| But also “cabernet” and “chardonnay” On New Year's Eve, a pre-holiday cargo left for Moscow from Moldova - two million bottles of wine and champagne. In total, since the beginning of the year, 10 million deciliters of wine and about 90 million bottles of champagne with the famous brand: a stork carrying a bunch of grapes in its beak have been sent to Russia.
They say that once a stork dropped a bunch of grapes while flying over a besieged Moldavian fortress. And this bunch, having reinforced the defenders, helped them repel Turkish attacks.
Cabernet, a drink for mature men, is considered the king of Moldovan wines, according to the famous wine technologist Nikolai Kholostenko. The best red wine is produced on the red soils of the Budzhak steppe. The sun, which is merciless for other plants, gives local grapes a unique taste. Due to poverty, for the last ten years the vineyards have been practically not fed with fertilizers or protected from pests with chemicals. Now it turns out that you can make good money from this. Morell Villete, an industrialist from Spain who supplies bottle caps to Moldovan winemakers, once told me that Moldova is the only ecologically clean region in Europe.
In Moldovan villages it is believed that he is not the owner who has not prepared several barrels of wine for the New Year. Typical homemade preparations - from 200 to 600 liters. A traveler knocking on the gate of a rural estate will certainly be presented with a glass of wine and the usual snack: feta cheese, peeled walnuts and herbs. You can’t imagine a better “accompaniment” for Cabernet.
The author of the bouquet of Moldovan cabernet, a couple of dozen bottles of which Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain orders for her table every year, still lives in the village of Chumai. The creator of the famous brand, Alexei Chumachenko, lives on a meager pension: in Soviet times they did not indulge in patents.
The best white wine in Moldova is Chardonnay. Especially if it contains a grape variety such as Muscat. But if you come across a bottle of such wine, be careful: the catchy aroma under the Moldavian label is most likely a fake. Natural Moldavian nutmeg has an unobtrusive aroma, unlike the muscats of Crimea. The history of the Moldovan white is directly related to the history of Russia. After the war of 1812, Count Peter Wittgenstein was granted an estate in the village of Kamenka (now in Transnistria) by the sovereign's grace. The renowned general, who succeeded Kutuzov after his death as commander of the Russian army, founded a hospital in Moldova and laid out grape terraces on the rocky cliffs of the Dniester. The vine was brought from France. Now on the site of the old military hospital there is a sanatorium where they practice ampelotherapy - treatment with grape juice. During Gorbachev’s Prohibition, when vineyards were uprooted everywhere, in Kamenka the vines on the terraces were covered and saved.
Two years ago there was a crop failure in Moldova, and local factories purchased wine materials from Bulgaria, Hungary and even Argentina. They mixed it with their own, and the result was a blend; this mixture was mainly used for the production of ordinary, cheaper wines. To avoid mistakes, it is better to pay a little more and buy vintage wine from the famous Cricova cellars. There is a national wine library there and there are entire streets of “Aligote”, “Cabernet”, “Chardonnay”... So, recharge your health with the energy of the Moldovan sun. Svetlana GAMOVA, Chisinau |
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