Somma

A tiny natural-wine project in Ciumai, in the south of Moldova, inside the IGP Valul lui Traian. Somma is run by two brothers, Eugen and Alexandru Sîrbu, who worked as sommeliers in Moscow before coming home to make wine. The winery was founded around 2019-2020. The estate vineyard is 1.8 hectares of 25-year-old Cabernet Sauvignon adjacent to the cellar; Riesling and other grapes are brought in from trusted friends in the Codru zone, notably Vorniceni - as juice rather than fruit, so it arrives undamaged.

The philosophy is minimal intervention: spontaneous fermentation, native yeasts, low or no SO2, often unfiltered. "Let nature and sense of place manifest themselves through the grapes."

The range is small - Somma makes no more than about 5,000 bottles a year in total. The wine that put them on the map is Noble Savage - Cabernet Sauvignon, half ambient and half selected yeast for fermentation, twelve months in used oak, unfiltered, around 1,800 bottles per vintage. The 2019 release was almost incidental and became a hit overnight. Roșu de Căuș is a multi-vintage Cabernet Sauvignon × Merlot blend, whole-berry, wild-yeast, aged in old oak. The Pét-Nat Riesling 2023 is the next cuvée to know, released with no added sulphur after disgorgement.

Somma's Chișinău gateway is La Nobiltà Del Gusto, a vinoteca where both Eugen Sîrbu and Maxim Levcenco - of DiWinety - work the floor. I met Eugen there by accident: I had come for DiWinety bottles that turned out not to be for sale, and instead ended up with a Somma Pét-Nat Riesling in the glass and the winemaker himself walking in a few minutes later. I met his brother Alexandru a while after, at a small wine festival in Chișinău's Grădina Publică Ștefan cel Mare și Sfânt.

A quiet party trick comes with bringing a Somma bottle to a blind pour: experienced drinkers reach for Germany, Austria, France - rarely for southern Moldova. That mismatch isn't underripening or fleeing the terroir; it's craft. A warm southern climate tends to produce big, ripe, extracted wines, and Somma's bottles are the opposite - delicate, lightly perfumed, built on acidity - which is a harder thing to pull off down here than it looks. The Sîrbu brothers spent years in Moscow's fine-dining rooms where Burgundy, Piedmont and Champagne were daily reference points, and they brought that calibration home. They drink good wine, they know what good wine is, and they are willing to experiment. Both brothers are also quietly humble - no performance, no mythology. Not everything in the line-up lands, but the hit rate is high and the direction is clear.

Somma sits alongside Equinox, Minis Terrios and a handful of others in the small, growing circle of low-intervention Moldovan producers that actually work as wines rather than as curiosities. If Equinox is the first-generation standard-bearer of that movement, Somma is the next wave: less extracted, more delicate, more interested in finesse than weight.