Cricova: A City Where the Streets Are Named After Wine

Picture a bus rolling down a sloping tunnel. Then a road sign appears. Then a crossroads. Then a street name: Cabernet Street. You're underground, up to eighty metres down, and this really is a city. There are no residents, though. The bottles live here, and the addresses are grape varieties. Sauvignon. Fetească. Aligoté. Dionis. Altogether there are one hundred and twenty kilometres of underground streets. That's nearly three marathons, all of it under a Moldovan hillside.

The place is called Cricova. It sits fifteen kilometres north of Chișinău, the capital of Moldova. And the first thing to know is that nobody dug this labyrinth for wine. They dug it for stone.

Under Cricova lies limestone. It's soft and pale, and you can saw it with an ordinary saw. In open air it hardens. So it's a perfect building material. People were cutting it here as far back as the fifteenth century, and they kept cutting for a long time. Much of Chișinău is built from what was taken out from under Cricova. So the city above grew by exactly as much as the ground below emptied out. The emptiness wasn't the goal. It was a leftover.

Then, at some point, somebody looked at those abandoned tunnels and thought: wait. It's cool down here all year round.

Let's stay on that for a moment. Why is the temperature underground always the same? You might guess it's cold because the sun can't reach. But if that were all, winter would bring a hard frost down here, since there's even less sun in winter. Yet in Cricova it's about twelve degrees Celsius in January, and the same in July.

The answer is the rock itself. Forty, sixty, eighty metres of limestone overhead acts like a giant flywheel. It heats up and cools down so slowly that summer heat and winter frost simply never make it down. The thickness of the rock swallows them. A wave of warmth takes months to arrive at that depth, and by then it's almost flat. On top of that, the stone is porous. It soaks up extra moisture and gives it back when the air is dry. Humidity down here stays close to ninety-eight percent. So corks don't dry out, and wine doesn't slip away through them. It's a natural refrigerator that nobody ever had to switch on.

The first sparkling wine here, made by the classic French method, came in nineteen fifty-two. That's when the old quarries were turned into a winery. The man who organised the work was a Moldovan winemaker, Petru Ungureanu. The niches where wagons once stood and cut stone once lay filled up with stacks of bottles. Today about eighty of those hundred and twenty kilometres are given over to wine.

Two years later, Cricova got a collection. And here the story takes a turn you wouldn't expect from a quiet cellar.

In nineteen fifty-four, trophies of the Second World War were brought here from Moscow. Among them were bottles from the private collection of Hermann Göring. So under Moldovan soil ended up what had survived from someone else's cellar. The most famous bottle in the collection is called "Easter Jerusalem," bottled in nineteen hundred and two. It's more than a hundred and twenty years old. It lies in the dark, at the same twelve degrees. In all, the collection holds about one and a quarter million bottles.

The darkness, by the way, isn't for show either. Light damages wine. It sets off reactions that leave a taste of wet cardboard and boiled cabbage in the glass. Winemakers call it "light-strike," and that's why wine bottles are made of dark glass. Underground, the problem takes care of itself.

Meanwhile the wine ripens with no oxygen at all. Acids, alcohols and tannins slowly rearrange themselves, and what was rough turns soft. The steadier the temperature, the more predictable the change. Swings of five or ten degrees push the contents back and forth, press against the cork, and age the wine in jerks. Cricova simply doesn't allow that.

Visitors have been coming here for a long time. Distinguished guests traditionally get a niche of their own with their own stock of wine, and the name plates hang along the walls in long rows. People tell a story about Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. They say he went down into the labyrinth and came out only a day later. That's a legend guides love, and it should be treated as a legend. But it does give you a sense of the scale.

Up top, Chișinău is built of Cricova limestone. Down below is the emptiness left behind by that stone, where wine now quietly grows up. One material gave the city its walls, and gave the emptiness its address.

What should we tell you about? Your own street would do. moygid dot online.