Roll Over, Moldova

Hugh Ryman figured it would be a piece of cake. Moldavia had broken off from the Soviet Union and, renamed Moldova, was open to doing business with the West. And it was wine country, reputedly one of the best regions of the former Soviet Union for fine wine: Moldava has 420,000 acres of grapevines, 100,000 more than California. But it is a poor country in need of cash, so goods and labor would be cheap.

Ryman, who looks younger than his 33 years, has all the correct credentials. He was reared on Chateau la Jaubertie, his father’s property in Bergerac and educated at the University of Bordeaux in the ways of great French winemaking; he had apprenticed with the great Australian winemaker Brian Croser.

His impact working for many wineries in widely divergent regions of the south of France won him the title of king of the Flying Winemakers. That name was given after the harvest of 1987 for a team of youthful enologists who went from region to region improving the wines wherever they went.

Ryman, the most successful of the lot, wanted to make great wine that tasted of the fruit, not of the oak barrel or other production techniques. This desire took him eventually to Moldova.

A year after Moldova’s break from the Soviet Union in 1991, Ryman got a call from Penfolds, the largest winery in Australia, which wanted to see if good, inexpensive wine could be made from one of the former Soviet satellites.

“It figured to be wonderful,” Ryman says. So he accepted the task.

He wasn’t going blindly. He knew, for instance, that Jancis Robinson, master of wine and author of “The Oxford Companion to Wine,” had written that Moldova was “possibly the one [former Soviet state] with the greatest potential for wine quality and range, thanks to its extensive vineyards [and] temperate continental climate....” Moreover, he knew from what he had read that great wine had once been made there, so he thought the grapes must be good.

Reality, however, was a wake-up call. “I expected a lot more than we got,” he says with remorse.

It started with the vines. “The plantation was all there,” he says, “but they clearly had gotten the wrong clones of grapes, and they were using the wrong viticultural systems, because we were getting very small crops.”

Instead of five to seven tons of grapes per acre of land, Ryman says, in his first harvest, 1992, the crop yielded just over 1.6 tons per acre, and some of that was unusable because of rot and other problems.

Then there was a problem with such things as barrels, bottles, corks and capsules. No one wanted to deliver them because of the danger of theft, he says. Often, sealed shipping containers were opened en route and large amounts of goods were stolen.

There were other problems as well. “We thought we had solved the barrel problem because we found we could buy them [locally] for $20 each,” he says, chuckling. Oak barrels from the heart of France cost $500, so this sounded like a bargain. “But most of them leaked.” Moreover, the oak they used was an Eastern European variety that imparted an aroma not like that of classic French oak.

Ryman’s worst problem, however, was just getting permission to ship the wine he made from a country where the bureaucracy is worse than anything he had imagined. He affiliated himself with one of the largest cooperative wineries, Inacesti, and then found that an entrepreneur from the Netherlands had flown in soon after Moldova declared its independence and had signed an exclusive agreement with the government to export wine.

A major legal fight began, with Ryman contending that he had rights and the other party asserting different rights and with various government and business interests in Moldova flip-flopping, depending on which side offered more money.

It sounds as endless as the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial, but was solved simply enough when Ryman came up with more money.

“What it came down to was, the Moldovans wanted a new bottling line,” he says. So he arranged for a $400,000 state-of-the-art bottling line for the then state-owned cooperative and finally was able to gain export rights.

The first wine Ryman made was a finely crafted, lighter-styled Chardonnay that sold primarily in England two years ago for the equivalent of about $4 a bottle.

Penfolds withdrew from the project after a year but, Ryman says, “they’re still keeping an eye on it.” Ryman, facing a challenge like no other in his life, remained with the project along with other partners and still hopes one day to make great wine.

“One of the major problems was how the local residents viewed me,” he says. “The Russians always said the best wines came from Moldova, so when I showed up and told them their wines needed a lot of improving, well, they just didn’t believe me.”

In the meantime, Ryman hasn’t been idle. He’s been involved in a number of projects, including one in Hungary, one in Spain and one in the Stellenbosch area of South Africa. In addition, he is making some northern San Joaquin Valley wine at the Arciero Winery in Paso Robles for sale in England.

As the Moldovan and Hungarian ojects continued, Ryman began to export the wines first to England and then to the United States under the brand name Hickory Ridge. These bottles look for all the world like California wine bottles until you see the appellation of Gyongyos, which clearly isn’t a sub-region of the Napa Valley. It is a Hungarian wine area in the northern Massif that reportedly makes great Chardonnay.

Unfortunately, those reports are wrong, at least from what I have tasted of Ryman’s wines. Although the fruit is decent, the wines are at present relatively dull. Of the Hickory Ridge line, the best I tasted was a 1993 Merlot ($5) from Matra, Hungary. It has good fruit and acidity but lacks charm.

Ryman admits the wines aren’t yet where he’d like them to be, but he says that within the next year, a far better run of them will be available, part of a new 50,000-case importation.

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Wine of the Week

1994 Richemont Sauvignon Blanc ($6) : Hugh Ryman’s latest winner is this stylish, soft and tasty white wine from his winery Cave du Casse in the south of France. Fresh, melony and with citrus notes in the finish, the wine isn’t bone dry, but what little sweetness it has is balanced by perfect acidity. Ryman really loves wines of varietal distinction, and he uses oak sparingly. So this wine focuses not on some bizarre use of wood flavoring but on the grapes. Delicious wine that will be discounted to less than $5 a bottle.