Cats and Wine-Paros, Greece

One thing I have not mentioned yet is the cats and the wine. First the cats, not just on Paros but in every place we visited in Greece. Street cats are everywhere and most of them seem quite well taken care of by the community, with some places even having city provided “feeding stations” for the cat population. They also seem to do a decent job with spaying and neutering (you can tell by the clip of their ear) otherwise, the population would be even bigger than it was now. But obviously not all the cats are fixed because just down the stairs from our apartment on Paros lived a small mama kitty and two kittens maybe a month or two old. Old enough to play on their own, eat hard food and be absolutely adorable but mama was always there making sure no one messed with her babies. We even would find them curled up on the mat in front of the door sleeping some mornings. We made a habit of bringing any leftovers from meals home and sharing them with the mama and her kitties and it was all we could do to not want to take them home.

And now the wine. All three of us enjoy red wine. So we would either order wine with dinner or find a local wine shop and purchase a bottle of inexpensive wine. Not the cheapest bottle but still in the economy section. In California, there are plenty of decent wines in this price bracket. However, we found the wine so very lacking…. Like it wasn’t quite done. Sometimes very grape juicy, sometimes too tart, other times just not enjoyable at all. We tried and failed so many times to drink a good glass of wine that finally by the end of the trip, we were describing wines that we liked as “drinkable”. That is the most complimentary descriptor we could manage. Never good or even decent. It was either drinkable or not. And we even drank that.

Our last dinner on Paros and we went back to the waterfront restaurant where we ate our first meal on the island. It was good, but none of us were blown away. Looked good though.