At the time of Napoleon’s Continental Blockade (1809-14), the Banat was already a chief supplier of grain, coal, ore (iron, copper, silver) & wine. By a few years later, Werschetz had become the biggest wine producer of Europe,  even the world. From the mining area of Anina, a railroad was built (1846-56) to Bazias on the Danube and in 1857 a railroad from Szeged to Temesvar.  The first German railroad, from Nuremberg to Fürth was built in 1835.

Neubeschenowa, 1855 vineyards and fruit trees froze; 1885 destruction of vineyards by phylloxera Jamu Mare, large surfaces of vineyards were destroyed due to the phylloxera from 1884.

Marienfeld makes the most wine, Bakowa the best wine; the best schnapps is made in Guttenbrunn. [© Our Danube Swabian Banat Villages Have Their Own Character "Donauschwäbischer Volkskalender" of 1924.]

Vilagos, Wine was made and stored in underground cellars, some as large as 150 meters long.  The wine was aged in these cellars,  sometimes as long as 20 years.

Photos

Werschetz

Community Evolution and German Life of a Banat Wine and School City & a supplement by Helmut Frisch Werschetz.  This large volume is 785 pages of text, including a 40 page index of surnames, plus another 270 pages of pictures. The supplement adds 90 pages of text and 45 pages of pictures. Helmut Frisch of Vienna published the 7-800 pages Heimatbuch on Werschetz which is now unfortunately out of print.

Werschetz (German) now officially Vrsac lies in the Serbian administered republic Vojvodina (previously western Banat). About 42 miles due northeast of Belgrad (on the Donau or Danube river). Werschetz lies at the foothills of the Carpathian mountains and its environs were known for their vineyards.   The city lies at the foot of the Schlossberg (Castle mountain) and a smaller mountain called the Marienberg.

Wines & Grapes in Bakowa (Banat)

     The work in the vineyards on the Silasch mountain was very strenuous and exhausting, but it was carried out with much diligence and dedication, since it was well known that wine production was more profitable than work in the fields.

     Work in the vineyards usually started in mid-March (when the soil was dry enough), with “uncovering”, “cutting”, and “driving stakes into the ground”. “Tacking” (or fastening, nt) started as soon as the new branches had grown too long. Spraying was probably the hardest physical labor. To protect the new branches against rust, the vineyards had to be sprayed regularly, starting at the beginning of May, with a solution of 2% copper vitriol (called “Ploostaan” in Bakowa dialect; Blaustein in hochdeutsch, nt). In an average year, the vineyards were sprayed five times and hoed three times, and ahead of every spraying there was “tacking” and “cutting back” (of new growth, nt). As a rule, these activities took until the end of July.

     After that, until grape harvest, no work was done in the vineyards. Depending on the weather, harvesting of the grapes began around mid-September. Even though most growers had planted several types of grapes, separate harvesting of each type was not common, but white grapes and red grapes were harvested separately. Even so, a very good wine was made out of the mixtures. This speaks for the skill and knowledge of the winemakers. 

     The bunches of grapes were put through the grinder on location; the resulting mash was taken home in the evening and pressed out there. The sweet grape must was much in demand by the children, while the older men preferred the several days-old “Rampasch”. Processing of the wine in wooden barrels in their own home cellars was completed, as a rule, in February or March, after which the wines were ready to be sold.

      The buyers were almost exclusively innkeepers from Temeswar. The intermediaries between seller and buyer were called “Kupetz”. These were residents of Bakowa who were skilled in evaluating the quality of each wine and earned a percentage of every sale. Well-known “Kupetze” were Werosta Hans, Ultschak Hans, Kunzer Hans and Gimpl Dassinger.

 The practices of enriching the must with saccharose or sweetening the wine with retained must, as permitted today in German wine-growing regions, was not common in Bakowa.

     Radical changes took place in the viticulture of Bakowa after WWII. Through the expropriation of their vineyards, the population lost its main source of income. For the part of the population that found work at the state farm or joined the collective farm, the hard work remained the same, but the pay was poor, with the profit from the wine trade going to the government. 

     Later on, wines previously designated as coming from Bakowa were sold by the government-owned cellars of Busiasch and were still fairly well regarded. In the 1960s almost all people planted vines on trellis throughout the no-longer-used spaces of their yards and gardens.  Although the quality of the wines produced was not quite comparable with the quality of the wines from the vineyards, Bakowaers had the skill to produce at least some good wines that sold well on the private market in Temeswar.

     It must be noted that the area of yard and garden was too small for some inhabitants of Bakowa, so they had to find other methods to produce more wine: They added water and sugar to the remains of the already-pressed grapes and then put them again through the presses. The result was a bad wine (often ridiculed as “nylon wine”) that was less enjoyable but good for producing a quick headache.

     Today (1999) you can hardly buy any Bakowa-wine. The vineyards have grown wild, and some have dried up. The current Romanian inhabitants of Bakowa and Silasch did not use their chances to maintain the good name of the wines from this region and to utilize them as a continuous source of income…

     What remains are the memories: the Silasch mountain and the Bakowa mountain, the often quite hard work, but also the beautiful mild evenings after work in the Silasch house in the vineyard, and most of all the great-tasting, excellent wine that made Bakowa rich and well-known, and the equal of which it would have been hard to find in the entire Banat.

More About the Wine-growing of the Bakowaer”
(www.bakowa.de/index.htm
“Mehr über den Weinbau der Bakowaer"
translated by Nick Tullius 25 Mar 2005)

Wine Producing in Rekasch

In the so-called good old days, one of the well-known wine-producing villages in the Banat was Rekasch. During the years of Communist rule, production naturally declined in both quality and quantity.  According to the German-language newspaper Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung ("ADZ") appearing in Romania, the once state-owned winery has been taken over by a British-Romanian firm that is successfully exporting its wines to the USA, Great Britain, Germany, and South Korea. In the USA, you can look for wines called "Vampire" (what else?) if you are inclined to taste these
contemporary wines from the Banat (to my knowledge, they are not availed in Canada).  The winery currently occupies about 700 hectares (about 1730 acres) and has plans for expansion to more than 1000 hectares (about 2470 acres) by the time Romania joins the EU. 
[Nick Tullius]