Moldovan Mining Tunnels Hold Goering and Putin's Wine

Where will you find over 70 miles of old mining tunnels transformed into a vast and astonishing wine cellar? In Moldova. BBC News has the details of Cricova Estate, best known now for what lies beneath it. BBC Reporter Stephen Sackur got a tour of the tunnels from Marketing Director of Cricova Estate, Alexandru Alexeev, and was admonished for handling one of Herman Goering's bottles from his collection seized by the Red Army at the end of World War II: "Don't remove the dirt, even the dust is valuable....[E]ach bottle is worth £15,000 and there are 129 of them."

So how does Vladimir Putin have a collection of wine in these tunnels? Every visiting dignitary is afforded the opportunity to keep wine in the tunnels, and apparently Putin has an entire cave to himself. He even held his 50th birthday party there.

An interesting fact about the Moldovan wine industry? Though a country with a population of less than four million people, Sackur reveals that Moldova "has consistently been among the world's top 10 wine exporters."