Cahul

I came to Cahul because of a single sentence in a Romanian travel blog that described it as “the town where the Soviets built a sanatorium for their officials and the wine is better than anyone admits.” That is the kind of sentence that sends me sideways across a country, and I do not regret it. Cahul is in the far south of Moldova, close to where the Prut River marks the Romanian border, in a landscape that opens out from the central plateau into something broader and more agricultural — huge fields of sunflowers in late summer, vineyards running in long rows toward the horizon, the sky enormous in a way it isn’t further north.

The town itself is small and unhurried in a way that southern Moldovan towns tend to be — wider streets than Chișinău, more shade trees, a central park with a fountain that works. The Soviet sanatorium is still there, now operating as a rehabilitation resort, and still drawing visitors for its mineral spring waters, which are sulfurous and warm and taste, honestly, like something medicinal rather than pleasant. But people come for the same reason they always have, and they seem improved by the experience. I sat by the spring for an afternoon and watched an elderly Romanian couple take their daily constitution across the park with the serious determination of people who believe the waters are working.

The wine from the Cahul region is little known even within Moldova, overshadowed by the prestige of Purcari further north and the marketing machinery of the big cellars near Chișinău. But the local winemakers — several of whom operate from family estates that produce only a few thousand bottles a year — are doing something interesting with the region’s particular terroir: a clay-limestone mix that gives the wines a freshness that the heavier soils further north sometimes lack. I found a producer in a village about fifteen kilometers from town through a local restaurant owner who called him on my behalf and arranged a visit. The winemaker met me in his yard with a dog, a cigarette, and no particular sense of time, and we tasted through six wines in a garage that smelled of sawdust and sulfur dioxide while his wife brought out bread and a plate of tomatoes from the garden.

The Fetească Albă was the revelation — a white wine so precise and mineral that it reminded me of good Chablis, except that it was made by a man in rubber boots in a village in southern Moldova and cost roughly the equivalent of two euros a bottle at the cellar door. He seemed slightly embarrassed by my enthusiasm. His son, who appeared at some point during the tasting, spoke better French than I expected and said the family had been making wine on this land for four generations. He didn’t say it with pride exactly. More with the quiet factual certainty of stating that the Prut River runs south. It is simply what they do.

The evenings in Cahul are gentle in a way that spa towns tend to be — something about the combination of mineral water and slow afternoons makes people move at a different pace. I had dinner at a restaurant that served a fish stew made from Danube carp, seasoned with dill and soured with what the menu called “village vinegar” and what tasted like young wine just past its window. It was very good food made from very local ingredients by someone who had no ambitions beyond cooking it right.

When to go: August through October is the best time, when the vineyards are full and the evenings are warm enough to sit outside. The mineral spa is open year-round and the town is genuinely pleasant in spring. Direct marshrutkas from Chișinău take about two and a half hours south.