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.
