Wine Routes in Rural Romania

Abstract

Scholars have shown the power of wine routes to boost tourist arrivals, increase destination competitiveness, and enhance sustainable development. Like in the past decades in 2019, Romania ranked 10th worldwide and 4th in the EU for its vineyard cultivated surface (ha), also ranking 13th worldwide and 6th in the EU for wine production. Romania registers a modest level of wine tourism despite the initial efforts: Romania – Land of Wines, with the sub-program Wine Route/Road, recognizing the huge potential of this form of tourism and trying to develop it, mainly in rural areas. The Master Plan for Romanian Tourism Development briefly mentioned wine tourism, without indicating any functional route/road. This chapter aims at identifying the existing wine routes in Romania's rural areas and at evaluating whether the communes along these wine routes enjoy tourism supply and demand advantages, compared to communes associated with vineyards/wineries, but not included in wine routes.