Vin (Jin) de Casă - Moldovan House Wine
The best wine in the world is always made wherever you are in Moldova
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Moldova is a country that loves good wine. The nation is famous as a wine producer with award winning vintages and picturesque wineries. Moldova has not only the largest wine cellar in the world, it also has the second largest as well. These cavernous underground cities of wine production and aging have underground streets named “Cabernet” and “Fetească Neagra” after the various types of wine aging there. Cars and trucks drive down roads up to 80 meters underground as workers produce sparkling wines in conditions that are naturally perfect for aging them.
Of course there are also famous above ground wineries - some designed to give the experience of a traditional Moldovan village, others a French Château, others a California style country escape.
Most visitors to Moldova will visit some of these wineries and enjoy a nice glass (or two). But this isn’t really the story of Moldova and wine. Away from the commercial vineyards almost every Moldovan household makes their own wine - Vin de Casă, or house wine.1
Welcome to Moldova - Have Some Wine!
Back in June 2012 I arrived in Moldova along with 55 of my soon-to-be best friends for 27 months of service in the Peace Corps. As part of our training we were sent to live with local host families for the first 3 months. During the day we would take classes in Romanian (or Russian2) as well as technical trainings around your planned area of work. In the evening you live with a family who doesn’t speak any English and you try your best to figure things out.
So there we were, blurry eyed from jet lag and fresh off a long flight, arriving in a small Moldovan village where we would live for a time. In my group we had around 8 volunteers crammed into a marshrutka (mini-bus) along with everything we brought with us for the next 2 years. As the bus picked its way through the village of Cricova on an uneven road we were all pretty nervous about what would happen when it was our time to get off and meet our host families.
As the bus arrived at the first gate nerves turned to terror for any introverts in our gang. The first volunteer to get off exited the car into the waiting arms of around 10 people who were clearly excited to greet him. One of them pushed a German beer mug filled to the top with Vin de Casă into his hands before he even left the car. He was made to drink deeply from this offering before he was even let into the house. Welcome to Moldova - try our house wine!!
The Culture of House Wine
The first thing to understand about house wine is that families who make it are extremely proud of their work. We quickly learned a joke around village life - “who makes the best wine in the world? whoever just gave you a glass of their Vin de Casă.”
I learned this the hard way by committing a terrible cultural faux pas on my first day. Peace Corps had recommended that we bring some gifts for our host families - ideally something unique from your state or city in the US. Having read that Moldova was all about wine I decided to bring a good bottle of Virginia wine and some Virginia peanuts. I saw it as a kind of cultural exchange and a way for me to (eventually) talk about American history - pretty much all vineyards in Virginia trace their roots to Thomas Jefferson.
This was a bad idea.
In America people might appreciate wine by trying different types and becoming a connoisseur (or snob). In Moldova, you appreciate wine but making better wine than your neighbors and drinking it. If I had brought a bottle of whiskey? That would have been loved. But a glass bottle of American wine? I seemed to imply that the wine in this house wasn’t up to snuff. Suffice to say, we never progressed as far as talking about Thomas Jefferson. They raised a skeptical eyebrow at the bottle of wine, put it away and poured me some of theirs.
The second thing to understand about house wine are the practices and rituals around drinking it. There are basically 3 times when it is appropriate to drink house wine. With meals, in the cellar and when doing some types of manual labor.
Hai La Masa!
The most common of these is while having dinner. “Hai la masa!” means let’s go to the table and with that proclamation it’s time to feast. Dinners in Moldova are long processes where people eat, drink and toast for hours. Families will mostly eat outside in the summer and it isn’t uncommon at all for neighbors to drop by and for a fresh chair to be pulled up. Overall it’s a very communal experience and Moldovan home cooking is delicious.
Every house is different but in a lot of cases wine drinking is a fairly organized affair. At a fancy dinner the family might pull out a set of wine glasses for everyone, but on normal days there is only likely to be one. The “toastmaster,” usually the male head of the household, will pour himself a glass and drink it first. Wine is not sipped on these occasions but drunk more like a shot - down the hatch! The toastmaster then will refill the glass and pass it to the person on his left, usually his wife. Once she drinks the toastmaster refills again and sends the glass to the next person.
This process is interesting in a few ways. Obviously, anyone squeamish about everyone at dinner sharing a glass will probably be focused on that - but another aspect is how this both speeds up and slows down the drinking process. Once the glass comes to you it’s pretty important that you drink it fast because until you do no one else gets wine. So in that way there can be a lot of pressure to take your wine shot. On the other hand, the toastmaster is responsible for pacing and after a few quick rounds things tend to slow down. Moldovans love to drink wine but being drunk is frowned upon so the goal is a long leisurely evening - not people falling out of their chairs.
Whenever you’re enjoying a dinner like this it is usually a good idea to have some toasts prepared. Typically people drink to health, to peace or around 10 or so common toasts. Sometimes things get a bit edgier though. One time my host family had some of their family visiting from Moscow. This was a fancy occasion so we all had our own glasses and the visiting uncle raised a glass to Putin. He did so staring right at me to see what I might do with that one. My host family had complex3 political views but *really* did not like Russia or the Soviet Union so this made everyone freeze up uncomfortably. After a moment’s pause I decided to meet his gaze, raise my glass and say “To Obama.” The Moscow uncle thought a moment and decided that each of us toasting our own president was a good compromise and we drank.4
To the Cellar!
The second place to enjoy house wine is in the family’s wine cellar. If you just drop by a random village house this is the most likely place that you will wind up. It’s usually the first and last stop on the tour. People are eager for you to taste their wine and to show off their wine aging equipment as well. Sharing a glass of house wine right out of a barrel is a pretty great way to enjoy it but there’s a little danger here. At dinner there’s lots of food and also a social norm that you go a bit easy - not so in the cellar. If you stay a while you’ll probably open up a jar of pickles or something to snack on but in this intimate setting the shots of wine move fast and the conversation is lively.
My host family made around 700 liters of wine per year. Some families make more, some less, but basically it is however much you need to get you to the next batch of wine maturing. House wine isn’t something you age year on year and typically each batch is polished off in time to make room for the next. That doesn’t mean that a family drinks 700 liters of wine in a year - factor a lot of dinner guests, parties and giving bottles away as gifts into this equation. Even so, Moldova loves its wine and makes a LOT of it.
Work and Wine
The final interesting thing about house wine is how it is traditionally used as a sort of micro-currency. If you hire workers to help on the farm or repair something, etc it is considered polite to give them some wine. Sometimes this is a few drinks after the job is done, sometimes it is a bottle to go. Basically, this might be tradition or actual payment depending on the person and the job. More concerningly, especially if there are power tools, sometimes it becomes part of the work itself.
In my first month in Moldova another volunteer on my street had one such story. He was called out into the backyard by his host dad and told that they need to move a pile of stones from the bottom of a small hill up to the top. The good news? They would put a bottle of wine by the new pile and have a shot each time they made it up the hill. This volunteer didn’t want to offend his host so he agreed and they went about moving stones and having wine. Later he found out that host dad was actually just playing a prank on him - there was no reason to move the stones at all. It was an excuse for some wine and to see how far you could push the American out of his comfort zone. I also learned from experience that particular Moldovan man often covertly spilled out his own wine while goading others to keep drinking rounds - so it’s fair to say he had a particular sense of humor.
While this one case was a joke, wine is associated with manual work - especially harvests. Picnicking and shooting wine in a field after a long day of picking grapes is a pretty wonderful experience and highly recommended.
Making Your Own Wine
I think I’ll come back in a future article and talk more about the process of making house wine. These days, many years after my Peace Corps crash course into Moldova wine culture, my wife and I also make wine. We have some grapes at our house and we’ve had some luck with our own house vintage in past years - though we’re still amateurs. Everyone has their own secret so there isn’t a lot of consensus about technique - but there is one thing not to do. Don’t use wine yeast! This is really frowned upon, as is anything else seen as “not natural.” If you buy it in a winemaking store it’s pretty likely that the village will put it in the “not natural” category. Natural yeast is collected by leaving your open vat of crushed grapes outside for a while and letting wild yeast drift in on the breeze. It’s a process that is literally as old as winemaking itself and in Moldova the old ways are considered the best.
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In Romanian the correct way to say this is “Vin de Casă” which literally translates as house wine. In some parts of Moldova though, especially very rural areas, local accents transform the “V” in Vin to a J pronounced more like a zh (pronounced like the “s” is vision). Some people hate this and castigate as a kinda country bumpkin pronunciation but I kinda love it. Romanians think it sounds insane and if you say Jin de Casă people know you’re definitely from Moldova.
Peace Corps Moldova typically had around 2-3 volunteers assigned to speak Russian in a group of around 50. These volunteers would go to the more Russian speaking parts of the country including Gagauzia and parts of the far north. Since I had previously been learning Russian in Peace Corps Kazakstan I was put in this group.
At the time the big political debate was about language. Some in the family believed that it was called the Moldovan language, others that it was Romanian. They all agreed that Russian was terrible and that it was awful that I was learning Russian and not Romanian. Since I had already lived in Kazakstan for a year I spoke Russian a lot better than my fellow volunteers spoke Romanian - this meant that my host dad periodically would explain to me how bad it was that I spoke Russian and have me translate this to my fellow Americans who didn’t speak Romanian well enough to be told this directly. All this was kinda interesting but didn’t really amount to what I would normally understand as politics. Since Peace Corps Volunteers are *really* not supposed to talk much about local politics that all worked out just fine.
Summer 2012… more innocent times.
This was excellent, I went to Moldova over the summer and loved the hospitality, food and wine. I hope to go back and see beyond around the capital.
Loved this read, thanks David!