CHISINAU, October 4.
/TASS/. Moldovan President Igor Dodon said on Friday he plans to present his Russian
counterpart, Vladimir Putin, with a cask of home-made wine on his birthday to
be celebrated on October 7.
"We will see
each other on Friday [October 11 — TASS] in Ashgabat [at a summit of the CIS
heads of state — TASS]. I’d rather not let it on but I have some ideas [for a
present]. For instance, young wine from Sadova [Dodon’s native village — TASS]
which I made myself. White and red. When he visited Moldova, he told me several
times that our wine is good. We can arrange for that," Dodon said in an
interview with Moldova’s television channel Number 4.
When asked what he
will do if Putin does not accept the present, as laws prescribe, the Moldovan
leader replied jokingly, "And what if it is a cask of wine and he tastes
it? Should it be taken to a museum?"
The Moldovan
president added he hoped his Russian counterpart would pay a visit to Moldova
soon. "A clear agenda is needed for that. I think it will depend on the
next year’s situation, on whether the current parliamentary majority stays in
place and the government continues to work after the local elections," he
noted.
At a CIS summit in
Chisinau on October 7, 2002, Moldova’s former President Vladimir Voronin
presented Putin with a crystal crocodile, saying it was the only creature that
never moved backwards.
In 2017, Dodon
brought to Putin several bottles from the Russian leaders’ personal wine
collection kept at the famous wine cellars of Cricova, a town located some 15
kilometers north of the capital city Chisinau. The matter is that there is a
tradition in Moldova to present high guests with wines from Cricova. Putin
received several hundreds of bottles of rare wines as a birthday present during
his visit to Chisinau back in October 2002.
Typically, the
leaders don’t take their presents with them but leave their wines to age in
Cricova’s wine cellars that were founded in 1954. The Cricova tunnels boast of
housing a private collection of Hitler’s right-hand man Hermann Goering the Red
Army captured in Berlin in 1945. The private collection sector also holds
bottles belonging to former and present heads of state and royal families. The
famous winery welcomed many world leaders and celebrities. Its guests included
former Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, the world’s first
man in space Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, China’s Mao Zedong, North Korea’s
Kim Il-sung, France’s Jacques Chirac, Germany’s Angela Merkel and others. Some
of them have their own collections in Cricova tunnels.
Source: ITAR-TASS
05-10-2019
