Last year was the most successful ever for boutique wine producer Prince Stirbey, with local sales helping to push the company to a 15 per cent growth.
Sales of premium wines in Romania have kept buoyant during the financial crisis, with this homegrown wine brand - run by Austrian Baron Jakob Kripp and Romanian-born Baronin Ileana Kripp - expecting a further rise of ten per cent in 2010.
The best-seller is white wine Cramposie Selectionata - a local variety of pre-Roman origin - which takes up one quarter of the company’s bottling and is exhausted three months before the next batch hits the market.
“Customers are quite angry – as Cramposie is listed on our menu and we sell out,” says Baron Kripp. “A good wine can’t be delivered on demand – we cannot switch on the tap.”
After a period of large expansion, Kripp says the wine producer will not increase its wine estate from the current 25 hectares or the bottling numbers, but may instead focus on the sale of more exclusive varieties.
Around 60 per cent of the company’s sales are to premium restaurants, mostly in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca and Timisoara. “In good restaurants people are still drinking good wine,” says Kripp. “People are now more conscious about quality and are getting more educated in the medium to premium segment and there is a good price to quality ratio.”
But around one fifth of the sales are from the company’s winery in Dragasani, Valcea county. Here visitors come for weekend trips or company day-outs to spend an afternoon to eat and drink in arranged tasting sessions - for which the Baron and Baronin need around ten days’ notice.
In the family estate, the Kripps produce regional varieties such as reds Novac and Negru de Dragasani - two hectares of which were planted last year.
In the future, the company will not plant the most internationally famous of Romanian grapes - the deep red curranty-flavoured Feteasca Neagra - because many Romanian wine producers have been planting these grapes over the last few years.
Baron Kripp fears that soon the market may be “flooded” with Feteasca Neagra.
Prince Stirbey
Red, white and rose wine producer and bottler
Estate: 25 hectares
Between 80,000 and 100,000 bottles a year produced
Romanian sales: 85 per cent, exports: 15 per cent
The Diplomat, November 2010
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