Mileștii Mici

One and a half million bottles

Twenty kilometres south of Chișinău, one and a half million bottles of wine lie underground. They rest in rows, in tunnels that together run for more than two hundred kilometres. Step through the gate and you leave the daylight behind. In two thousand and five, Guinness World Records recognised this as the largest wine collection in the world. The record belongs to Mileștii Mici, a state winery near a village in the Ialoveni district.

A limestone quarry

The story begins not with wine, but with stone. From eighteen eighty-six, limestone was quarried here. The quarry grew into a maze of tunnels, forty to eighty metres deep. According to the Unesco application, the underground area covers almost ninety-eight hectares. In nineteen sixty-nine, wine began to be stored here. Today the winery uses about fifty-five kilometres of the network as cellars. The rest is a silent labyrinth.

The climate of the stone

The limestone works as natural air conditioning. All year round, the temperature stays between twelve and fourteen degrees, and the humidity is around eighty-five to ninety-five per cent. The damp air keeps the corks supple, so no oxygen creeps into the bottle. In these conditions, wine matures slowly and evenly. No cooling system is needed, only patience. For a winery that stores millions of bottles, that is a great advantage.

The Golden Collection

The heart of Mileștii Mici is called Colecția de Aur, the Golden Collection. More than seventy per cent is red wine, about twenty per cent white and around ten per cent dessert wine. Many reds are made from Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Saperavi, and the blend Negru de Mileștii Mici is one of the best known labels. The oldest bottles come from the harvests of nineteen sixty-nine onwards. The nineteen seventy-three and seventy-four vintages are considered the most valuable. In two thousand and five, the site was also declared national cultural heritage.

By train through the cellar

Visitors do not go on foot. A guide takes them on a little electric train through the underground streets. Tours are offered in Romanian, English and Russian, and must be booked in advance. Tastings take place deep underground, from a few wines with cheese to a full Moldovan dinner. Above ground, a wine bar and a shop are waiting. From Chișinău, the taxi ride takes twenty to thirty minutes. According to the Unesco dossier, more than forty-five thousand visitors come every year.

An archive of harvests

Since twenty twenty-five, Mileștii Mici has been on the Unesco tentative list for World Heritage, together with Cricova. Its network is almost twice as long as Cricova's. That makes the cellar more than a storeroom. It is an archive of Moldovan harvests, year after year, kept in stone that was once taken from the ground to build houses. Every bottle in the row is a summer that stayed.