With 6,000 years of wine history, Romania is one of the oldest and most traditional wine growing countries in Europe. The Greek poet Homer already mentioned Thracian wines in his Iliad in the 8th century and the historian Herodotus (482-425 BC) tells of the wine trade of the Greek colonists on the Black Sea coast. German settlers from the Rhine Moselle region followed the call of the Hungarian King Géza II. (1130-1162), the then ruler of this area, and revived viticulture in Transylvania in the 12th century and in the 18th century these were the Swabians brought into the country by the Habsburg ruler Maria Theresa (1717-1780). The historical landscape of Bessarabia, where viticulture has also been practised for 5,000 years, was mainly inhabited by Romanians at the beginning of the 19th century. This area, which today belongs to Moldavia, was part of Romania between 1917 and 1940