Milesti Mici

A few weeks ago, my brother (Matt) and sister (Anna) came for a visit. My mom, Molly, who has been working with the Peace corps here for the past 4 years, is leaving soon, and so this was one last chance to have a "family reunion" of sorts here in Moldova.

Now, Moldova has qualities that make it good for family reunions, and some that make it bad. On the plus side, it is convenient to go elsewhere than Moldova once you are here. And this my family did, separately. Molly and Matt first went to Odessa, Ukraine, and the following week Molly took Anna to Istanbul, Turkey. Good stuff! But, on the down side, one must spend some time in Moldova once one is here.

With the closure of the Black Elephant club (the only rock venue in town) there is nowhere to go in the evenings other than EuroTrash discos. This can be good for a laugh, but not so much for my brother and - even more so - for my sister. Matt just likes a good night out of drinking - so all that irrelevant and extraneous dancing and poppy music doesn't quite suit him. But Anna likes live music, and good live music as that, with a dynamic and colorful scene of cool hipsters to go with it. Well, yeah, that ain't Moldova. So, the point is, there wasn't much to do. We were bored.

But, naysay as I might Moldova, this country has one very good thing going for it: wine. Moldova has some good, cheap, plentiful wine, everything from homemade house wine to the quality stuff in bottles with corks. Even the best stuff is rarely under 10 dollars (unless you want to get some old collection wines) so you can drink til you pass out and still have money left for cab fare.

Moldova has such a great wine culture that it even boasts some of the largest wine cellars in the world. One of them, that at Milesti Mici vineyards, is in the Guinness Book for housing the most bottles of wine in the world! So, of course, to entertain visiting family, this is where we went for our big family reunion outing.

Milesti Mici is so big that you actually have to drive through it, in cars. The wine cellar occupies an old limestone mine, which is just deep and cavernous enough to ensure the right climactic conditions for the wine. The wine is kept in gigantic casks that line the walls of the underground streets, until it is bottled and then housed in these vast, honeycombed chambers. A typical tour takes you through all this and then culminates in a very well designed underground dining hall where the wine is sampled along with a few tidbits of Moldovan fare. We nearly polished off 6 bottles of wine between us, a few reds, a desert wine, a couple whites, and a sparkling. I got pretty buzzed and wound up breaking my class. Whee!!! I can't wait to go back.

Anyway, here are some pics to help you live the experience. I only wish I could spit a great mouthful of the grape through these optic byways so you could taste the experience as well. Ah, wine!