Enjoying the good life

A cow scientist who has spent much of his life in Italy now tries to bring some of the finer things here in the form of a wine shop and pizzeria. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man with expensive taste

The shelves are stacked with wine bottles, the CD plays ‘Nessun Dorma’. Nicos Charalambous pauses momentarily as his wife Maria Teresa says something in Italian. “Si,” he replies, nodding vaguely, then gets back to talking as she busies herself in the back of the shop – the Enoteca Italiana in Nicosia – and returns with bread, cheese and wine. The bread is a crispy Sardinian flatbread known as ‘pane carasau’, the wine a Montassu, the cheese a complex pecorino sardo (“One of the 10 best cheeses in the world,” claims Nicos). Maria Teresa lays out the mid-morning feast. “Bread from Sardinia, wine from Sardinia, cheese from Sardinia,” she notes with satisfaction.

Thereby hangs a tale – because Maria Teresa is herself from a well-known Sardinian family and Nicos spent nearly three decades in Italy, working for a big dairy company called Granarolo Latte before coming back in the mid-90s. He’s 67, with small unblinking eyes and a very firm handshake; his hair is dyed black, his conversation peppered with wry, rather mirthless chuckles. “I’m a veterinarian, my wife is a lawyer,” he explains, though in fact that description is wildly reductive. “As you see on my card, when you turn it over” – I do; he’s the General Manager of N.C. Ezootechnica Ltd., the company logo being a happy-looking cow with a straw in its mouth – “my business is cows, and the reproduction of cows. I have a factory, in partnership with a younger vet… I deal with dairy farmers, with halloumi, with animals – like I said, with reproduction, genetics, feeding, with the soil, with fertilisers, with seeds. We have the knowhow in dairy farming”.

It feels a bit strange to be talking cows while sipping wine and nibbling pecorino, then again our whole conversation is tinged with a certain disconnectedness. He is, you might say, in the food industry, since his business involves producing pre-mixed fodder for cows with added vitamins and supplements – but he’s also in the food industry because he and Maria Teresa own Enoteca (a high-end wine shop, specialising in wines from small Italian producers) and he also co-owns Isolani, the Italian pizzeria and restaurant in Ayios Antonios Market. And there’s also another disconnectedness because he was born in Cyprus, lives in Cyprus, came back to Cyprus to lend his expertise to the dairy farming sector – yet he also (let’s not mince words) looks down on much of Cypriot culture and society, which is partly why he opened his Italian food and wine shops in the first place.

“I like to eat well,” he tells me, “because someone who lived in Italy for so many years is accustomed to something different from the Cypriot way of life. Cypriots these days – well, they don’t even know how to eat. They always eat the same thing. I mean, if you go to any taverna, you’ll always eat exactly the same. It’s not easy for me, when I know for instance that in Italy we have pasta and every 10 kilometres, when the region changes, the pasta changes too, and there might be 2,000 different kinds of pasta”.

It’s not just the food, either. “Ours is a conservative society, very closed. What I mean is – well, we lack culture,” he blurts out with one of his wry chuckles, “and it’s a problem. Thank goodness for planes, so we can travel once in a while”. Foreigners often find it hard in Cyprus, he reports – especially perhaps Maria Teresa who is actually Maria Teresa Murgia and the daughter of Francesco Murgia, a pillar of 20th-century Italian politics who even had a hand in drafting the country’s post-war Constitution. Τhere’s something covertly – almost resentfully – aristocratic about this couple, like those sulky Russian émigrés who’d hang out in European salons in the years after the Revolution. ‘Isolani’, for instance (the name of their restaurant), means ‘islander’, which I thought might refer to the fact that both Nicos and Maria Teresa are islanders – but it actually refers to a Lusignan prince who moved from Cyprus to Bologna in the 13th century, birthing a new line of royals (his current descendants are the wine-producing Cavazza Isolani family). Enoteca, similarly, makes no bones about being aimed at connoisseurs: “We’re not a wine shop that sells to the masses,” says Nicos, “but to people who understand quality”.

Who are those people? Cultured people, people (implicitly) like themselves – people from abroad, or who’ve lived abroad. “Let me repeat, I’m not 100% Cypriot,” Nicos makes clear a little later. “Because society in Cyprus isn’t the society I knew when I was a boy, it’s totally different. Just to give you an idea, I live, so they say, in the best neighbourhood in Nicosia – maybe in Cyprus. Ayios Andreas, it’s one of the best neighbourhoods in Cyprus. Would you believe that I don’t even know my neighbours? Yes. It’s very strange to me. I don’t know what’s wrong with these people [i.e. Cypriots], that they like to hide. Is it because they’re not educated, and can’t hold a high-level conversation?

“I really find it hard to understand. I’m fine in the countryside – I get along much better with the people I collaborate with, than I do with the nouveaux riches of Nicosia. I’ll say this very loudly, even though I’m sorry to say it – because when I was a kid our doors were always open, and the neighbours would come calling out ‘Where are you, koumera?’. There was such a connection, such a need in people to live together. Now, everyone just wants to show that they’ve got a bigger car, or a bigger house”.

On paper, Nicos Charalambous might come off slightly arrogant. ‘Who does he think he is?’ some may splutter, reading his criticisms – but in fact he knows very well who he is, viz. a self-made man who embraces his own elevation from the mass like a badge of honour. I suspect it’s a key to the man that Nicos’ own background is working-class: his dad was a butcher and he’s the oldest of six siblings, most of whom never went to university – but Nicos did, studying veterinary science in Bologna. “I’m a very decisive person,” he tells me – and illustrates that with a story from his youth, when he went to Italy in 1968 only to find that his high school (Terra Santa in Nicosia) wasn’t officially recognised by the authorities, meaning he wouldn’t be allowed to study. His response – as a mere 19-year-old, alone in a foreign country – was to jump on a train to Rome and plead his case before the Minister of Education himself, a wildly ambitious plan that actually worked (though he ended up meeting with another high official, not the Minister per se). “Imagine that – how immature, you might say. But I was determined!”

His life has been a series of successful projects. His company is probably the biggest of its kind in Cyprus, with a dozen employees and a turnover in the millions of Euros; banks are throwing money at him at the moment (he says), offering loans at good rates so the company can grow. He’s worked on cows – “It may be hard for you to understand this, but there’s a tremendous amount of science surrounding the cow” – and worked on cow farmers, whose sector he effectively transformed by teaching them new techniques and taking them on expeditions to the US and Italy (“If we have 200 producers, I must’ve taken 100 or 120 – and I still do, so they can see how people work abroad”). His first marriage, which ended in 1982 after seven years, was admittedly a less successful project – but it did produce a son, who lives in Italy. What does he do? “My son is an artist,” replies Nicos, stifling a slightly embarrassed chuckle. “He’s in the theatre.”

He also has a daughter, Marina, now almost 18 and about to embark on her studies – and it’s obviously absurd to refer to a person as a ‘project’, yet it’s also true that second-time fatherhood was a conscious choice for Nicos. He was nearly 50 when he and Maria Teresa adopted Marina from a Ukrainian orphanage – but the project has been highly successful, Nicos rising easily to the challenge of middle-aged parenthood. “I’m 67, and I still feel like a kid inside,” he beams. “When we took our Marina into our home, I felt even younger”. She now plans to follow in her father’s footsteps, studying in Parma and specialising in horse medicine, which was always his own dream (it was only the need to earn a living that forced him to settle for the less distinguished cow). “But now she also wants to study to become a sommelier!” adds Maria Teresa, Enoteca having clearly left its mark on the girl.

Whether the wine shop is successful too I have no idea – though Isolani seems quite busy when I pass by later to meet Massimo, the Italian chef plucked from a restaurant in Umbria after years of culinary globe-trotting from Japan to Saudi Arabia (he once cooked at the Saudi king’s palace in Medina, he tells me; obviously a future profile waiting to happen). At the very least, Enoteca seems to match Nicos’ description of a place intended as “something special”, with wines ranging from good value to very expensive (the latter tucked away in a back room) and an emphasis on small producers. “The problem in Cyprus is that we have good soil, good grapes, [but] when the product is good and we put 2,000 bottles on the market, three years later they become 10,000 bottles, or 20,000”. Greed is the enemy of quality, and bigger doesn’t always (or ever) mean better. Nicos learned about wines from the dairy farmers he dealt with in Italy, who made their own wine and always offered him a little tipple; he was quite embarrassed when he took their Cypriot counterparts to visit, he recalls, and our local farmers asked for Cokes and 7Ups. It’s different in Italy, there’s a real food and drink culture there; even McDonald’s was forced to close in Bologna, he claims – “not like us now, with Jamie’s Italian opening…”

That’s a constant refrain, in between the excellent cheese and Sardinian bread, and Nicos using a mini-decanter to pour us all a generous measure of wine: the shortcomings of Cyprus, and the evident superiority of Italy. When he goes to Bologna (he kept his home there, and still travels back and forth), many people assume he never left; when he’s in Cyprus, on the other hand – even after 20 years – casual acquaintances often ask ‘So you’re in Cyprus now? Where do you live?’. He feels like a stranger here, he admits ruefully. “When people come to my factory they say ‘You’re not Cypriot at all’. Because I have a little garden in the factory, I have a 17th-century chest in my office… Because I can’t live –” he begins, then makes it more general: “I want to live well. I mean, you won’t see me in a bow tie or something flamboyant, or a Versace – but I want to have a good life”.

Some may wonder why a good life depends on the country where you live, as opposed to the person you are inside. Some may accuse him of snobbery. Some may also have other questions, wondering for instance if his work is really so noble. The “science” of cows, after all, is a major part of agri-business, its rather scary aim being – as Nicos freely admits – to perfect a breed and eradicate any differences between one animal and another. Wouldn’t it be better if cows didn’t eat his vitamin-enriched products, and instead grazed freely? (He himself prefers organic, he agrees, but there are just “too many people on the planet”.) And what about the fact that Cyprus has the most expensive milk in Europe – a problem he puts down to high production costs and our relative geographical isolation.

Maybe so. But the more intriguing story is the thought of Nicos Charalambous with his hand halfway up a cow’s uterus – even with all the science, there’s only one way to make sure the reproductive bits are healthy – then coming back to sip excellent wine at Enoteca and commiserate with Maria Teresa over memories of Italy, the land that nurtured and beguiled him. “First you’re born, then you develop,” he explains philosophically. “And it all depends on what kind of people you’ll meet in your life. If you meet the correct people, you’ll become a correct person”. Just as long as they’re Italian, and appreciate a nice glass of red.