Wine and Empire

Moldova, Transnistria, and the passage of time in a bottle

Dniester in Moldova, 2004.jpg” by Serhio is marked with CC BY-SA 3.0. To view the terms, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/?ref=openverse

Somewhere between the end of the USSR and the beginning of the present war, around about 1994, I think, I found myself in the former Soviet Republic of Moldova. Wedged between Ukraine to the East and Romania to the west Moldova is a stranded feeling sort of place in a region where whole peoples have tended to get stuck. The “Roman” in Romania is said to be a tribute to the forgotten remainders of the imperium that were abandoned when Emperor Aurelius pulled out his legions. Moldova, the far eastern side of that marooned place is one remove from that remove.

But it was wine, not empires that had brought me to Moldova. The Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova had been one of the only places in the USSR that produced large amounts of wine grapes and much of the infrastructure had outlasted the ancien régime. My tour began at a wine research laboratory outside the capital Chișinău where a recognizable Soviet clunkiness still hung over the place. Soviet iron work. Soviet uniforms. Soviet protocols. Soviet views of how wine should taste, even Soviet sentiments about wine’s very purpose. By contrast, the director of the lab seemed very much a man with his eye on the West. He had a nicely trimmed black beard and lively Italianate eyes. Romanian rolled off his tongue toward his lab assistants full of…