So we covered a bit of general information and a bit of history on wine in Romania, best wine in the world. Now let’s get a bit more specific and let’s us talk grapes. Well not individual grapes of course, I mean varieties. As mentioned previously, accurate figures are difficult to come by, in Romania or elsewhere, due to informal wine making and general issues with such statistics, but I will try to give some numbers, as accurate as I can. So take it with a grain of tartrate, so to speak.  According to Ministry of Agriculture estimates, Romania has about 200,000 hectares of vines, 80% of which are dedicated to extracting the nectar of the grapes, making 500 million liters of wine. Give or take 150 million.  Half of them are European vines, half are hybrids. I will ignore the latter altogether because, personally, I do not consider that to be wine wine, and frankly there is not much to say of the mighty Căpşunica.

strawberry wine... theres a song in there somewhere

Isabella or strawberry wine

Fine…  I will talk briefly of Căpşunica, the most popular hybrid wine grape. The word comes from căpşună, meaning strawberry. It came to Romania via Italy, where it was called Fragolino, hence the name.  It is a hybrid originating in, I think, South Carolina or thereabouts, where it was called Isabella or somesuch. Many Romanians drink wine made of this. I am not among them. I find it utterly unpalatable. Anyway… Moving on…

About 70% of wine grapes in Romania are white and the remaining 30% red. There may be a few confused, inter-color, bi-curious and such, but a negligible amount. This data is basically approximation as no one knows for certain. This is due to the highly fragmented nature of the holdings, mostly because of those who grow for personal consumption. While in the EU the average vineyard size is 1.3 hectares, in Romania it is 0.2. So everyone and their grandmothers have a couple of vines to make a bit of wine, usually ready in spring and to be drunk by mid-summer, otherwise it goes sour. There are exceptions though; a minority of people do make good homemade wine.

The white is predominant due to local preference for lower alcoholic, sweetish wines that can be drunk in high quantities, usually mixed with soda water. Șpriț, as the locals call it, word coming from the German Spritze. This leads wine snobs, such as yours truly, to turn their nose up and look down upon the plebs. For one thing, I dislike wine that isn’t dry. And second, I would rather drink a smaller quantity of something good than a larger one of something bad. And I don’t mix my wine. Some people actually put Cola in wine.  One thing that amused me, as an anecdote, was one such person criticizing another:  I understand drinking red wine with Cola, I do it all the time, but white wine with Cola is just weird. White wine is with Sprite or mineral water.  But the șpriț has its reasons: if you want to drink all night and keep hydrated, half wine and half water works better. You don’t get pissed as fast.

Old school sifon

As an anecdote, most people use bottled mineral water now. But back in the day – 80, 90 or so, it would be sifon, which I don’t know how to translate other than soda water. This was basically tap water with CO2 added. There were special places – sifonarie – where you would take your reusable bottles to refill. The bottles had a special head.

The main white grapes cultivated in Romania are Fetească Alba, Fetească Regală, Riesling, Aligote, Sauvignon Blanc, Muscat Ottonel, Pinot Gris, Chardonnay, Tămaioasă Românească, Grasă de Cotnari, Francusă, Galbenă de Odobești, Crâmpoșie Selectionata, Mustoasă de Mădarat, Zgihară de Huși, Sarba, Plavaie,  and several others. Riesling is mostly Italian Riesling, but small amounts of Rhine Riesling have been planted recently, for the local need of a wine with just a hint of petrol in the nose.  The largest amounts are planted with the local grapes Fetească albă and Fetească regală, together being 18% of plantations.

The main red grapes planted are Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Băbească Neagră, Fetească neagră, Pinot Noir, Burgund Mare, Traminer Roz, Busuioacă de Bohotin, Cadarcă. Merlot is the most planted red grape, with about 12 thousand hectares. (As a side request for the admins, please catbutt any post saying they won’t drink any fucking Merlot.)

I will not talk of international grapes much, but focus on the local ones. While there are several varieties, a fraction of the pre-phylloxera varieties still exist. I think there are probably lost varieties still grown among villages off the beaten track, but there is no project or funding to identify and preserve them (one of the things I would fund were I a billionaire). Many more were probably lost in the recent frenzy to replant everything with Cabernet and Syrah and other such invasive species.

Fetească is sort of the local flagship grape, both in white (alb means white) and red (negru means black). Fetească Alba is a white clone of Fetească Neagra.  Feteasca comes from the word fata, meaning girl, and it could be translated as young girl like. I do not know how this came about.  Another common grape Băbească neagra (red fruit, higher acidity), comes from babă which means old woman. Băbească is to Fetească maybe stretching it a bit what Pinot is to Cabernet, and is used to make lighter somewhat fresher and fruit forward wine. Fetească is the more serious grape, making more complex wines. There is an old saying, heteropatriarchical I would think, about how young men like the older woman and old men like younger girl (meaning youth prefer the lighter wines from Băbească and the older, with or without candy, like the more complex Fetească). Băbească  also has it’s white wine clones Băbească Albă sau Băbească gri, but these are very rare.

The general harvest date for Fetească Neagra (considered typical with a significant aroma of dried plum) is around 15 September, having a growth period of 160-170 days.  They get about 230-240 g/l of sugar and acidity of around 7 g/l. I will not give technical notes on other grapes. For more info there are encyclopedias for this sort of thing.

Saperavi spoiled the Romanian purity, but still good wine.

Negru de Dragasani

Less common red wine varieties which make, in my view, good wine are Negru de Drăgășani (black cherries, blackberries, blueberries and other dark fruit) and Novac (raspberries, sour cherry, cloves, black pepper, dark chocolate – I do not do tasting notes myself so I just copied these from some professional wine taster, I find describing wines in such detail a bit silly), both from Drăgășani, a wine region in southern Romania, and both obtained by different crossings of an old Romanian pre- phylloxera grape Negru Vârtos with the grape Saperavi. They make a velvety red wine with some aging potential and one of the local candidates to making what some might call “Great Wines.” Negru Vârtos – meaning strong, powerful black – was one of the more appreciated pre phylloxera wines of Romania, and it was preserved in Negru de Drăgășani and Novac.

As a note, many of the wines that are traditional to Romania (which contains the subregion Moldova) are also common in the now independent country Moldova. Some say one grape comes from one or other, but being that the language and culture are mostly common (despite the best efforts of Russians to make Moldova Russian), I do not think it is relevant. Jancis Robinson makes claims about this, for example, but I find it meaningless. The national grape of Moldova is Rară neagră which is simply another name for Băbească Neagra.

Now to go through a few more grapes quickly… Grasă de Cotnari -gras means fat – is the flagship grape of the Cotnari region and is used to make sweet, aromatic white wine – and I remember reading that it was also planted in South Africa for this purpose. Fetească Regala is a cross between Fetească Alba and Grasă de Cotnari in order to get a more aromatic wine, but used for dry whites. Francusă is the Cotnari grape used for dry and rather acidic wine. In the old days people in general preferred sweet wines to dry, but the legend goes that Cotnari wine was generally so sweet that the boyars occasionally drank some Francusă as a palate cleanser.

Crâmpoşia is one of the grapes believed to date back to ancient Dacia. Crâmpoșie Selecționată was obtained from Crâmpoșie crossed with a grape called Gordan, which I know little about, in order to solve some problems with sterile vines. It has high acidity and is used to make fresh, fruity whites. While traditionally used for dry wines, the possibility of both high sugar and high acidity made it useful for semi sweet and sparkling wines (Prince Stirbey vineyard makes a good sparking from Crâmpoșie). Another local wine use for sparkling is Mustoasa de Madarad, from the Arad region of western Romania.

Tămaioasă Românească – tămaie means frankincense – is of the main white grapes used in Romania to make sweet aromatic wine. Although traditionally only used for sweet, some dry varieties were produced recently, due to the changing of tastes towards dry wines – Romanians still like a lot of sweet or semi-dry wines but tastes are shifting. Some of the dry versions were, in fact, pretty good. The grape is related to the French Muscat de Frontignan. A variation called Tămaioasă Roza – used to make a rose sweet wine – is actual Muscat de Frontignan, but they are, apparently, not allowed to call it that.

Another sweet rose wine of some fame is Busuioaca de Bohotin. Busuioc means basil and it is a reference to the wine being quite aromatic. This was, during communism, grown on a limited surface and was reportedly Ceaușescu’s favourite. Due to this – the dictator drunk it and the people didn’t get any – after communism it got real popular because everyone wanted to drink Busuioaca. In the 90’s, probably 10 times more Busuioaca was sold than produced, a cheap, sweet red wine of the poorest quality. Recently, a few reputable producers made some, and while I’m not a fan, it can be pretty good as sweet wines go.

As far as international grapes, I would say that if you are a fan of Pinot Noir, I would be very careful buying Romanian one. It is most likely bad, and not very typical due to the hot summers. Say what you will of Romania as a wine region, Burgundy it is not. Not even, say, Oregon. Furthermore, Pinot Noir was mostly made in Romania as a semi-sweet red wine of poor quality. It was what Romania was known in the past in England and Germany for – bad cheap Pinot for students and drunks.

I was thinking of making one more post on recommended Romanian wines, but due to the availability in the states, there is little point. I already mentioned the wineries I like in the first post. Most wines from those are good. To highlight a few, Fetească Neagra I like from SERVE (Guy Tyrel de Poix), Bauer (FN quite different style to others), Davino, Balla Geza (Stone Wine Fetească Neagra) and Ferdi Feteasca Neagra – although this is nearly impossible to get in Romania, small family winery which does not really retail in stores, you need to know a guy. . . For Negru de Drăgășani and Novac the top is Prince Stirbey. There are other producers in the Drăgășani area that make it and only one outside, Via Marchizului Negru de Drăgășani from the somewhat hotter Dealu Mare, but an interesting variation of the wine. White wines I drink less of, but recommend the same producers. Stirbey and Bauer make great Sauvignon Blanc, but that is not a local grape. Bauer is the main oenologist of Stirbey, who made his own boutique winery with great results and even made the first Orange wine in Romania.

About where to get it … TotalWine apparently has the mid-range Recas, which OMWC reviewed. The net said something about Mariano’s in the Chicago area, but we will have to ask Swiss if that is true. Mission Liquor & Wines Pasadena, CA, had, at least on the website, Nedeea – a blend of Fetească Neagra, Negru de Drăgășani and Novac and some Panciu which should be decent if not spectacular. The website has some stuff on it, no idea if it retails or how. Besides that… who knows.