Clancy Tucker's Blog: WINE

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24 September 2022 - THE WINE CELLARS OF CRICOVA

THE WINE CELLARS

OF CRICOVA

G'day folks,

Cricova takes the notion of a “wine city” to another level, in more ways than one. About 260 feet below this little-known Moldovan town, over 75 miles of limestone caves are home to about 1.3 million bottles of wine.

The fertile region surrounding the town of Cricova had no problem becoming a major source of wine for the USSR by the mid-1900s. They did have a problem storing all of it, however.

Conveniently, the excavation of vast amounts of limestone to build the nearby capital of Chişinău left a sprawling underground network of cool, dry caves, ideal for aging and storing wine. As more limestone was mined to build the city, more space was created underground to host an imperial collection of bottled wine. After Milestii Mici, another underground Moldovan winery, Cricova is the second-largest wine cellar on the planet.

Today, the above-ground winery is a jack of all trades, producing more than 150 styles, including basics such as muscat, pinot noir, cabernet, and sauvignon blanc, but also unique local varieties such as rkaţiteli and aligote. The “streets” and “avenues” that make up the underground booze-storage metropolis are named for the wines they store, helping tour guides navigate visitors through the network by mini-train. The winery is most famous for producing a sparkling variety known as kodrinskoie, utilizing methods made famous by French monk Dom Pierre Pérignon. According to Balkan Insight, a team of five women rotates as many as 35,000 bottles of the sparkling vino 45 degrees in wooden slots to encourage the movement of sediments.

Though an over-the-top underground oddity, the site was made a visiting point for all official delegations to the USSR and, even after its collapse, still holds the collections of various political heavyweights. Angela Merkel, John Kerry, Joe Biden, and Petro Poroshenko all visited and were gifted private collection spaces. Vladimir Putin has an impressive assortment of wines here, and, according to Forbes, a gold-plated mini-car to take him through the tunnels. While no politician, the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, is rumored to have gotten lost in the caves for hours (guides like to joke that it was easier for him to get into space than out of the wine cellar).

Perhaps most shockingly, the wine collection of Hermann Göring, one of Hitler’s henchmen, rests here, as well. After the Red Guard took Berlin, his collection of more than 2,000 bottles from regions occupied by Germany during World War II were brought here to continue aging.

After each tour, visitors can sample an array of wines in one of the facility’s five extravagant tasting rooms, including “The Sea Bottom,” a nautical-themed room; the “Presidential Hall,” meant to host official delegates; and the unambiguous “Fireplace Room.”

Feel free to purchase as much wine from the store as you’d like. Cricova’s not running out any time soon.

8 January 2018 - SPANISH WINERIES MAKE WINE IN ALL COLOURS

SPANISH WINERIES

MAKE WINE IN ALL COLOURS

G'day folks,

Here's a post for all of you wine lovers.

People have been making wine of thousands of years, but in only three colors – red, white and rose. But not anymore. Spanish companies have come up with ways to make all-natural wines in pretty much any color imaginable, from vibrant blue to green and even pink.

It all started last year, when Spanish startup Gïk unveiled the world’s first blue wine. They spent two years working with scientists at the University of the Basque Country and food researchers at Azti Tecnecalia trying to use anthocyanin, a natural pigment in the grapes’ skin, in order to manipulate the color of wine. It became a great commercial success, with the company reporting in January that it had sold over 100,000 bottles in under six months. But competition is ramping up, as other Spanish wineries are using similar technology to create all kinds of unusually-colored wines.

Bodega Santa Margarita, in Caudete, Spain, offers different shades of blue wine, as well as green, orange and pink wines, as part of its “Passion” line. They are already a big hit in several European markets, like the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. They also use anthocyanin for their Passion Blue wines, but it’s not clear how they make their wines orange and pink. If I had to guess, they are combination of different wines and the added grape skin pigment. One thing is for sure, they are completely natural.

“The last few weeks the wine has been flying out the doors,” Vincent Janssen, a Dutch wine importer, told Share-a-Bottle. “We also had to get used to the idea, but that color appears to have a real value to people. It looks different and the wine is good too.”

Bodegas y Viñedos Amaya also mixes tradition and innovation to create what it calls “tecnovinos”. So far they have a collection of bright red, yellow and green wines, made from a variety of Spanish grapes.

All these winemakers are relying on people’s curiosity to reach a whole new customer base, as well as change the way the world thinks about wine. But, apparently, lawmakers don’t like change very much.

Earlier this year, Gïk announced that Spanish authorities had forbidden them to sell their blue drink as wine, because it’s the wrong color. There is no category for blue wine, so even though it is 100% wine, Gïk was forced to relabel the bottles and sell its product as part of the “other alcoholic drinks” category.

“In order to continue selling, we have been forced to stop labeling Gik as a wine. Instead, we had to label it as a bastard category named ‘Other alcoholic drinks’. The main reason? There’s not a category for a blue wine, as there is no historic background for anything similar,” Gïk wrote in a statement. We had to change the composition to 99 per cent wine and 1 per cent grape to adapt the product to the current legislation.”

Despite such hurdles, it’s unlikely that the wine color revolution will be stopped. People are drawn to unusual colors like blue and pink, even if it does make the wines look more like energy drinks, and most of them don’t really care about technical details like the category the wines are being sold in.

Clancy's comment: First, it was black and yellow tomatoes. Now, it's wine. What will they dream up next? Maybe wine named after authors, eh? Just sayin' ...