My things

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

Saturday, 26 September, was supposed to be one of those thoroughly mundane days: deal with a few things at the house, collect some photographs, sort out the Internet connection and eventually go home. Of course, once a house renovation is involved, a list containing the words “a few things” should never be trusted. We are still spending much of our time at Vita’s parents’ house while the work on our own place in central Chișinău continues. So the day began there with a suitably substantial breakfast before we set off for the city, about a thirty-minute drive away. We had several jobs waiting for us. By the time we finally returned in the evening, the day had somehow accumulated a police stop, another meeting with the contractor, roughly a thousand old family photographs, one failed fibre installation, another Internet contract, Georgian lemonade, two enormous pieces of Napoleon cake and some salt-and-pepper dispensers that very nearly acquired new owners. ...

While our house in Chișinău is still being renovated, my partner and I are living with her parents. Before describing what happened, there is an important part of my own background that probably explains why I reacted so strongly. I was raised with animals around me all the time: dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, hamsters and others over the years. They were not animals that existed somewhere outside the household. They were part of the household. Our animals lived inside the house with us. I took dogs to the beach. I had dogs sleeping beside me. One of my cats even chose the middle of the night, between my legs in bed, as the place to give birth to her kittens — a particularly strange experience to wake up to. Animals, for me, have always been part of life in a very direct and connected way. They occupied the same spaces, participated in everyday routines and developed individual relationships with the people around them. They were never simply something we happened to keep. ...