Communist Party officials ordered the destruction of vineyards in Moldova, Georgia and Crimea, it became a curse. It became. Moldova tore up some vines, claiming they needed the grapes to make juice, but left most intact.
Before that, Moscow and Moldova bonded over alcohol.
In 1966, when Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut and the first man to successfully fly into space, visited Moldavia, then a Soviet republic, he spent two days at the Kulikova Winery, where, like other visitors, he sampled wine. I was offered a tasting.
Legend has it that he tasted so much food that he passed out.
Maslo said that was not true, insisting that “Gagarin was not drunk” and was simply satisfied with the quality of the wine.
Unlike Mr. Putin, Mr. Gagarin was not canceled and is still celebrated with a photo and a plaque in the Kulikova basement. A handwritten thank you note he left at the end of his 1966 visit is proudly displayed on the wall. “These cellars are rich with fine wines,” he wrote. “Even the most picky people will find a wine to their liking here.”
There are certainly many options. The vast wine cellar, housed in the shafts and winding tunnels of a former limestone mine, holds 1.2 million bottles of wine. Tunnels lined with wine racks, barrels, and large wooden barrels are part of a vast underground city. With tens of thousands of visitors each year, there are tourist wine shops, movie theaters, and luxurious tasting and banquet halls for visiting dignitaries.
Tunnels dug for limestone miners have become streets, and each tunnel is named after a type of wine, including cabernet, pinot noir, champagne, and local varieties like feteasca. There are also road signs and traffic lights. Electric buggies transport winery employees and visitors around the maze. The temperature is constant at about 55 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity of the air is always the same.
Nor is the tedious labor of the teams of workers who spend their days deep underground, carefully spinning bottles of sparkling wine stored neck-down on high racks. This movement allows sediment to collect in the neck, where it can be easily removed before final bottling. All of the bottle spinners are women because Cricova’s management decided that men got bored easily and took too many breaks.
Lvov Zolotko, who trained for the job by twisting his wrists in a bucket of sand, said he spins at least 30,000 bottles a day. “It’s a boring job, but you get used to it,” she admitted. This job pays a steady salary in a country where steady work is difficult to find.
Another Moldovan winery, Milesti Michi, has an even longer tunnel, spanning 150 miles, but Cricova has far more prominent visitors. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky. And Chancellor Angela Merkel was still Chancellor of Germany.
Tatiana Urus, who has worked at Krykova for 30 years, has hosted a succession of dignitaries in her underground tasting room and banquet hall. Particularly heartwarming, she said, was Putin’s visit in 2002. Putin had good relations with Vladimir Voronin, then president of Moldova and the first democratically elected Communist Party head of state since the collapse of communism.
Urus said that while the visits used to be a source of pride for the winery, “not anymore,” considering that the seemingly mild-mannered man she met in 2002 had only been in the Kremlin for two years. No,” he added. I visited Moldova, but since then it has become hostile to Moldova.
Voronin gave the Russian president a wine bottle in the shape of a crocodile, she recalled.
Putin and other members of the Russian delegation did not drink too much and left a good impression on their Moldovan hosts, Urus recalled.
“We were all friends back then. It was a different time,” she said.
