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Mi Piace La Pesca Dolce and the Name Moldova Still Needs for Its Bubbles

This was another small discovery from a day that has already produced several different stories. Today was Moldova’s National Wine Day, which this year takes place on 3–4 October and celebrates its 25th edition. I have another post about the event itself, because trying to describe the entire day through a single bottle would not make much sense. This particular story actually started a few weeks earlier. Viorica had received a bottle from one of her customers — the company behind Mi Piace — and it had been sitting at home waiting for us to open it. I had not paid very much attention to it at the time. Then, while walking around National Wine Day today, I saw the Mi Piace stand amongst all the other producers and suddenly remembered the bottle. By the time we returned home, after tasting more than enough wine during the day, curiosity finally won. I had finished the wine I was drinking and decided that this was as good an opportunity as any to find out what exactly had been wa...
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A Sauvignon Blanc, an IT Colleague, and a Tiny Moldovan Winery

Today was Moldova’s National Wine Day, an event that deserves a post of its own because there was far too much happening to compress the entire day into one story. This one is about a single bottle of wine, but perhaps even more about the people behind it. When we entered the event and started walking through the different stands, one of the first places where we stopped was Pomușoară Dulcișoară . There are many producers at an event like this, including some very large and very well-known Moldovan names, so it would have been easy simply to taste something, say thank you and move on to the next table. Instead, we stayed. The people there took the time to talk to us properly, not simply to pour wine, and the conversation immediately made the stand memorable. We talked about the wines, the winery and what they were doing, and there was the kind of relaxed personal interaction that is much easier to find with a small producer than with a large commercial operation. We eventually ...
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One More Passenger at the End of the Day

After everything else that happened today, apparently the day still had one final story waiting for me. It had already been a long Saturday. We had started at 06:00, dealt with house matters, driven into Chișinău to inspect the renovation, wandered through the National Wine Day celebrations, eaten, drunk, talked to people, discovered new wineries, watched enormous quantities of meat rotating over charcoal, and eventually headed back towards Vita’s parents’ house. By that point I was ready for the day to become considerably less interesting. Instead, while I was driving uphill along the street towards the house, I noticed a group of teenagers running down the road. They kept looking backwards as they ran, which initially seemed slightly odd but not especially important. It took me a few moments to understand what they were looking at. A very small puppy was running after them as fast as its tiny legs could manage. The teenagers passed my car and continued down the hill. The ...
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From Renovations to Wine Day: One of Those Days That Makes Me Love Moldova

Today was Moldova’s National Wine Day. That sounds as though the day started with wine, which would have been perfectly understandable in Moldova, but reality was considerably less glamorous. Our Saturday began at 06:00, dealing with the usual collection of things that have accumulated while we are still living between houses. After that we drove into Chișinău to check the progress of the renovation. Only once all of that was out of the way could we move on to the considerably more attractive part of the programme: going into the centre of the city and surrounding ourselves with wine, food, smoke, people and the general organised chaos of one of Moldova’s biggest celebrations. The house visit was important, though, because we are finally reaching the stage where I can say that the renovation is almost finished without immediately feeling that I have tempted fate. The inside is essentially done. There are ...
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Movie - Minions & Monsters (2026)

 
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A Blackout, a Bottle of Barriquello, and an Unexpectedly Good Pinot Noir

Friday evening did not begin particularly well. I arrived at my in-laws’ house and, once again, there was no electricity. This has become a rather familiar situation. There have been repeated interruptions while work has been taking place on the local electrical infrastructure, and on this occasion I simply did not have the energy to start the familiar procedure again: find out whom to call, ask what happened, ask how long it will take, receive an approximate answer, and then continue waiting anyway. So I decided to simplify the problem. There was no electricity. There was not very much I could do about it. I was going to have to sit and wait. And if one has to sit and wait, one might as well sit and wait with a glass of wine. Fortunately, I had exactly the bottle for the occasion: a Moldovan Barriquello Cuvée Rouge Pinot Noir that I had kept around waiting for an appropriate moment. Of course, as far as I am concerned, almost every moment is an app...
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TOMS - Inside the Group Contact Model: Keeping Shared Contact Data as a Proper Value Object

In the previous article about my C++ event-planning reconstruction, I looked at the Group model: a surprisingly compact object that connects a collection of Guests with a shared name, shared contact information and some seating-related behaviour. One of those three pieces of Group state deserves a closer look of its own. Rather than storing addresses, telephone numbers and email directly inside the Group, the reconstructed architecture places all of that information into a separate Group Contact object. It is not a large class. It has no inheritance hierarchy, no graphical behaviour and no complicated external relationships. Its job is much narrower: represent the contact information associated with a Group as one coherent value . That makes it a useful example of something that can easily be overlooked in object-oriented design. Not every worthwhile class represents a large business entity. Sometimes a small value object provides a cleaner architecture precisely b...
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