shewhomust | Ovid's Tears

Dinner, after an afternoon dash round Sainsbury's, was mussels and focacia and a bottle of Santa Rita Reserve chardonnay (reduced), which leaves me in the mood to write about Romanian wine. Once upon a time, eastern Europe was the place where cheap wine came from from. We joked about Algerian reds, labelled as French, but in fact they belonged to an earlier era; the suspiciously cheap plonk of our time was from Hungary, Romania, maybe even Bulgaria. The first wine

durham_rambler and I discovered for ourselves was Hirondelle rosé: we weren't keen on their red or their white, but we loved the rosé, which we discovered was Hungarian.

Later, the flying winemakers moved in to Hungary, and it became a fashionable source of pleasant white wines, easy drinking at easy prices. But Romania continued to produce the most accessible pinot noir on the market, the three pound bottle, fruity as the best strawberry jam.

Then somehow they vanished. I thought we'd simply been distracted by the arrival of wines from all over the globe, from the Americas and elsewhere. But since we returned from Romania, I've been paying attention, and eastern Europe has simply been squeezed off the shelves - somewhere near floor level you'll find a Bulgarian merlot, and maybe a Moldovan rosé, but nothing like the diversity - of geography or of grape variety - that there used to be. Eventually I tracked down a Romanian pinot noir in Sainsbury's, and it was fine, but both the flavour and the label design had gone stylishly minimalist while my back was turned.

We didn't make great discoveries within Romania, either. We drank whatever wines were on offer: the Vampire merlot obviously, because how not? a Cotnari merlot which tasted of damsons, a Cotnari dry white, light and acid, a Fetteasca neagra - none of which was dreadful, but none of which we wanted to order again, because it was always possible that the next bottle would be better.

With two exceptions: the only wine we did actually order twice within the country was a dry muscat from Jidvei, like a mouthful of ripe grapes. As the Jidvei web site says:

Wine - a paradoxal comparison with the woman - is it a pleasure or a sin? It produces euphoria, it brings you to the realm of phylosopy and love. It can lift you to the highest levels of methaphysics or get you down into the hell of unconsciousness.

Each people has its tradition, those peculiarities that characterize it and offer it personality, that build it up during the centuries that pass over its teritory and its generations living there.

It would not be an exageration to overlap this potion extracted from the grape with the millenary history of the Romanian people in the Charpatian-Danube-Pontus territory.

Which brings me neatly to the wine we had drunk before when a friend brought us a botle home, and hunted throughout our holiday, finally finding a bottle just in time to take it home in our turn and share it with friends, Lacrima Lui Ovidiu, Ovid's Tears, the aromatic dessert wine whose name commemmorates the poet's exile by the Black Sea, in what is now the city of Costanta.