Wine Tour

We were fortunate enough to go on a winery tour of the State Enterprise Quality Wines Industrial Complex "Milestii Mici"(or for short and in English, Milesti Meech). It claims to be, and after being there I believe it, the largest wine cellar in the world. The catacombs were formerly tunnels for a lime mine, but for the last 40 years they’ve been reclaimed to serve as the maturing place for millions of liters of wine.

The tunnels have the ideal conditions for maturing wines. Located 40-85 meters (130-280 feet) below ground, they’re (obviously) dark and maintain a year-round temperature of 12-14 degrees Centigrade (in the mid-50s) and a humidity of 85-95% (we also use percentages in America, so I’m not going to bother converting this figure). There are 50km (31 miles) of tunnels passable by car and I saw several trucks down there being operated by some of the 350 workers who work underground every day.

Interestingly, this winery doesn’t have it’s own wine. It has no vineyards that produce grapes – it old acts as a holding place for others’ wines to mature, though apparently there are plans to purchase land and being producing their own grapes soon.

Oh, a word about the pictures… In most of the tunnels I saw there are these huge barrels along the walls, most 6 feet or more in diameter. The wine is pumped into the barrels, which never move, where it ages for a certain period of time, absorbing the flavor of the wood. Then it is bottled where it continues to age. All the specifics are way beyond me, but I admit I was impressed by the operation.