By
CRISTI CRETZAN
MURFATLAR, Romania - When Stephen Bennett got his job at Murfatlar winery two years ago, winemaking wasn't so much of a science as it was a frenzied assembly line.
Once the grapes mellowed in mid-autumn, thousands of temporary workers flocked in, picked the crop as quickly and crammed it into the vineyard.
Steel blenders crushed the grapes in a race against the clock. At the end of the season, quotas, not drinkability, served as a measure of success.
"They called that a traditional method, but this is not a way to make quality wines," says Bennett, a 44-year-old Australian winemaker who was tapped by Murfatlar's new private owners to help transform the former state-owned company into a worldwide quality brand.
Stretched across 2,100 hectares (5,200 acres) between the Danube and the Black Sea, in Romania's southeastern Dobrogea region, the Murfatlar winery is the country's largest and best known brand name domestically.
Although it traces its winemaking history back to the Roman empire, it employed obsolete technology just three decades old and the company didn't even have a business plan.
No more. Goodbye ugly bottles, hello snazzy labels. Farewell to the old oak barrels that tainted the fermenting product. Sort those grapes - don't just crush them all at once.
Quality is now the watchword at the winery, which lost its primary, less-discriminating Russian consumer market after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 and now finds itself fighting for rack space in Western Europe alongside popular brands from France, Italy, Australia and South Africa.
The change has brought results. Exports are up and the company recently snagged a silver award for its 2001 Cabernet Sauvignon at Vino Ljubljana 2002 in Slovenia.
But the transition has been anything from easy. Bennett quickly discovered that Communism's poisonous legacy for sloth and poor workmanship remained buried inside the winery's workers more than 11 years after the end of Romania's brutal Communist dictatorship.
So undoing the mentality — or the "traditional way" as locals refer to Communist era habits — has become as important as teaching his staff the secrets of modern winemaking.
"You have to talk to people and show them why it's important to do things in a different manner," Bennett said while leading a visitor through the company's tasting room. "And you have to be very patient."
Bennett came to the vineyard in 2000, shortly after the former state-owned company Vie Vin Murfatlar SA was sold to a group of Romanian investors. They pledged to rebuild the brand's image after decades of decline under public ownership, and sought an expert winemaker.
Bennett, who has his own wine trading firm in Australia, has also worked as winemaker in Eastern Europe since 1993 doing tasting and testing from Bulgaria to Ukraine and Moldova.
At Murfatlar, he rolled up his sleeves and took a hands-on approach to supervising the winery's 450 full time employees by moving into the attic over the winery's main building as the investors plowed US$3 million into the facilities.
Around the winery, Bennett is known as "Mister Steve, our Australian expert," and workers tell stories of the tall, bespectacled Australian hurrying through the vineyard with an ever growing list of instructions.
For the first time, they were told to keep a close eye on the temperature of the grapes, to clean the tanks after every load and farm managers were — gasp — actually asked to work on their own fields and to decide with winemakers the best time for harvesting.
"Some of the managers hadn't been out there in the field even once in the past twenty years," Bennett recalled.
Fourteen farms provide grapes to the central vinery, which has the capacity to produce some 12 million liters of red and white wines. The product was there in bulk but the bottled result could hardly guarantee a profit if it wasn't drinkable.
So Bennett began with the basics. New refrigeration machines, vital for maintaining quality, were brought in, and most of the old wooden barrels that were tainting the wines were replaced. Young oenologists were hired to preach the new gospel of winemaking to the workers.
But then Bennett almost sparked a revolt when he asked temporary workers to limit the daily amount of grapes harvested to 600 tons.
Paid once for the whole season, the workers were trying to get the job done as soon as possible. But rushing the harvest made it hard for experts to properly sort the grapes.
In the end, Bennett did it his way, as workers were asked to comply or leave.
The company also turned formed a proper business and marketing division.
"Just imagine, before privatization there never was a marketing department here," said Cristian Din, the company's commercial manager.
As most of its wines were sweet at a time when global demand was tending to dry vintages, the company launched a new line of dry red and white wines called Sec de Murfatlar for the domestic market. For the export market, the company markets a range of dry red and white wines called the "Vampire's Collection" — a name that trades off Romania's Dracula legend.
The company's traditional line of green and gray bottles stamped with carelessly scribbled labels were replaced with crystal clear bottles made in Austria and the products were jazzed up with a short description of the wine, undersigned "Stephen Bennett, Australian Expert."
Murfatlar's exports totaled some US$1.5 million in 2001 an increase over previous years, but the winery won't disclose past results. Germany and Britain are among the main export markets.
Bennett said that Romania's inconstancy in winemaking hurts exports. With such an image, it's no surprise that a bottle of good Romanian Sauvignon Blanc of Murfatlar sells in Britain for 4 pounds (US$6.20), while a similar wine made in Australia sells for 8 pounds (US$12.40).
But a better glass of Murfatlar in the coming years, coupled with Romania's drive to join the European Union membership might change the impression that Romanians can't make wine, Bennett believes.