Tesco is one of the largest retailers in the world and the 1 million bottles supplied by Cramele Recas in its first contract year (2011), are an important step towards the development of the Romanian wine exports, which are extremely low, compared with what they could really be.
Cox says he first worked in the beer industry, where he owned a company importing Heineken beer, which was doing very well, but he thought of starting exports to be able to exchange lei for foreign currency.
He tried to export wine to UK, where his family owned fine wine stores but met with reluctance from the winemakers, most of them state-held back then. He did take Romanian wines to UK eventually and a year later was hired by German-held winemaker Carl Reh as general manager. He spent a while there and in early 2000’s decided to leave and bought a winemaker from the government. This is how he started to develop the Cramele Recas business.
Recas, which owns 970 hectares of vineyard in Timis County (western Romania), comprises three companies Cramele Recas (owner of the wineries), Cramele Recas Prod (owner of the vineyard) and Cramele Recas Group (which handles sales and distribution), posted about EUR18 million in revenue last year, up 30% on 2010.
The company set out to attain 22% growth in 2012 and expects growth of 25% for the first quarter.
The winemaker of the Recas group was the seventh largest winemaker in Romania in 2010, according to ZF’s calculations based on Finance Ministry data.
Recas is among the largest exporters of wine on the local market, according to the available data. About 40% of its sales abroad are made to UK, US, Japan, Sweden, Canada, Estonia and Slovakia.
The other owners besides the Cox family include Gheorghe Iova and Ioan Georgi.
Philip Cox is thinking of buying another 200 hectares of vineyard or land on which grapevine can be planted, driven by rising demand both on the domestic and on the international markets.
The businessman believes this is a good time for wine exports, because the countries in the southern hemisphere, major rivals of European winemakers are facing trouble with their domestic currencies, which means opportunities for Europeans, Romanian producers includes.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)