ABOUT

 Born in Romania, Mihaela has spent a lifetime reading landscapes, first as a child in the foothills of the Carpathians, and later as a geologist working to understand how those same hills came to be.

She holds a PhD in geology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her dissertation traced the paleogeography and landscape evolution of the Southern Carpathian foothills between 65 and 20 million years ago, the slow, patient story of how rivers, seas, and shifting mountains built the ground that Romanian vines would eventually take root in. Over the past thirty years she has continued that work in sedimentology, stratigraphy, and landscape dynamics, and she has been fortunate to do it on nearly every continent.

Alongside the science, Mihaela has spent decades in business: leading multidisciplinary teams, managing multi-million-dollar projects, and learning how to bring careful people and complicated ideas together to make something real.

Dor de Casă™ draws on both halves of that life. The geologist in her chose these wines because terroir is not a marketing word, it is millions of years of rock, water, and weather speaking through a glass. The businessperson in her built the house so the wines and the stories around them could find their way to your table. And the Romanian in her did all of it because some part of home should always be within reach.

Michael Ryer, MBA - Operations & Compliance Manager

Michael brings six years of experience in sustainability and entrepreneurship to Dor de Casă, and a genuine belief that the best businesses are built on efficient systems and authentic relationships.

He holds an MBA from Willamette University. In 2021 he founded a company that deployed the first portable EV charger on the Big Island of Hawaii, a project that required navigating ocean and land shipping logistics and multi-agency permitting. That project is where he discovered what he is best at: making complex, moving-parts problems look simple on the other side.

While working for Forth, his career has taken him from the policy corridors of the Oregon Department of Transportation, where he helped allocate federal funding to Oregon-based companies and facilitated a local car-sharing program, to the front lines of EV infrastructure, where he helped workplaces build their charging programs and earn national recognition.

Michael joined Dor de Casă to celebrate his Romanian heritage and to apply that same talent for logistics and compliance to something close to his heart: bringing indigenous Romanian wines to American tables.

Outside of work, Michael leads tabletop adventures as a Dungeons & Dragons storyteller and competes in Ironman triathlons. He approaches both the same way he approaches operations: with patience, preparation, and a deep appreciation for what happens when all the pieces finally come together.