Romania's wine tourism potential is as yet little exploited

"You've got very good wine. And I'm not just saying this to be friendly. It is a fact," says an American who has just finished a wine tasting at Pivniţele Rhein (Rhein Cellar) in Azuga, the terminus of a cruise that had started 28 days before in Western Europe, for which he and his wife paid 25,000 dollars.

He is one of the over 10,000 tourists per year who come for tasting events or for a lesson about wine in Azuga, where Halewood producer makes sparkling wine based on a more than one hundred year-old recipe. Wine tourism, which in countries like France and even the US (California) attracts tens of millions of visitors per year, is poorly developed in Romania, but producers are now trying to draw tourists to vineyards. And they do have what to show them: in Romania there are almost 200,000 hectares of vineyard, which places Romania fifth in Europe, in terms of vine growing area.