ROMANIAN WINE-RELATED COMPANIES AND THEIR STRUCTURE. A PRELIMINARY STUDY

The present paper tries to cover the gap regarding the wine-related companies’ structure in Romanian academic literature by providing an image of the structure of Romanian wine-related companies. The present research might also provide an answer to the position of wine-related companies as nodes that can play an important role in the development of wine tourism and wine routes in Romania. The findings of the present paper show a structure dominated by micro-enterprises and the dimension of this sector of companies is relatively small, just 1,213 companies established between 1991 and 2023. Further, the research revealed a weak relationship with tourism companies therefore the position of wine-related companies as nodes for wine tourism development is also feeble. The image of Romanian wine-related companies is also blurry, where the websites exists (about 11% of the companies declared their websites). The Romanian wine-related companies first must look internally in order to create a more coherent identity for consumer and potential investors and as such to increase their power to diversify and become important nodes for wine tourism development. JEL classification: O13, Q12, Z32. Article History: Received: August 18, 2025; Reviewed: September 15, 2025; Accepted: September 22, 2025; Available online: September 29, 2025.