The first 7 months of 2020 has been showing promising results: the export value of Hungarian wine has grown by 20% compared to the same period of 2019. The No1 market of Hungarian quality wine is the UK, so God save the queen and her people!

Not only value, quantity increased as well

The majority of the exported wine is in bulk – it represents 35% of the export income. Almost 30% came from bottled quality wine (smaller than 2 L). These positive pieces of information are somehow shadowed by the fact that the exported quantity grew at even higher extent, by 43%, which means that the wines were sold at lower price, except for sparkling wines, which more or less managed to keep their price: sparkling wine price went down by only 1.5% compared to bottled wines (of less than 2 L), which went down by 13%.

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Do the French drink Hungarian wine?

As for our export markets, the vast majority, 80% goes to the countries of the European Union. The rest is: 13.4% to non EU countries in Europe, 3.5% to Asia and 4.5% to America. regarding our bulk market, the first is Germany followed by Slovakia, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom. It is interesting to see France on the 5th place, and it is more surprising to see that the quantity to France grew to 4.6 times more than last year.

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The British have good taste…

The most Hungarian quality wines are sold in the United Kingdom. The UK was leading last year as well, and export value could still increase – presumably due to successful campagnes like Furmint February by Wines of Hungary UK. It is also interesting to see that Poland is only on the 5th place – after Slovakia, the Czech R. and Germany –, even though several wineries target Poland as their number one market. Poland is a tough market, partially because spirits are more popular than wine, and also because due to climate change Polish wine is rising, so now local wines compete as well for the keen winelovers. Mihály Nagy, representative of Haraszthy Winery in Etyek wine region also considers Poland as an important market. He believes in the Polish wine drinkers, as he say, there has been a serious change in the attitude towards wines. More and more Polish people learn about wines, therefore the easy to understand aromatic wines are not the number one products there. Haraszthy sells Sauvignon Blanc to Poland through Lidl (see below) and they are proud to say that the wine sells very well!

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Lidl – an important player

When speaking about export, we must mention the German discount chain called Lidl. This company promised to play a key role in wine export, and it does so. Every year there is a serious wine selection with international experts – Caroline Gilby MW is one of them – to choose the best wines for the foreign markets. The initiative called Lidl Wine Expo and was launched in 2014. In 2019 Lidl exported almost 30% of all Hungarian exported wine. In 2019 Lidl exported 142 labels to 12 countries, the top three markets were: Germany, Poland and the UK. The top wines were Szürkebarát, Királyleányka, Egri Bikavér red blend and Furmintfrom Tokaj.

Less imported wine

Hungary has always been a patriotic country regarding wine consumption, and this tendency continues. Import value decreased by 15% compared to the previous year, the most significant decrease is in Italian wine, our No 1. importer. However, Spanish wine import increased considerably, and so did the import of Slovakian wine, which is quite interesting since Slovakia is one of our main export market. And what kind of wine do we import from The Netherlands? This remains a question… (Since The Netherlands is an important destination and distributor of bulk wines, probably these are re-exported wines, but we owe our readers the precise answer. As soon as we find out more, we will update this article.)

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Source and special thanks

The data for this article are from an article of ‘Borászati füzetek’, a publication of HNT, the National Council of the Wine Communities. The author of the article is Dr. Jenő Szabó agricultural economist, and he kindly helped to “decipher” the rigid numbers. Original source: KSH (Central Office of Statistics).

Chart 1. Export value

Chart 2. Export quantity

Chart 3. Export markets of bulk wine (of wines in a container larger than 2 litres)

Chart 4. Export markets of quality wine (of wines in a container smaller than 2 litres)

Chart 5. Import markets