Culinary South

Găgăuz feast & a speakeasy nightcap

We'll meet at our hotel and dine at a traditional Găgăuz restaurant for a first taste of southern Moldova. Expect rich reds, flavourful mutton with herbs, pungent sheep cheeses, and warm homemade bread. Appetites whetted and the week ahead sketched out, we'll wander to a speakeasy for drinks. Covor is a modern bar obsessed with local liqueurs and ingredients, its cocktails drawn from Moldovan folklore.

Leather, looms & a night of stargazing

We leave Chișinău after breakfast and drive south along the Prut. In the village of Manta we meet Gheorghe Burcă, a working leather smith, who introduces us to the art of making opinci — traditional Moldovan shoes. Then we visit a straw-weaving artisan to watch her craft in action.

After a day of craft, we head to the Domeniile Pană micro-vineyard, run by Nicolae Minciună and his wife. We'll tour their rose garden and cellars, then taste their limited-quantity wines. Then head to the kitchen with Tanti Masha — Nicolae's mother — to learn how to make cuscuți, a quintessential southern bulgur dish. After sunset, we go to the only village observatory in Moldova, where a 14-inch Celestron telescope brings the stars and planets into naked-eye-impossible detail.

Beleu Lake by boat & a folk museum

We wake at sunrise for a boat ride onto Beleu Lake, the heart of the Prutul de Jos biosphere reserve — one of the last great wetlands in Europe, its reeds full of swans, herons and egrets at first light. Back on shore, we explore the reserve on foot with a ranger, then stop for a light lunch with the Căpățînă family, who make artisanal matured sheep cheese with the authentic taste of Moldova's south.

In the afternoon we visit Slobozia Mare's Ethnography Museum — folk costume, archaeology and a reconstructed peasant house and yard. Then back to the guesthouse for a home-cooked dinner and an early night, because tomorrow we cross into another country-within-a-country.

Găgăuz wine, a wedding & gözleme

We cross into Găgăuzia, a Turkic-speaking autonomous region, where we'll meet the Cerven family, the founders of KaraGani winery. We'll taste excellent wines paired with home-cooked cuisine. The day continues at the Museum of Găgăuz History in Beșalma, where we'll get the chance to try traditional clothes and take part in a staging of an authentic Găgăuz wedding.

Lunch is hands-on: we cook gözleme alongside the women who make it every day, with kavurma, șurpa and other Găgăuz dishes on the table beside it. The evening closes with a long dinner and folk music — the kind that starts as a performance and ends with everyone at the table singing.

Orlov horses, carpets & a farewell feast

Our last morning is spent horse-riding at Moldova's only farm that specializes in raising purebred Orlov trotters. After that, we continue our journey and take a hands-on lesson in Găgăuz carpet weaving from the artisans at the Carpet Museum in Gaidar.

We gather one last time for a farewell feast at At Mount Winery that pulls together everything we've come to love about the region — the wine, the cuisine, the company — before the drive back to Chișinău, where we arrive by early evening.