On Saturday evening, after what had already been a very long day dealing with the renovation of our house in central Chișinău, we made one final stop at a local supermarket.
The objective was extremely simple: buy some wine, go back to Vita's parents' house and finally stop doing things for the day.
Moldovan supermarkets are certainly not short of wine. Quite the opposite. The shelves can be packed with bottles from local producers, covering everything from very inexpensive everyday wines to considerably more ambitious bottles.
So I was walking past what was, by now, a fairly familiar wall of wine when something caught my attention.
New Zealand.
I stopped and looked again.
There, among all those bottles in a supermarket in Moldova, was a 2025 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, branded Blue Horizon.
I had not been looking for New Zealand wine. In fact, I had absolutely no expectation of finding any.
That was precisely why seeing it felt so unexpectedly familiar.
A very long journey for one bottle
The front label made its origin impossible to miss: New Zealand – Marlborough – Sauvignon Blanc, together with an illustration of a sailing ship beneath the words “From the Edge of the World”.
The bottle also carried Romanian-language labelling for the Moldovan market. This was not simply something that had somehow been brought privately from the other side of the planet. It was part of the local retail system.
That fascinated me.
I have become accustomed to finding imported products in Moldova, particularly from neighbouring European countries. But wine is different. Moldova already produces an enormous variety of its own. A supermarket here does not need to search twelve thousand kilometres away simply to find something to put on an empty shelf.
And yet somebody had imported a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, labelled it for the Moldovan market, distributed it and found enough reason to give it shelf space beside Moldovan wines.
Apparently it was not even particularly unusual. When I checked later, I found that this same Blue Horizon Sauvignon Blanc had already appeared in Moldovan supermarket promotions earlier in the year.
New Zealand has travelled surprisingly well
There is actually a straightforward explanation for how it got there.
New Zealand's wine industry is heavily oriented towards exports. New Zealand Winegrowers reports that the country's wines are sold in more than one hundred international markets, with the majority of production ultimately leaving New Zealand.
Sauvignon Blanc is particularly important, and Marlborough is the name most people outside New Zealand immediately associate with it.
So from a commercial perspective there is nothing extraordinary about a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc travelling overseas.
What surprised me was the destination.
Moldova.
A country with its own deeply established wine culture had somehow become one of the places where a bottle from Marlborough could complete its very long journey and end up waiting for somebody like me to notice it.
For me, it was not really about the wine
The more interesting part was personal.
I lived in New Zealand for a significant period of my life. It has now been almost a decade since that chapter, but seeing those two words — New Zealand — unexpectedly printed across a bottle in a supermarket in Moldova immediately connected two very different periods of my life.
That happens occasionally when you have lived in several countries.
A product, a smell, an accent, a piece of music or even a supermarket label can suddenly collapse geography and time.
For a moment I was not simply standing in a shop after another exhausting Saturday of dealing with contractors, Internet providers, family photographs and everything else involved in rebuilding our life in Chișinău.
I was looking at something from a country where I had previously built another life.
New Zealand and Moldova could hardly feel farther apart geographically. One is a group of islands in the South Pacific; the other is a small landlocked European country between Romania and Ukraine.
Yet there they were, connected by one bottle of white wine.
I bought the bottle, of course.
Not because I had conducted some sophisticated comparison of Sauvignon Blancs. Not because Moldova was suffering from a shortage of perfectly good wine. And certainly not because importing wine halfway around the planet is the most obvious way to shop locally.
I bought it because it was from New Zealand.
Sometimes that is sufficient reason.
Small reminders of previous lives
Much of this blog is becoming a record of transitions: countries where I have lived, work I have done, people I have known, family history I am reconstructing and, now, the process of making a home in Moldova.
Those periods do not fit into perfectly separated boxes.
Germany occasionally appears in Moldova. Brazil appears in Germany. Family documents from Italy turn up on a computer in Chișinău. Photographs taken more than a century ago end up being digitised a few streets away from our house.
And, every so often, New Zealand appears on a supermarket shelf.
There is something rather pleasant about that.
The bottle itself is just a bottle of wine. I have no grand conclusion about it, and perhaps that is precisely the point. Some memories do not arrive through major anniversaries or carefully planned moments.
They simply appear while you are doing the shopping.
On this particular Saturday, after spending an entire day dealing with the practicalities of our new life in Moldova, I unexpectedly encountered a small reminder of an old one.
So a bottle of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc travelled from New Zealand all the way to Moldova.
And eventually it found me.
The personal experience, interpretation and conclusions remain my own.
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