Influence of the EU accession on the Hungarian Wine Industry: Three years experience of the CMO-wine implementation

In our communication, we give a detailed analysis on the results of the EU accession of the Hungarian wine sector, while it is one of the significant wine producers of New Member States, and we have nearly three years experience of application of the CMO-wine. We show what was expected by the actors of the Hungarian wine industry from this accession. For this reason, we analyze deep interviews made in 2003 with several represents of the wine enterprises and the represents of the professional organizations before the entry to the EU. Then we examine the implementation of the CMO-wine at the level of the national regulation and we analyzed the available statistics (sources: KSH, HNT, MVH) in relation of the measures of the CMO-wine applied in the wine sector, and its effect on the Hungarian wine economy. After that, we study the effect of the EU accession to the Hungarian wine exchange, the wine export and import of the recent period. Finally, we touch upon the probable influence of the actual version of the CMO-wine reform on the Hungarian wine industry. Our study underlines that the operators of the Hungarian wine sector expected a foreseeable and relatively stable regulation system of wine production or wine markets and therefore they projected a rather stable subvention system. Among the CMO-wine measures, for Hungary, the primary is the restructuring and re-conversion of vineyards, but we examine the exploitation of the other CMO-measures like the distillations, the private storage, the aid for musts usage and the export refund for wine exportation into third countries. Then we analyze the tendency of wine export after the EU accession, which reduced drastically during the recent period for the reason that the concurrence is more and more intensive at the international markets and the cause for the lack of marketing investments. At the same time, the structure of wine import has changed. Its volume rests still marginal, but it shows an increasing tendency, particularly in the category of the bottled wine with favourable quality/price rate, which means a direct concurrence for the Hungarian quality wines in the super-, hypermarket and hard discount chains.