Postcard from Romania
No bears, no vampires but a lot of wine and some fascinating history
Two days before I went to Romania (for work - about which more below) I realised I knew next to nothing about the country and what I knew wasn’t particularly positive. Ceausescu, Vlad the Impaler - I’m not sure who was worse.
I wasn’t spending long there so I decided to consult Google. Or rather AI
“Tell me 10 unexpected things about Romania” I asked.
Turns out it has a Merry Cemetery, some of the fastest internet speeds in Europe and the largest number of brown bears.
Then I looked it up on a map (I do love a map) and found just how big it was. Much bigger than Bulgaria though not as huge as Ukraine.,
We were in the west of the country rather than the more picturesque centre which is dominated by the Carpathian Mountains. Just over the border from Serbia and Hungary.
We flew in to the town of Timișoara which is famous for having been the focal point of the Romanian revolution, a bloody uprising that finally overthrew the Ceausescu regime explained our impressively knowledgeable, purple-haired guide Alexandra, who gave us an unusually frank and open account of the city’s history.
The main point of the trip though was to visit the huge Cramele Recas winery, Romania’s biggest wine exporter, with whom I’d agreed to do a collab (influencer-speak for ‘work with’. More on that another time!)
It has a great back story. The founder Philip Cox, who as you might gather from the name is a Brit, bought the winery off the state back in 1998 while he was still in his twenties along with 660 ha of vineyard which is a heck of a lot of vines.
Given Romania didn’t have much of an image for quality wine Cox concentrated instead on providing good value focussing mainly on indigenous varieties - notably fetească regală an aromatic grape variety that is stocked by most of the supermarkets and has proved a surprising hit with the public. (Maybe not so surprising when Asda’s own label version costs just £5.98. And goes brilliantly well, I discovered, with a katsu curry!)
They also make the wine trade’s best value pinot noir, the cheapest iteration of which you can find in Waitrose though I’d hang on for the 2024 vintage which was particularly good in Romania, an affordable orange wine - they are genuinely innovative - plus a sweet wine, sadly not available in the UK, that could easily pass for Sauternes.
It’s a spectacular success story.
So what is Romanian food like?
