Moldovan Cricova stone & the Codru

This is a stone entry with an unexpected ending. From the fifteenth century, limestone was quarried out of the ground under Cricova, north of Chisinau, and hauled up to build the capital. What the quarrying left behind is a network of tunnels running roughly a hundred and twenty kilometres, in places eighty five metres down.

Moldova then did the sensible thing with a large cold hole. In the 1950s the galleries were converted into wine cellars, and about sixty kilometres of them are in active use storing wine. The tunnels are laid out as underground streets, each named after a wine, Cabernet, Feteasca, Pinot, Sauvignon, Codru, and there are tasting rooms and a cinema down there. Nearby Milestii Mici runs two hundred kilometres of the same kind of workings and holds the Guinness record for the largest wine collection in the world. Moldova has put both forward for UNESCO World Heritage consideration.

The stone is the reason any of it exists. It is a soft, workable, pale sedimentary limestone, the standard building material of the region, and the underground climate it produces, cool and stable at that depth, is what makes it work for wine.

The Codru around it is the central wine region and the country's largest protected geographical indication, about sixty one thousand hectares of vineyard among wooded hills, with oak and linden forest covering a quarter of the landscape and sheltering the vines from northern wind and frost. Codru means forest.

For a visitor this is straightforward and very much worth doing. Both cellar systems run guided tours, you go in by vehicle because of the distances, and it is genuinely cold, so take a coat in July. There is nothing to collect. The point is standing in a quarry that turned into a cellar.