It takes three hours by train from Warsaw to Krakow, the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. A leading academic and cultural centre, Krakow includes over 20 institutions of higher education and some 200,000 students who sustain a lively nightlife. At one bar near the central train station, Ministerstwo, the bartender looked quizzical when asked for a wine list. A Polish woman enjoying her beer at the bar said that wine is for “sissies”. In Krakow’s old town centre, vodka and beer flow aplenty at Pijalnia Wódki I Piwa, open 24 hours. Two slightly inebriated young women assert that wine is “boring” after enjoying shots of vodka for just 7.00 Zloty ($2.30) apiece.
Limited choices
Although it’s possible to order dry wines at various restaurants – from Italian Gavi with sashimi at White Sushi in Warsaw, to Pinot Grigio at Warsaw airport’s Cheers Cafe – wine choices in restaurants can be dire. At the end of the Jewish Culture Festival in the Kazimierz quarter of Krakow in July 2013, both tourists and locals lunched at the traditional (and delicious) Polakowski restaurant, not far from the synagogue. Beverage choices for cabbage rolls, stewed beetroots, meats, soups and dumplings included no less than five beers. But wine? One red and one white, available in 187-ml screw cap bottles, the Chilean Santa Carolina Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon. But Polish wine aficionados exude passion and seem to be growing in numbers, if not as quickly as the wine trade would like.
And there is good wine to be found.
Warsaw’s Mielżyński follows a “British model of wine selection,” said Mielżyński manager Tomasz Zaremba. That means a wide variety of wines, from French and Italian to New World. Mielżyński is at once an importer and retailer, which cuts margins down for consumers resulting in good pricing for Cru Bourgeois-level wines such as Phélan Segur.
The wine bar restaurant has both indoor and outdoor seating, with appealing wooden tables and elegant table settings. Off to one side of the restaurant lie available wines – many still in their wooden cases or cardboard boxes, as delivered, accentuating a somewhat casual ambiance.
With about 39m inhabitants and almost one-quarter of revenues coming from food and drink, the Polish market remains “one of the most promising in Europe” for wine, according to a 2013 industry study by UBIFRANCE, the French government agency for export promotion.
Ever since 2000 – with the exception of 2009, which followed the world financial crisis – wine consumption in Poland has been growing each year, the agency reported. By 2007, Poland imported just under 880,000 hL of wine worth over €137m ($189m), a significant jump from the year before. By 2012, those figures added up to nearly 1m hectolitres worth almost €180m.
And in 2013, according to French customs data, the growth trend continued, at least for French wines: Last year, Poland imported just over 107,000 hL of French wine valued at nearly €29m. Over the same period in 2012, it was just over 96,359 hL valued at just over €24m, both figures increases over the year before. According to the German Wine Institute’s representative in Warsaw, the market for German wine increased by 11.4% in the past year.
A further positive sign for wine: Just two years ago, the prestigious Jagiellonian University in Krakow inaugurated a postgraduate oenology curriculum, in part because over the last several years, “Poland has observed significant growth in the wine industry, an increasing number of wine importers, increasing sales and consumption of wine,” according to the curriculum description.
Low consumption
As impressive as the data seems, per capita consumption of wine in Poland remains very low. Polish people consume at least 90L of beer per head per year. Although vodka consumption has been dropping over the last 10 years, it still amounts to over twice as much as wine consumption. And observers now urge some caution due to various recent factors, from a slowing economy to a persistent Polish predilection for inexpensive and sweet wines that limits sales potential for more expensive imported wines.
Four years ago, German wine importer Jung & Lecker opened a boutique and restaurant in Warsaw as a window for its wines. But wine consumption growth there, “has not been as quick as we expected,” said company representative Monika Wojtysiak in September 2013. “The really good wines [more expensive] are not so easy to sell, and I would say that [when the restaurant and boutique had opened], we were more optimistic.” Wojtysiak told Meininger’s that “many supermarkets” which were, until recently, selling wine “at varying price points” are now focusing on lower-priced wines.
The UBIFRANCE study acknowledged that about three quarters of wine sold in Poland is from the €5.00-per-bottle price point. The French agency recommends that speciality wine shops – which feature wines between 20.00 to 35.00 Zloty ($6.59 to $11.50) – should add more bottles in the 15.00 to 20.00 Zloty range to their shelves.
Tomasz Józefik, deputy sales director of PWW, a major wine importer, also said that growth in wine consumption – currently between 3L and 3.5L per capita per year – is “not as fast as we had been anticipating”. Echoing Jung & Lecker’s Wojtysiak, he said that most Polish wine consumers look for bargains more than anything else. The inexpensive American Carlo Rossi brand, for example, remains the top-selling wine in Poland, with about a 10% share of the entire wine market, according to the Central European Distribution Corporation and Direct Wines, a Polish wine distributor. From its California Red to California White, its bottles retail for not more than €5.00.
At lunch at a traditional restaurant in Warsaw’s Old Town (Stare Miasto), no dry sparkling wine was available. One had to buy more expensive Champagne to get a dry bubbly.
“That’s typical,” remarked Ela Chwiałkowska, product manager of distributor Direct Wines in Warsaw.
Indeed, over 40% of wines sold in Poland are off-dry or sweet, according to UBIFRANCE. Although UBIFRANCE reports that “the image of these wines is declining” and associated with “lower-quality” wine, Chwiałkowska is less optimistic about such a trend, even though she encourages it.
UBIFRANCE cited a survey published in December 2012 by a popular Polish wine website –www.winicjatywa.pl – which indicated growing appreciation for more expensive dry wines for buyers between ages 25 to 34. But those surveyed already appreciate fine and dry wine; they follow the website, either directly or on social media like Facebook. “Yes, people who are into wine will try dry, but if you talk to anyone else in Poland, they will tell you that they prefer sweet [and generally cheaper] wine,” said Chwiałkowska.
Łukasz Skalski serves wine at an elegant wine restaurant in Warsaw, Concept Restaurant and Vinoteka, which features Italian wines – including vintages of Amarone della Valpolicella reaching back to 1964. “Yes, vodka is in our blood, but people are trying wine more,” said Skalski. Since 2007, Skalski’s Warsaw southern district Ursynów has seen the opening of no less than nine wine shops, “with three opening in the last two years,” Skalski said, adding the more people are asking questions. “I get asked about decanting and why that helps,” he said, eagerly showing off the restaurant’s cellar space and an underground table for private dinner reservations.
While inexpensive wine sells quite well, industry representatives see potential for somewhat pricier bottles among educated consumers in their 30s and 40s. Warsaw-based German Wine Institute spokeswoman Anna Gmurczyk reported this summer that this age group – especially consumers with college degrees – buys more higher-priced German wine sold in Poland.
Of growing importance for this age group is combined wine and food sales, a relatively new concept in Poland. Take Warsaw-based CaterTeam, a service that started in 1997. The company began with food exclusively, including cheeses, olive oils and pastas mainly from the Mediterranean region. This past December 2013 marked only the second year since CaterTeam added wine to its portfolio, but now wine accounts for 20% of the business. “Wine is becoming more important because we see increasing demand,” wrote CaterTeam buyer Marta Ręgowska. “Indeed, the trend for drinking wines is more among people in their 30s and 40s, and those in their 20s drink beer, vodka, long drinks or lower-level of wines,” she wrote in an e-mail.
CityWine, an importer/retailer with five locations in Warsaw includes a charcuterie and cheese stand at the entrance. The impressive wine selection, from Israeli and Australian wines to Spanish, Italian and French, caters to “educated, working professionals,” said store partner Joan Daví, a Spaniard living in Warsaw. “We encourage customers to think of wine with food.”
To nurture the more upscale interest among 30- and 40-somethings, industry sources such as UBIFRANCE encourage companies to organise tasting events in cooperation with distributors and importers. Such tastings should be prepared for restaurant staff, journalists, business people with an interest in wine and wine tasting clubs that tend to bring such people together. Because anti-alcoholism legislation in Poland limits wine advertising, UBIFRANCE recommends using such platforms for promotion.
Future growth
A major factor will be Poland’s economy. If it starts to pick up after sluggish growth in the past year, there is potential for growth in the hotel-café-restaurant sector, which has proven important for sales in terms of value, if not in terms of quantity, according to UBIFRANCE. Although hotels, restaurants and cafes represented just 3% of wine sales in terms of volume, the value was more than 12% in 2012. At fine restaurants, the average price of bottles sold has increased in the last five years from about 150 to 200 Zloty ($49.00 to $65.90), according Marek Przyborek, president of the Polish Sommeliers Association.
But such buyers remain limited to the 1m or so “knowledgeable” and “initiated” wine consumers who have “purchasing power comparable to Western Europe and who can regularly purchase wines at this price level (€12.50 and more at a retail price level),” according to UBIFRANCE.
Although many wine-friendly restaurants hardly seemed packed (including the Concept Restaurant and Vinoteka in Warsaw), Mielżyński wine bar and restaurant in Warsaw had a waiting list. “This is the most popular place in town,” said Chwiałkowska.
