In a segment of HTV’s Dnevnik news programme titled “Are suppliers overcharging? Tabak: Croatia will be expensive for its own people,” aired on 19 June 2025, the president of the Caterers’ Guild at the Croatian Chamber of Economy, Jelena Tabak, made unsubstantiated claims about the pricing of Croatian wines that damage the reputation and the business of the winemakers gathered under Graševina Croatica. We publish their response in full:
We strongly object to the creation of a general impression, among Croatian consumers as well as foreign visitors, that our winemakers have set wine prices many times higher than the actual costs of production. On the contrary, a significant part of the rise in wine production costs has been absorbed by the winemakers through the painstaking search for more favourable input prices for raw materials and by reducing their own revenues. It is important to emphasise that the prices of our key wines, set at the beginning of this year, have either been raised only minimally or have even remained at 2024 levels. They were certainly not raised ahead of the tourist season or after the aforementioned 1 April. Our winemakers are prepared to transparently present all their costs as well as the sale prices achieved, precisely in order to demonstrate that the key wines they supply to retailers and caterers are nowhere near a 37% increase.
If any individual winemaker has raised prices by the stated percentage, we demand that their name be clearly stated, so that the claim about “some winemakers” does not harm the entire wine sector. On the other hand, the share of wine sales in hospitality certainly does not constitute a key part of that business, and therefore singling out winemakers as a particularly important problem for the hospitality industry is far from the truth. It is time to clearly set out the input prices of the key products in hospitality offerings and to establish where and how prices arise that many times exceed producer prices. It is well known that caterers set wine prices so that their price is around three times the purchase price, which is as a rule significantly lower than the retail price.
However, in today’s digital age, retail wine prices are for the most part publicly available and consumers can easily compare them with the prices of wines on wine lists, so it is understandable that they are not willing to pay many times more than the real price. Amid all the difficulties currently facing the Croatian wine sector, the last thing we need are individuals who, in front of the cameras, with unsubstantiated statements call for the purchase of imported products — in our case, imported wines — because that is, to put it mildly, a very dangerous statement for Croatian production and causes direct economic harm. We understand that there are certain difficulties related to the rising prices of our tourism offering, but we cannot accept responsibility being shifted onto others in a blanket manner, nor the wine sector being unfairly portrayed as a so-called generator of the problem of high prices in the hospitality offering.
The winemakers of Graševina Croatica propose holding consultations with the Caterers’ Guild at the Croatian Chamber of Economy, with other related associations of food and beverage producers, and with the relevant ministries of agriculture, economy and tourism, in order to establish the real facts and the key problems. Let us talk about problems such as demographic trends, that is, the shortage of labour, national tax and incentive policy, the seasonality of Croatian tourism, the monopolisation of the market and similar topics that are certainly key problems — both in the tourism and hospitality offering and in the wine sector.
22 June 2025
