The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘I am sure I have emerged in Versailles’
Tiny Moldova once satisfied the Soviet Union’s thirst for wine – and now its vineyards are undergoing a revolution of their own, says Chris Leadbeater
Castel Mimi looks lost – not just as a question of “where”, but as a matter of “when”. It is out of time as well as place – so much so that I am half convinced I have fallen through a hole in the fabric of everything, and emerged in the gardens of Versailles in the late 17th century. The property’s facade smiles with the smooth elegance of honed stone and neat windows gazing onto clipped hedges. Behind, there are rows and rows of vines, fluttering in the evening wind. Within, there are long cellars, brimming with bottles.
But Louis XIV is not at home, and the journey out of the city, rolling 25 miles south-east, has not carried me through perfumed Paris. Even at first glance, Chisinau bears all the scars of eastern Europe’s 20th century – those vast, grey, depressingly uniform apartment blocks that sprang up everywhere from Prague to Pristina in the 1950s and 1960s; the sudden return of fields and farms beyond an invisible line where the dreary housing ends.
I pull out my phone and re-examine the map. There is my blue locator dot in the middle of little Moldova, with Romania massed to the west, Ukraine swarming to the north, and the Black Sea just 100 miles over the horizon. This really is the east. A European far east.
Yet the vineyards around me are exactly where they should be, and precisely where I expected to find them. Moldova is, by some statistics, the second poorest country on our home continent, but it is Europe’s 11th largest producer of wine, and the 20th biggest on the planet. Not bad for a country of barely 13,000sq miles and just 2.6million souls.
Of course, wine has long been its lifeblood. It certainly was from 1944 to 1991, when Moldova was one of the Soviet Union’s viticultural workhorses, pumping out endless gallons of unpretentious red and unremarkable white for export to Russia. Moscow may have a love of pricey vodka, but it spent much of the Cold War gulping Moldovan plonk. The latter word is not one you should use while touring Castel Mimi. Set in the village of Bulboaca, it is perhaps the most photogenic example of Moldova’s attempts to rid itself of its mass-production image and enter a new era where its wines compete with the best.
The company would argue that it has the history to do this, and that any references to France are entirely relevant. The property was built in 1893 by Constantin Mimi, a Chisinau-born aristocrat who had studied the art of winemaking in Montpellier, and was crafting fine vintages long before Lenin had sculpted his beard. It is to this period before the world wars that the property has been seeking a partial return. Its restoration between 2011 and 2016 was a careful procedure that required the peeling away of layers of Soviet concrete from its exterior, and the removal of the railway tracks that cut into its courtyard (the main line which links Bulboaca to Chisinau and ultimately to stations in Ukraine and further afield runs just beyond its gates). They have been replaced by a boutique spa hotel, regular food festivals and concerts, and a restaurant, which pairs an intriguing menu with the glorious main product.
The dishes placed in front of me – including a stew heavy on pork, root vegetables and mushrooms – are definitely east European. The wines poured out alongside them – an oaky sauvignon blanc, a gentle rosé, a light cabernet sauvignon, a pinot noir that gleams in the light – would be perfectly at home on a Frenchman’s table.
The process of moving on from the Cold War is less advanced in the capital. Moldova wore its strapping into the Soviet straitjacket more unhappily than most. It found itself trapped on the frontier as the westernmost parcel of the USSR, fenced off with full barbed-wire ferocity from Europe – even the Eastern Bloc incarnation of it – on its left flank. The ligature cut very deeply in the case of Romania, the neighbour with which Moldova has a great deal in common culturally, historically and linguistically.
This dead epoch drags its feet in the centre of Chisinau. The cathedral – a delightful relic of the 1830s, with a separate bell tower – still sings with neoclassical joy, but probably only still exists because it was converted into an art gallery during the 1960s. The same cannot be said for the other 19th-century buildings, which once faced it across the square. They were demolished to make way for the undisguised brutalism of what is now Government House – a vision of Soviet control, constructed in 1964. The national opera house, two blocks to the north, is softer of purpose, but just as stern of architecture. The Presidential Palace, next door, is harder still – an unlovely concoction of white blocks and mirrored windows.
The 21st century peeps through only occasionally. Berd’s Hotel shimmers splendidly as the city’s first boutique property, its chicness only amplified by its proximity to Hotel Chisinau – a bastion of the Cold War, now showing its age. Trendy bar 513 is stuffed with Soviet memorabilia, all dial telephones and antique motorcycles. Around the corner, restaurant Black Rabbit gives no backward glances – slickly modern in its stripped brick walls and bright murals, its drinks list a tribute to newfangled Moldovan wineries.
Wine and Cold War collide most strikingly – and with a certain frisson – in Cricova. On first impressions, this small town, 10 miles north of Chisinau, is as sleepy as anywhere on the perimeter of the capital. It is only on closer inspection that I realise it conducts most of its business underground – in the tunnels that course like capillaries below its main hill.
There are 75 miles of them, these gloomy passageways – first dug in the 15th century when limestone mining was Cricova’s big purpose, but now (as of 1947) used as storage space for more than a million bottles of wine. Remarkably, it is not even the largest such labyrinth in Moldova (a similar affair at Milestii Mici, 10 miles south of the city, is bigger still), but the effect is dramatic. And mildly unnerving. No great leap of imagination is needed to see the complex as a Bond villain’s lair (perhaps in a movie where the bad guy intends to unleash a swarm of pesticide-resistant phylloxera bugs that will destroy the globe’s vineyards, before swamping the market with his own brand, safely stored beneath the soil).
Electric buggies glide around in the half-light. Men in high-vis vests appear in doorways. The maze is vast enough to stage a 10K race (The Wine Run) every January– and an “Underland” music festival in February. There is a cinema, a museum, a church. And there is the prime pursuit – barrels and barrels and cellars and cellars of it. The tasting rooms are like temples, dreaming in marble and stained glass. The chambers holding private collections of bottles, gifted to visiting dignitaries by the winery, are a political tour of the past 20 years, labelled with the names of Angela
Merkel, John Kerry, Vladimir Putin. It is no surprise to find the latter here. The Russian president marked his 50th birthday with a dinner in this subterranean universe, in 2002.
That was in “happier” times. One of the reasons Moldovan wine has stepped up from stereotype is that it has had to. In 2006, a diplomatic crisis saw Russia place a ban on the import of Moldovan wine. The consequences were devastating. Wine was 20 per cent of Moldova’s economy, Russia its prime market. Many producers folded, others pivoted (Cricova redirected its exports to Kazakhstan). But there were also fruits of the rupture. Out on the south-east side of the city, Atu is part of a new generation of wineries that has taken root. It, too, looks out of time, though in a different way to Castel Mimi – the slabs of stencilled graffiti on its walls exuding the sort of hipster vibe normally associated with craft breweries. This fresh attitude is also apparent inside. The owners, young couple Vlada and Victor Vutcarau, bring impressive energy to their project, concocting 20,000 bottles a year, even though Atu is “only” a weekend side-show to their weekday job (they manage Moldova’s largest vine nursery). Their enthusiasm extends to less feted grapes and a regional emphasis.
The revolution continues further down the road at Asconi, which has embraced the 21st century while preserving some of the 20th. This familyrun business began operations in 1994 – a year that is tattooed onto its flesh in the enormous iron tanks, now retired, that once held lakes of red and white destined for St Petersburg and Volgograd. It has survived and thrived since 2006 by expanding its remit – into 12 new holiday cottages and a restaurant, serving a fusion of Moldovan and Balkan cuisine. On a Sunday afternoon, abuzz with people and conversation, it feels emblematic of a country where the past is obvious, the present is hopeful – and the future is unwritten.
It feels emblematic… the past is obvious, the present is hopeful and the future is unwritten
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