Hermann Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man, survived the cut. His bottles of wine — part of a collection seized by the Soviet army as a trophy at the end of World War II and deposited in a labyrinthine underground cellar in Moldova — are still on display.
A gift of 460 bottles given in 2013 to then Secretary of State John Kerry when he visited the former Soviet republic is also there, kept in his name in a cubbyhole in the vast system of tunnels. (The State Department reported their value as $8,339.50, which might explain why Mr. Kerry chose to leave them behind.)
But President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who twice visited the cellars operated by the state-owned Cricova Winery, has been banished. His wine bottles, along with his photograph, have been removed from view in the vast complex of underground tunnels that twist and turn over 75 miles under vineyards north of the Moldovan capital, Chisinau.
After Mr. Putin began a full-scale invasion of Moldova’s neighbor, Ukraine, in 2022, the winery “got lots of questions that we could not answer about why he was still here,” said Sorin Maslo, the director.
Mr. Putin’s wine collection, a gift to him from Moldova’s former communist president, has not been destroyed, Mr. Maslo said. The bottles, he added, had been moved to a dark, sealed-off corner of the cellar so that “nobody has to deal with him.”
For a country that takes viniculture very seriously, the banishment of Mr. Putin’s bottles sent a blunt divorce message in a long-strained relationship that Moldova recently declared doomed by irreconcilable differences.
It was part of a decisive rupture that in October led voters to endorse, albeit by a tiny majority, changing Moldova’s Constitution to lock in the country’s exit from Moscow’s sphere of influence and align more closely with Europe.
That course was first set in 2006 when Russia, previously Moldova’s biggest wine export market, imposed a two-year ban on imports from Cricova and other Moldovan wineries during an early tiff between Moscow and Chisinau.
The ban, Russia claimed at the time, was needed to protect consumers from impurities, but it was widely seen as retaliation for demands by Moldova that Russia stop supporting the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria.
Russia lifted the ban on Moldovan wine the following year but reimposed it in 2013 after Moldova expressed a desire to forge closer ties with the European Union.
The 2006 embargo forced Moldova’s winemakers to look West for markets and convinced them that “the future for us is definitely not Russia,” said Stefan Iamandi, the director of the National Office for Vine and Wine in Chisinau. Russia, which once accounted for 80 percent of Moldovan wine sold abroad, today buys 2 percent, with more than 50 percent going to the European Union. That has meant moving away from sugary “semisweet” wines produced to suit Soviet palates, to high quality wines that regularly win international prizes.
Georgia, another former Soviet republic, was hit by a similar ban in 2006, prompting its winemakers, too, to start looking West.
Wine has for centuries played an outsize role in Moldova’s relationship with Russia, both lubricating and at times poisoning ties between what, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, were two parts of the same country.
Moldova has traces of grape cultivation stretching back thousands of years, and started exporting wine to Russia in large volumes in the 14th century. This trade expanded dramatically during the Soviet Union when vineyards in Moldova and Georgia provided much of the wine consumed in Russia.
Moldovan wine enjoyed a particularly good reputation. That became a curse when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, identified alcoholism as one of the Soviet Union’s most serious problems in 1985 and overzealous Communist Party officials ordered that vineyards in Moldova, Georgia and Crimea be destroyed. Moldova ripped up some vines but left most intact, arguing that it needed grapes to make fruit juice.
Before that, Moscow and Moldova bonded over booze.
In 1966, when Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut and the first man in space, visited what was then a Soviet republic called Moldavia, he spent two days at the Cricova Winery, where, like other visitors, he was offered wine tastings.
Legend has it that he tasted so much he had to be carried away in a stupor.
Mr. Maslo said that is not true, insisting “Gagarin was not drunk” and was just happy at the quality of the wine.
Unlike Mr. Putin, Mr. Gagarin has not been canceled and is still celebrated in Cricova’s underground cellar with a photograph and a plaque. Displayed proudly on the wall is the handwritten thank-you note he left at the end of his 1966 visit: “In these cellars is a great abundance of wonderful wine,” he wrote. “Even the most fastidious person will find here wine to their liking.”
There is certainly a lot to choose from. The vast wine cellar, housed in the shafts and meandering tunnels of a former limestone mine, holds 1.2 million bottles. The tunnels, lined with wine racks, barrels and large wooden casks, are part of a sprawling subterranean city. It has a wine shop for tourists, tens of thousands of whom visit each year, a movie theater and opulent tasting and banqueting halls for visiting dignitaries.
Tunnels dug for limestone miners have become streets, each one named after type of wine — Cabernet, Pinot Noir, Champagne and local varieties like Feteasca. There are street signs and traffic lights. Electric buggies transport winery workers and visitors around the labyrinth. The temperature is constant at around 55 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity of the air is always the same.
Also unchanging is the tedious labor of a team of workers who spend each day deep underground methodically turning bottles of sparkling wine stored neck down in high racks. The motion ensures that sediment gathers at the neck and can be easily removed before final bottling. All the bottle-turners are women because men, Cricova’s management decided, get bored too easily and take too many breaks.
Lybov Zolotko, who trained for the job by twisting her wrists in a bucket of sand, said she turns at least 30,000 bottles a day. It is boring work, she conceded, “but you get used to it” — and it pays a steady salary in a country where stable jobs are hard to come by.
Another Moldovan winery, Milestii Mici, has even longer tunnels — they stretch 150 miles — but Cricova has had far more high-profile visitors, including Mr. Putin, who celebrated his 50th birthday in its cellars; President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine; and Angela Merkel, when she was still chancellor of Germany.
Tatiana Ursu, employed at Cricova for 30 years, has hosted a stream of dignitaries in the underground tasting rooms and banquet halls. Particularly warm, she said, was a 2002 visit by Mr. Putin, who was on excellent terms with Moldova’s president at the time, Vladimir Voronin, Europe’s first democratically elected Communist Party head of state after the collapse of communism.
The visit used to be a source of pride for the winery, Ms. Ursu added, but “not so much any more” given that the seemingly mild-mannered man she met in 2002 — who had only been in the Kremlin two years when he visited — has since turned against Moldova.
Mr. Voronin gave the Russian president a bottle of wine in the shape of a crocodile, she recalled.
Mr. Putin and others in the Russian delegation did not drink too much and left a good impression on their Moldovan hosts, Ms. Ursu recalled.
“They were all friends back then. It was a different time,” she said.
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