Crama Roy & Damboviceanu

Laboratory discipline in Corcova

The brief was scent, not scale: a wine that smelled like a nun’s clean cell. Liviu Grigorica, winemaker at Crama Roy & Damboviceanu in Corcova, brings that kind of technical listening to the cellar, where analysis and memory meet before a blend is ready to leave the bench. He is a PhD in Oenology, a Food Technology Engineer, an Expert Wine and Spirits Taster, and Vice President of ADAR, the Association of Authorized Taster of Romania. Those credentials matter here because the estate is not a small romantic holding. It is a working winery in the Mehedinți-Corcova DOC, with roughly 70 hectares under vine and an annual production around 500,000 bottles.

Grigorica’s role at Corcova sits alongside his wider Romanian oenology work, including Velvet Winery and ADAR, and follows earlier posts as a wine expert at Oprisor Winery and as General Manager at Bevitech. At this station, the habit it implies is evaluation, correction, repeat tasting, and the discipline to let a wine declare what it can carry. The house began in 2005, and its present work rests on a revived estate in a village where wine has long outlasted political systems.

Seventy hectares in the Mehedinți-Corcova DOC

The program moves across Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Fetească Neagră, Muscat Ottonel, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Syrah, with still red, white and rosé wines forming the range. Fetească Neagră gives the estate its Romanian register; the international varieties give Grigorica a broader set of tools for structure, aroma and tannin. The house works conventionally, at medium estate scale, with capacity for 600,000 bottles, so the craft here is not scarcity theater. It is repetition under control.

The vineyards sit in the Corcova area of Mehedinți, with the Jirov name tied to hillsides near the village. That geography matters in the glass because the estate has chosen to mark some of its wines by place rather than only by variety. The cellar itself carries another layer of time: historic cellars built by Prince Anton Bibescu at the end of the 19th century remain part of the property’s identity.

The cellar below the quiet estate

The room around the work is rural before it is theatrical. Vines roll out from Corcova toward the surrounding countryside, and the estate keeps the atmosphere of a production cellar that happens to receive visitors, not a tasting room built as scenery. The useful sounds are cellar sounds: glass, pump, footstep, the pause before a sample is judged.

Inside that calm, the historic fabric keeps the work from feeling newly assembled. Thick cellar spaces, a village setting, and a range that moves from Fetească Neagră to Syrah give Grigorica a broad station without losing the place name.