what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Saturday, December 22, 2018

Seasonal Taste

Romanian wines seem at last – after almost 30 years - to be coming in from the cold. No fewer than three significant “events” occurred in this domain in the past few months. First the publication in the summer of a substantial book The Wines of Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova; by Caroline Gilby (2018) who has apparently been a wine connoisseuse for the past decade and is the first English-speaking specialist to produce a book about the local wines. (An expensive coffee-table The Wine Book of Romania was produced a couple of years ago by a Romanian)
Gilby's book came to my attention because of the wine blog of Mike Vesseth - who made his first visit to Romania this autumn; took part on some wine tasting at Iasi and posted about these experiences this month.

I had no sooner asked to see a copy of the Gilby book (50 euros!) than, a few days later, I alighted on a copy of the first ever Gault Millau Guide to Romanian Wines 2019 – which describes (all too briefly) 63 wineries and 152 wines. There’s a good summary of the Romanian wine varieties here

At the same time, the various Crama (bulk wine cellars) which are such a pleasant feature of life here have been giving us access to the dry white wines of Averesti (Iasi), Macin (Dobrogea), Jidvei (Alba Iulia), and Vissoara (Constanta) – for 2 euros a litre! The famous Obor market not far from us has the last two including a new grape for me, the Sarba, available from Girboiu - one of the many new vineyards which have developed in the country in the past decade or so

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