The bottom retail price for Ukrainian sparkling wines, carbonated wines, fermented drinks, flavored sparkling (carbonated) wines (drinks) has been increased from UAH 89 to UAH 109 per 0.7-0.75 liter bottle. The government of Ukraine adopted the respective resolution on January 13.
“As a result, everyone wins: Ukrainian winemakers will become competitive and restore their lost positions in the market. Winegrowers will have a greater demand for their raw materials. Ukrainian consumers will have a high-quality, not falsified, product,” Minister of Economy Ihor Petrashko said in a Thursday press release of the ministry.
According to him, the resolution also brought the description of this product and its codes into line with the Tax Code and the Ukrainian Classifier of Goods for Foreign Economic Activity.
The minister said that the main problem of the sector is that the market is now manipulating the names of products and prices: lower quality imported wine-based drinks are sold at the same price as higher quality Ukrainian sparkling wines.
According to Petrashko, national producers have lost 40% of the sparkling wines market, and therefore there is a threat of closing Ukrainian wineries. The adopted resolution eliminates all manipulations and settles the issues that “the price should match quality,” the minister said.
The share of Artwinery, a large producer of sparkling wine in Eastern Europe, of the Ukrainian sparkling wine market totaled 20.6% compared with 19.4% in 2016, the company has reported. “The volume of production of sparkling Artvineri over the past year amounted to 10.26 million bottles against 12.3 million bottles in 2016. The average annual volume of export sales of sparkling wines of the company is about 15% of the total figure,” Marketing Director of Artwinery Yevhenia Stadnyk told Interfax-Ukraine.
According to her, EU countries (in particular Germany), the CIS countries (Russia, Azerbaijan) and the countries of Asia are promising directions for the company’s export development.
The marketing director pointed out that the wine materials for the production of sparkling wines come to the enterprise from the wine-growing enterprises of the Odesa, Kherson and Mykolaiv regions. In addition, there are wine materials of the Crimean peninsula of the 2012-2013 harvest in the reserves of the enterprise.
“The entire production cycle is located at a depth of more than 72 meters in underground gypsum tunnels, which keep the temperature and humidity constant all year round. The total area of the underground galleries used by Artwinery is over 25 hectares,” Stadnyk said.
She said that until now, there is no need to count on restoration of the sparkling wine market in Ukraine to the indicators of 2013, when the volume was 69 million bottles. Artwinery seeks to strengthen its positions on the Ukrainian market and further expand export geography.
