Purcari

The road to Purcari crosses a plateau that feels, in the right light, like it belongs to a different century entirely. The steppe grass grows between the vine rows here and the land rolls in long slow waves toward the Dniester, which appears on the horizon as a silver line and then disappears and then reappears, closer each time, until the estate comes into view: white gateposts, an avenue of trees, and then the long stone winery that has been on this site since 1827. This is the oldest continuously operating winery in Moldova, and it wears that distinction with a specific kind of unhurried confidence.

Purcari became famous under the Tsars — specifically for a wine called Negru de Purcari, a deep red blend that reportedly appeared at the coronation of Alexander II in 1856 and became one of the preferred wines of the Russian imperial court. The Soviets collectivized the estate but continued producing, and after independence Purcari was privatized and quietly went about the work of recovering its pre-Soviet quality. The recovery is complete. The Negru de Purcari I tasted in the cellar — the current release, not some museum bottle — was one of the most serious red wines I’ve encountered anywhere in Eastern Europe: structured, deep, with the kind of tannin architecture that suggests it will reward another ten years of patience.

The tour of the estate begins in the vineyards, which cover about four hundred hectares of that rolling steppe. The winemaker who walked me through was Albanian-trained but had worked here long enough to speak about the estate’s terroir with the specificity that only comes from knowing a piece of land in multiple vintages and in multiple failures. The soil here is different from the rest of Moldova — heavier, darker, with more clay — and it gives the wines a density that the lighter limestone soils of the central region don’t produce. He talked about a 2002 vintage Cabernet that he still had in the cellar as a reference point and then, after a brief pause, went and opened it. We drank it standing at a barrel. It was not dead. It was barely middle-aged.

The village of Purcari surrounds the estate in the way that agricultural villages always develop around the thing that employs them: a church, a school, a row of houses that have been repaired more or less continuously since the nineteenth century. The estate employs a significant percentage of the village, and the relationship has the quality of a long marriage — complex, interdependent, occasionally strained, ultimately defining. A woman at the village shop who heard me ask for a map of walking routes in the area produced instead a hand-drawn sketch on the back of a receipt, showing paths through the vineyards with local names for each section. She had lived here her entire life and had her own geography of the place.

I stayed for dinner in the estate’s guesthouse, which served a menu built around the wines in a way that every wine region aspires to but relatively few achieve. The Roșu de Purcari with a slow-braised lamb; the Alb de Purcari with a pike-perch from the Dniester; a glass of the estate’s dessert wine — Vinaria Purcari Vintage Blanc de Noirs — with something made of cherries and cream that required no further analysis. I ate slowly and thought about the Tsars, and then I thought about the wine, and then I stopped thinking entirely for a while, which is a reasonable outcome for a Wednesday evening in southeastern Moldova.

When to go: September and October during harvest is the obvious time — the estate offers harvest experiences and the air above the vineyards smells of fermentation for weeks. The guesthouse accepts visitors year-round and the winery tours run daily. Purcari is about two hours southeast of Chișinău by car; it is reachable by marshrutka to Căușeni and then taxi, but a car makes the return trip through the steppe much more satisfying.