North of Chișinău, a former limestone quarry holds one of the strangest towns in Europe. It has no houses and no residents, only streets, and every street is named after a wine. At Cricova, the map underground looks almost like the map above it, except the buildings are cellars carved from soft white stone and the population is bottles, millions of them, resting in the dark.
Mining stopped here decades ago, but the tunnels stayed useful. Stone quarried to build Chișinău left behind more than a hundred kilometers of galleries, and Moldovan winemakers realized the space was close to perfect for aging wine, cool, damp, and steady in temperature year round, winter or summer. Roads were paved, street signs went up reading Cabernet, Sauvignon, Pinot, and carts began ferrying visitors past walls stacked with bottles instead of houses. Only part of the network is used for wine today; the rest stretches off into dark stone corridors that few people ever see.
Cricova has been making wine since the 1950s, though vines have grown in this part of Moldova for far longer. Sparkling wine made in the traditional method is a specialty here, aged and riddled by hand the way Champagne houses have done it for generations. Deeper in the galleries sits the collection that gives Cricova its reputation beyond Moldova's borders: a guarded hall holding well over a million bottles, some rare, some very old, gathered as a kind of national archive of wine rather than a shop.
A drive through the dark
Tours move by vehicle, not on foot, because the network is too large to cross on a whim. Guides know which turns lead to tasting rooms and which lead nowhere in particular. Above ground, Cricova has become shorthand for Moldovan wine itself, a stop that shows up on state visits and on any traveler's itinerary that includes Chișinău. For a small country whose wine industry rarely gets attention abroad, an underground city with its own street signs turns out to be a memorable way to introduce it.
Cricova is one of more than 46,000 wineries mapped so far on World Winery Map.