Moldova
More vineyard per head of population than any country on earth, and the two largest wine cellars ever dug.
Moldova has roughly 128,000 hectares of vineyard in a country of about 2.5 million people, which is the highest vineyard area per head anywhere. Wine is a genuine pillar of the economy rather than a specialism. Under the Soviet Union it was the wine cellar of the union, and that legacy is visible in the scale of the infrastructure.
Cricova and Mileștii Mici are limestone mining tunnels converted into wine cellars. Mileștii Mici holds a collection of around two million bottles along 200 kilometres of galleries and is listed by Guinness as the largest wine cellar in the world. Cricova runs to 120 kilometres.
The vineyard is mostly international varieties, planted for the Russian market, and the loss of that market to trade embargoes in 2006 and 2013 forced a turn westward. The native grapes, fetească neagră, fetească albă, rara neagră and viorica, are the more interesting story and are being replanted deliberately.
What the label says
- IGPIndicație Geografică Protejată
- Four zones: Codru, Valul lui Traian, Ștefan Vodă and Divin for brandy.
Signature grapes
our choiceKey regions
2 records- Codru
- Valul lui Traian
- Ștefan Vodă
- Cricova
- Mileștii Mici
A dashed outline is a region we describe but do not yet hold a page for.
Grapes that originate here
1 of 2Worth knowing
- Mileștii Mici holds the largest wine collection in the world, in 200 kilometres of tunnel.
- Moldova has more vineyard per person than any other country.
- Russian import bans in 2006 and 2013 redirected the whole industry toward Europe.
More in Europe
Sources
The description, the reading of the classification system and the choice of signature grapes are ours. Region and grape records are built from Wikidata (CC0) and Wikipedia infoboxes (CC BY-SA 4.0). American AVA boundaries come from the TTB (public domain).