Romania
One of Europe’s five great vineyards by size, with twenty-seven centuries of practice, a sweet wine that once rivalled Tokaji at royal courts, and a bottle the world almost never gets to taste.
A great wine nation that drinks itself.
Romania is not a small wine country waiting to be discovered. It is a very large one that simply never exports, and its finest small growers deserve the world’s great tables. We make the introduction.
Stand in the Carpathian foothills in October and the scale of it becomes obvious: Romania holds around a hundred and eighty thousand hectares of vineyard, the fifth-largest in the European Union and more than Germany, across a spread of serious terroirs that would each be famous had history been kinder. Almost all of it is drunk at home. The world’s picture of European wine has a Romania-shaped hole in it.
Dealu Mare, “the big hill”, runs along the 45th parallel, Bordeaux’s latitude, on south-facing slopes sheltered by the Carpathians: this is red-wine country, the heartland of old-vine Fetească Neagră. Cotnari, in the cool north-east, has made botrytised sweet wine for five centuries; its Grasă once stood beside Tokaji at the courts of Europe. Drăgășani, on the Olt river, is the laboratory: an old aristocratic vineyard revived by growers betting everything on indigenous varieties. And high Transylvania, ringed by mountains, grows whites with the cut and nerve of the Continent’s coolest sites.
What interrupted Romania was not nature but collectivisation: half a century of quantity over identity. The estates are back, the old parcels are being reclaimed vine by vine, and EU accession brought cellars, capital and a generation of winemakers home. The wines are ready. The reputation is still in the post.
An indigenous cast the world never met.
Romania kept its own grapes through everything. They are the reason its best bottles taste of nowhere else.
Fetească Neagră
The great red of the Romanian lands, centuries old, born of the wild vines of the lower Danube. Black plum, liquorice and cool smoke over a velvet middle; in Dealu Mare’s old plots it gains the plushness and savoury depth of serious right-bank Bordeaux.
Grasă de Cotnari
The botrytis grape of Cotnari: honey, saffron, dried apricot and a bright citrus spine that keeps five centuries of sweetness dancing. At the great Paris exhibitions of the nineteenth century it took gold beside the most famous sweet wines on earth.
Tămâioasă Românească
Muscat à petits grains in its oldest local dress, named for the church incense it smells of. Orange blossom, resin and white peach: dry and electric, or nobly sweet and endless. A sommelier’s conversation piece of the first order.
Negru de Drăgășani
Drăgășani’s young signature red: crunchy black fruit, violets and graphite, medium-bodied and mineral, made for the table. Proof that the indigenous story here is still being written, and written well.
Fetească Albă & Regală
From the high, cool Târnave plateau: taut, floral, chalk-edged whites with riesling-like nerve. The Albă delicate and precise, the Regală fuller and quietly serious under oak.
Twenty-seven centuries of practice.
Herodotus knew this wine. So did the courts of medieval Europe. The world has simply had its back turned for seventy years.
Vine before Rome
The Getae and Dacians grow wine along the lower Danube; Greek chroniclers write of Thracian vineyards. When Rome arrives, the vines are already old.
Cotnari at court
Stephen the Great plants and privileges the vineyards of Cotnari. Its golden Grasă travels to the royal tables of Europe and stands beside Tokaji without blinking.
Gold in Paris
Grasă de Cotnari takes gold at the Paris Exposition: a reminder, on the record, of exactly where these wines once stood.
The long interruption
Collectivisation swallows the estates; identity gives way to volume. The varieties survive in old plots and stubborn family rows, waiting.
The homecoming
EU accession brings investment, modern cellars and a generation of winemakers trained abroad back to their grandparents’ hills.
The reveal
Old parcels reclaimed, indigenous grapes replanted, single-vineyard bottlings emerging, in quantities that will never satisfy the world once it notices.
Where it sits at the top table.
Bordeaux’s parallel in the reds, Tokaji’s league in the sweets, carried by names the world has yet to learn.
Poured blind, revealed afterwards. Velvet against velvet. The reveal is where the evening changes.
The fifth-largest vineyard in Europe is missing from the world’s wine lists. We intend to correct that.
Almost every bottle Romania makes is drunk inside Romania. What leaves does so by relationship, and the estates we represent hold back their finest parcels for buyers they know personally.