It is the summer of 2021. We are sitting on the terrace of one of the best restaurants in Baia Mare, Romania. As in many good restaurants in my motherland, traditional Romanian food is served here, such as delicious Mici (lamb/pork mince from the grill) or Ciorba de Burta (Belly Soup). For me, it’s a feast! And fortunately, Jan – my partner – also likes Romanian food very much. Except for the pork ears I ordered once… He didn’t like them much!

Ultima Regina

With good food comes good wine, we think. And so we grab the menu. To our surprise, we see almost exclusively Romanian wines on the menu. A very diverse assortiment to choose from: red, white, rosé, sparkling…. Feteasca Alba from the Prestige line of Domeniul Coroanei Segarcea… And wow what a good choice!  It turns out to be a delicious, fresh white wine!!! We get curious and it seems like a nice idea to try many different Romanian wines for the rest of our vacation….

And so, after two weeks we are both madly in love with Romanian wines! Every bottle of wine we open is a new surprise! But we also knew – and this is an experience many people have – that on vacation everything just seems better and tastier. So, we decided to load up our car with many bottles of Romanian wines and taste them again once back in The Netherlands. 

While driving back to The Netherlands I did a Google search: could I just order the wines in The Netherlands? After all, that would be a lot easier. But to my surprise: there was no on-line shop you could order a Romanian wine.

Importing to The Netherlands

Once home, of course, we tasted the various wines again. And what a feast! The wines continued to impress us! And while our vacation stock slowly but surely ran out, we got a taste for them more and more. And so an idea began to bubble up: if Romanian wines are not for sale here, why not import them ourselves? After all, if we enjoy them so much, there will be many more people who will appreciate these wines just as we do. 

What to do next? We didn’t have any experience in the wine world.  But what we do have is genuine interest, love for Romania and Romanian wine, ambition, a good dose of enthusiasm and a can-do mentality. And so we took the plunge and sought contact with winemakers in Romania. Because I speak the language, that went very smoothly. And we got enormously enthusiastic responses back: there was great interest in exporting to The Netherlands!

And so began our adventure…..

One year later

We are now a year on and we now import over 60 wines from 3 different top wineries from Romania. By immersing ourselves in the history of the Romanian wine world and visiting the winemakers, we are increasingly drawn to the ambition of making the story of Romanian wines known and introducing more people to these wonderful wines.