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 waiting for us.
The bottle is Mi Piace La Pesca Dolce, a Moldovan sparkling wine with peach flavour, produced in Ialoveni. The producer describes it as a sweet sparkling wine, and the current product information lists it at only 6.5% alcohol. The peach character is not subtle; this is clearly intended to be fruity, accessible and easy to drink rather than a severe traditional-method sparkling wine that demands careful analysis. The presentation gives the same impression. The bottle is tall and elegant, with a large metallic-gold label and the words La Pesca Dolce underneath the Mi Piace name. There is no attempt to disguise what it is. It promises something light, fruity and sweet, and that is precisely what it delivers.
Sweet, but not unpleasantly sweet
The surprise was how much I liked it. Normally, when somebody tells me that a sparkling wine is sweet and peach-flavoured, I immediately expect something that will become tiring after half a glass. There is a particular kind of sweetness that stops tasting like wine and starts feeling more like drinking liquid dessert, and that is generally not what I am looking for. This was different. Mi Piace officially classifies La Pesca Dolce as sweet, and the published product information confirms that it contains a substantial amount of residual sugar, but that is not how I experienced it in the glass. It was certainly sweet — there is no pretending otherwise — yet it did not strike me as sugary or syrupy. The sweetness felt mild and rounded, and together with the bubbles and peach flavour it produced something extremely easy to drink. It is not the sort of bottle I would open when I wanted a complex wine to study for an evening. It is the sort of bottle that I could imagine opening cold on a hot afternoon, with friends, at the end of dinner, or simply because somebody wants something cheerful in a glass without turning the occasion into a wine examination.
That distinction matters to me. Simple wine is not necessarily bad wine, just as complicated wine is not necessarily good wine. Sometimes I want something serious, dry and structured. At other times I want something that tastes pleasant from the first mouthful and requires no effort whatsoever. La Pesca Dolce belongs firmly in the second category. Its success, at least for me, is exactly that it does not pretend to be anything else. Peach dominates, the sweetness is obvious but manageable, the alcohol is low, and the whole thing is very easy-going. I finished the first glass expecting that the novelty might wear off and instead poured another. That is generally a more useful review than inventing a list of sophisticated tasting vocabulary simply because a bottle happens to contain wine.
Moldova certainly knows how to make bubbles
What interested me afterwards was not only this particular bottle but the larger question it created. Moldova is unmistakably a wine country. Living here makes that increasingly obvious, and National Wine Day amplifies it enormously: producers from across the country arrive in central Chișinău, familiar large wineries appear beside tiny operations I had never heard of, and it becomes possible to move from one interpretation of Moldovan wine to another simply by walking a few metres. Sparkling wine is very much part of that culture as well. Cricova alone has made Moldova’s underground sparkling-wine cellars internationally recognisable, and many Moldovan wineries now produce their own sparkling ranges using different grapes, sweetness levels and production methods. Yet outside Moldova, I do not think those wines have acquired the same linguistic identity that some other sparkling-wine traditions have achieved.
That is where I started thinking about names. France has Champagne, but Champagne is not simply another word for sparkling wine; it is a protected geographical designation belonging to one particular region and production tradition. France also has several protected Crémant appellations. Spain has Cava. Italy has Prosecco. These names have become extraordinarily powerful because a consumer can hear a single word and immediately associate it with a country, a style and an expectation. Moldova, quite correctly, no longer uses “Champagne” as a generic name for its own sparkling wines. Since 2018, following its commitments on protection of geographical indications, the country has formally used vin spumant instead. That is technically correct Romanian terminology: sparkling wine. But vin spumant describes a category. It does not yet function internationally as a specifically Moldovan identity.
Perhaps that does not matter. Perhaps Moldovan sparkling wine and the broader Wine of Moldova identity are enough, and individual wineries should simply build their own brands underneath them. But after spending a day surrounded by Moldovan producers, I am not completely convinced. There is enormous marketing power in having a word that belongs to a place. Prosecco is no longer something that requires an explanation in London, Berlin or São Paulo. Cava does not need a paragraph on the back of the bottle explaining why it is not Champagne. The word itself carries the category. Moldova already has the history, the vineyards, the cellars, the producers and the technical capability to make serious sparkling wines. What it does not appear to have is one internationally recognised word that makes somebody looking at a restaurant wine list immediately think: that is the sparkling wine from Moldova.
What would Moldova call it?
I have no clever answer, and I am certainly not proposing that a peach-flavoured Mi Piace should suddenly become the template for an entire national category. La Pesca Dolce is one particular product with its own purpose and style. But opening it after National Wine Day made the question feel much less theoretical. Moldova produces a remarkably broad range of wines, from inexpensive and uncomplicated bottles to genuinely ambitious wines capable of competing internationally. Sparkling wine is already part of that landscape. Perhaps, over time, one region, one method, one local grape or one protected designation will eventually become associated strongly enough with Moldovan sparkling wine to develop that kind of identity. Or perhaps the industry will deliberately create and protect a term. Wine names that now seem completely natural did not become internationally meaningful overnight; they accumulated history, rules, producers, marketing and consumer recognition until the name itself began carrying value.
For the moment, however, the bottle in front of me simply says Mi Piace La Pesca Dolce, and perhaps that is enough for tonight. It arrived in our house almost accidentally because Viorica works with the company producing it. I noticed the brand again while walking through National Wine Day, remembered that the bottle was waiting at home, opened it after finishing another wine and discovered something I genuinely had not expected to enjoy as much as I did. It is sweet, but to my taste not oppressively sweet; peachy without becoming unpleasant; light, mildly sparkling and dangerously easy to continue drinking. It is not trying to compete with a vintage Champagne, and there is absolutely no reason that it should. It occupies its own much simpler space and does that job rather well.
And once again Moldova has managed to give me another question to investigate. I already came away from National Wine Day wanting to make a list of the small wineries around Chișinău and start visiting them. Now I think I need a second list: Moldovan sparkling wines. Traditional-method wines, tank-fermented wines, dry ones, sweet ones, perhaps some unusual local varieties, and probably several things I have never encountered before. The more wine I discover here, the more obvious it becomes that there is still an enormous amount I do not know about the country where I now live.
Somewhere amongst all of those bottles, perhaps there is also the beginning of an answer to another question.
Catalonia has Cava. Italy has Prosecco. France has Champagne and Crémant. What name, one day, will make people immediately think of sparkling wine from Moldova?
Factual background was checked against information published by Mi Piace, the Moldovan authorities and Wine of Moldova. The tasting impressions, opinions and question about the future identity of Moldovan sparkling wine are my own.
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