To start, in the beginning there was a formless void. Then the Dacians created the world, and after it, wine. Moving in the realm of less fictional, but maybe somewhat so, based on serious archaeological evidence, we can estimate at least 4000 years of wine making round these parts. Getting to the 60s – BC that is – we have Dacian king Burebista – the first to unify the tribes in what is now Romania and parts of Ukraine and Hungary into something resembling a kingdom, or kingdom like tribal alliance. Wanting a better, stronger kingdom, military and economic, he ordered the burning of the vineyards, because the people drank too much wine. So wine around these parts goes back thousands of years. And drunkenness as well.
Romania does have a history of wine and does have several famous wine regions, suitable from a geographical and climate point of view. Wine from areas like Cotnari, Odobesti, Drăgășani, Dealu Mare had its moments of being considered among the good European wines and are mentioned by foreign sources since the 1500s.
The present situation is… complicated, with good and bad. Much of the bad, as I said in my previous post, was due to communism – bad, cheap mass produced wine to export for low prices. Usually semi-sweet with added flavor. The vines and facilities were not maintained, a lot of knowledge was lost. The 90s were a bit of a dark age, as government agricultural cooperatives were dismantled, some vines being given to former owners or their heirs, others to dysfunctional government enterprises.
New owners did not maintain vineyards any better, and most of the wine was mass produced and of very dubious quality. At least in my view. Many Romanians like to claim they enjoy “natural clean country wine”, not that commercial stuff. Natural and clean meaning not polluted with the things that stabilize and clear the wine of impurities, thus making it drinkable. The resulting liquid is sometime – rarely – quite decent if not great, but more often brown and murky, reminding one of a muddy river. I feel the home made wines in Italy or Portugal are of significant better quality because people actually bother to have some skill.
But some of the… roots is the proper word… of the problem predate communism. Even before, quality wine was but a fraction of the total wine production. Most of it was made, then and now, for personal consumption on very small lots – basically each peasant’s garden. A lot of trade in the 1800s in Romania was still barter and did not involve money, which rural populations did not always have, so there was no developed market in wine, like in, say, France.
Story time: as I said in my very first post on Glibertarians, my great-grandparents were from the Pitești region, grew plum trees for țuica and owned a pub in Pitești. Back in those days, the pubs sold mainly țuica and wine, so they made extra țuica, loaded up some wagons and traveled over several days to a wine producing region and traded for wine.
Transport was bad in Romania back then, mostly by wagon and dirt road, so it made sense that most of the people made wine themselves, it was hard to buy from a distance. So each town or village had some vines surrounding it. The quality of the wine varied greatly. Some people respected the craft and themselves and made quite decent, if rustic, wine. Clear, somewhat stabilized micro-biologically – the barrels were sort of fumigated with sulfur providing the sulfites, wine was sometimes filtered using egg whites – something still done in modern times, although now artificial gelatin is favored. Others, not so much. It was just plain bad, or mixed with water, made with added sugar or with certain additives to make it seem better.
Now a little break for fun with etymology! Șmecher is a quite common Romanian word –which mean crafty, cunning, shrewd and difficult to trick. An assumption is that the etymology is from the German word like “schmeck” or schmecken, which means to taste. The legend goes that German merchants came to the Drăgășani region of Romania to buy wine. The locals gave them a bit of the good stuff, and then a bit more, and the merchant got a bit drunk, and then they sold him some bad wine as well, but for the price of good. Now, say what you will of German merchants, they were not stupid. Fool me once, as the saying goes. So the next time they brought tasters which did not get drunk and made sure to get the good stuff. These schmeckers or tasters were people who were hard to trick, who did not buy bad wine for the price of good. Hence the Romanian word.
Wine is the nectar of the vines, if we want to be pseudo poetical about it. And why would we not want to be? But wait; there are plenty of crawling plants, so which ones? Vitis vinifera is responsible for all that which most humans with a discerning palate consider good wine. So plant that shit and drink up! Well, that is what people did. A lot. So up to this point, all is well, everyone was all happy and drunk – as happy as semi-starving peasants can be that is – until you bloody Americans had to screw things up, with you interventionist policies and such. In the year 1884, enter phylloxera stage right. And things got considerably worse.
What is phylloxera ? It’s an insect, a bug, a parasite, vermin. You mean like socialists? Yes, precisely like socialists. Phylloxera is a pale yellow insect native to North America, which, instead of doing productive work, sucks the sap from good, honest grapevine roots. Americans have evolved some natural defenses against parasites such as these, which Europeans did not. But Americans lack the sophistication needed to make a good wine. And speaking of Americans, as a side note, just to avoid all sorts of silly comments, a hectare is 2.5 acres.
In 1884, Romania, not yet including Transylvania, had at least 200.000 hectares of grapevines – mostly local versions of vitis vinifera. Most villages and towns had their own vines, due to the difficulty of transporting things on dirt roads. Then the disease devastated the vines, and by 1905, 90 thousand hectares were left.
By the time the bug was in full swing round these parts, Western Europe, which was hit first, had found the solution. After many trials and errors with pesticide, insecticides, fumigating vineyards and such, the new vines were planted grafted on American root stock – vines that did not give good wine but resisted phylloxera. Romanians, red blooded and proud as the mighty oak that grows in the forests, said, naturally, we ain’t gonna let a bunch of foreigners tell us what to do. So instead, they started experimenting with pesticides, insecticide and fumigating vineyards. This failed miserably and in the end they turned to, you guessed it, planting vines grafted on American root stock.
Being a poor country, money was tight. As such, by 1910 Only 70 thousand hectares were left, out of which 20 thousand hectares had been replanted, and the others managed to hang on. The majority of the country, used to growing and making their own wine, and not being able to afford the new solution, settled on a not great but inebriation enabling intermediary solution. Direct producing hybrid vines. Hybrids of European and American vines, which were resistant to phylloxera and created a drinkable, if bad wine, were planted. They grew, they were maybe more productive than the “noble vines,” as they came to be called, and made a drink that got you buzzed. Good enough.
By 1935, after gaining Transylvania with a lot of vineyards, Romania had some 160 thousand hectares of European vines and 160 thousand of hybrids. By the end of communism in 1990, there were 160 thousand hectares of European vines and just 60 thousand of hybrids – results of collectivization and elimination of some of the hybrid vines. Sadly, things did not get better immediately, as many people who land from the old state cooperatives sometimes took out noble vines and replaced them with easier to maintain hybrids. So in 1997, the numbers were 80 thousand good vines versus 120 thousand hybrids. Right now, officially at least, it is illegal in the European Union to plant hybrid vines for wine making. This was, I assume, a standard protectionist method for established agriculture, although the pretext was the poor quality of the wine and the higher possibility of methanol in wine from hybrid vines.
Now, more than 100 years later, according to the national statistics institute, there are 180 thousand hectares of vines in Romania, out of which about half, 90, are grafted vitis vinifera. So 150 years after phylloxera, the country has half the vines capable of producing good wine. And the current territory also includes Transylvania. Sadly, many people who make wine for their own consumption still plant hybrids which create a good natural country wine. Because swill does not have the same ring to it.
It’s been available here since I was a kid. You could use something else, but its not the same and dare I say improper. Another example is Scrapple, which I’m not going to eat but Taylor Ham I will. I will also contend it’s basically an artisanal form of Spam no matter how much it irritates my stepdad. Many of these things he simply explained as, “an East Coast thing,” as he is a refugee from New Jersey. Which is why he insisted I take the SAT even though I was going to major in a science which meant the ACT would be advantageous for me to take but that was a “west coast thing.” This brings us to another “East Coast thing:” the cream ale.
Most of the wines regions of Romania are currently in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains and some plateaus in Transylvania. This all covers a good bit of the country. Other regions are along the Danube, in Dobrogea close to the Black sea. And pretty much all over, really. To drop some names based on Romanian regions, in Muntenia there is Dealu Mare is one of the main red wine areas, close to the cities of Ploiesti and Buzau. In Oltenian is Drăgășani on the Olt river, Samburesti and a few others. There is Murfatlar and Ostrov and Sarica in Dobrogea by the sea. Vrancea, Cotnari and Odobesti are in Moldova. In Transylvania there is Tarnave and Miniș-Măderat and more. In Banat the main one is Recas. There are dozens more besides these, and not the time or space to cover them all.
Where were they lacking? At 7.2% abv this is over twice what some states will allow for sale in grocery stores.
They are right though, its not for everyone. It has a high malt complexity and is balanced out by an obscene amount of hops. It is as about as balanced and flavorful as it gets without going into the barleywine category. Once you get past the stage where this is truly intense and it begins to be just another beer, Stone has you covered with the 
