17m euro wine flows to foreign markets

The exports of Romanian wine to foreign markets amounted to 17.3 million euros in the first ten months of last year, that is 6% of the total agricultural exports of Romania. “We do not have the full-year data yet, but I hope exports for the entire last year will be slightly higher than those in 2002, which reached $23 million,” said Basil Zarnoveanu, chairman of the Association of Winemakers and Exporters. Although having lost the Moldovan market that was Romanian winemakers’ favourite destination in 2002, the Romanian exports saw a slight increase on the traditional markets. “The poorer crop in 2003 drove prices up so that the importers from the Republic of Moldova gave up buying bulk Romanian wine,” Zanoveanu says. Compared with 2002 when sales of bulk wine accounted for 80% of the total exports, the volume of bulk wine sold dropped to 65% in 2003 and looks like the bottled wine will grab a large slice of sales this year. The total surface cultivated with productive grapevine was 238,300 ha in 2003 and the total grape output was 1,102,400 tonnes, 25,000 tonnes more than in the previous year. ZF