Cricova

Cricova is a city with no sky: a hundred and twenty kilometres of streets sixty to eighty metres under the vineyards north of Chișinău, cut from the limestone that built the capital and refilled, since 1952, with wine. The streets have names — Cabernet, Feteasca, Aligoté, Pinot — and traffic signs, and you drive them, because walking would take days; the temperature is twelve degrees in any month; the humidity is exactly what a bottle wants; and in the deepest galleries the National Collection keeps a million and three hundred thousand of them, including the cellar Hermann Göring assembled and the Red Army carried home from Berlin. Yuri Gagarin visited in 1966 and, the guides say, took two days to find the exit.

The traveller books the tour, drives the fifteen kilometres from the capital, and is put in a small electric train or a car at the entrance; rides the avenues of barrels, learns the difference between the sparkling made the classic way in the rock and the still wines resting in oak, sees the collection behind its bars and the presidents' private cellars; and ends in one of the tasting halls — the Sala Fundul Mării, the Bottom of the Sea, with its shells in the stone, is the one to hope for — with five glasses and a plate of brânză. Above ground, the vines that make it, and, an hour south-west, Mileștii Mici, the other underground city, with two hundred kilometres of tunnels and a Guinness certificate.

The Guide's honesty: Cricova is a working winery and a state treasure, and the tour is by reservation only, in groups, at a set price that includes the tasting — book days ahead, more in October —; twelve degrees is cold after an hour: bring the coat you did not think you needed; the tasting is generous and the road back is a Moldovan road — arrange a driver, or the bus and a taxi from Chișinău —; the wines are very good and very cheap at the shop by the exit, and heavier in the suitcase than they look; and Moldova is one of Europe's least-visited countries and one of its warmest — the tunnels are the excuse, the country is the reason.