Effervescent oceans of sparkling white wine are made in this underground city, with workers turning each bottle by hand, using Dom Pierre Perignon’s genius méthode champenoise. Just about every other kind of varietal is present too, including local specialities such as Feteasca.
Bulgaria might attract the beer-drenched bucks’ bashes, but Europe’s rich and powerful come to party in Chişinău, it seems. Putin celebrated his fiftieth birthday in this very cellar, and next to his stash of valuable vino I spy a collection with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s name on it. When Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin came on a sampling tour here, he emerged bleary-eyed a whole two days later.
I’m treated to a tasting session and soon see why Gagarin was so reluctant to return to Earth. I’m sipping the elixir of the gods. How have I never heard of this place or its plonk before? The quality of Moldovan wine never used to be such a secret – Queen Victoria always had a bottle of Negru de Purcari at the royal table – but these days, I’m told, all the good stuff gets gulped down by the Russians.
Emerging into the arms of the day, I head back to downtown Chişinău, which looks far more colourful now the wine festival is in full flow. While politicians, plutocrats and celebrity spacemen like to sip fine wine in the privacy of an underground cellar,
this vino-soaked shindig is a proper proletarian affair.
Moldova’s larger labels are here, but much of the wine being drunk in the streets has arrived almost straight from the vine, via old-school presses. It’s cloudy and delicious – organic grape juice with a punch. In parks and on corners, traditionally dressed folk musicians gather in groups and play, while the crowd wriggles and jiggles and couples spin off to spontaneously dance a reel or two.
If there are any tourists here, I can’t spot them. I certainly seem to be the only person taking photos. Everyone else is just enjoying themselves. It’s the least commercial festival I’ve ever been to, but if Chişinău is short on visitors – even during one of its signature events – they’re virtually unheard of in the rest of the country, especially at my next destination.
Technically, Transnistria is part of Moldova, but the Transnistrians do their best to ignore this fact. They have their own currency, their own army and police force, and to get into the little breakaway state I have to go through a humourless mock border crossing, where an outrageously officious uniformed guard wants to know my father’s middle name. My dad doesn’t have a middle name, but sensing this might cause issues, I make up one.
More arrive on a donkey, and then a group of folk musicians rocks up and performs an impromptu session. One guy teases out a tune on something resembling a cushion.
If all the posturing at the border seems surreal, things soon get even more Monty Pythonesque when I stop at the Tighina Fortress in Bender, on the banks of the Dniester River, and meet Baron Münchhausen.
Münchhausen – a German nobleman and a captain in the Russian army in real life – was famous for his tall tales long before Terry Gilliam got hold of him. He once claimed to have flown over this very fortress riding a cannonball during a battle with the Turks, and to honour his overactive imagination, a statue of the Baron stands proudly outside Tighina’s walls, next to a giant cannonball fitted with a saddle.
The fortress is far more sinister on the inside, where a guide in murderous-looking high heels shows me around a terrible torture chamber featuring iron maidens and a horrific hobbyhorse with a sharpened back, designed to slowly split a person in half when weights were placed on their legs.
A mental image like that can only be erased by a drink, but thankfully it’s seldom far to the next winery in this neck of the woods. We drive through the bucolic countryside that sprawls across Moldova and Transnistria – where people still travel by donkey and cart and live the kind of rural existence that’s almost entirely extinct elsewhere in Europe – to Noul Neamţ.
This is a monastery, not a vineyard, but the tour of the grounds inevitably ends in the cellar, where my charismatic monk-cum-guide Alexi pours mugs of red straight from the barrel. Between slurps, he tells me how the Soviets turfed the monks out in 1962 and turned the monastery into a TB clinic. The holy men in black moved back in when Moldova gained independence in 1990.
While most people in Moldova speak Romanian and identify with their western neighbours, Transnistria looks east, across Ukraine towards Russia. Most people converse in Russian and there has been widespread speculation that Putin might one day pocket the want-away state in the same way he collected Crimea.
If he does decide to move in, he won’t have to do much in the way of redecorating. Hitting the streets of Tiraspol – Transnistria’s de facto capital – is like being transported straight back to Soviet-era Russia. Statues of Lenin stand proudly outside government buildings, where uniformed guards are quick to wag disapproving fingers at anyone trying to take photos. In the absence of a park, children climb all over a decommissioned Russian battle tank that sits in the main square.
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