Buying alcohol, wine in Poland. It's very difficult.

WTF? Try a good Dao or Vinho do Douro and be very pleasantly surprised. Admittedly, it's surprisingly infrequent on supermarket shelves, but...

They are hardly up there with Chile, NZ, OZ or SA (RPA)

Greek wines can be very good. At least the ones I'd tried - but as the wine was served at home by some friends, I did not really look at labels or anything, I just drank a lot of it ;-)

I'm sure Southern has some interesting information about that. But where is he?

Well, there are many tourists in Greece now, so I guess he has "a lot" to do.

You probably 'sulphurised' yourself!

Oh.. wines.. good memories - this one was really popular in my secondary scool:

good old plastic cap.. it was pretty expensive for a cheap wine - 4.5zł..

Magda, that's one label I actually do look at. Not for long, mind you :)

Gliwice probably has many wine lovers as there are quite a few places around which offer wine. With an ever-growing nouveau-riche culture emerging, that will only strengthen that.

Learnt a very costly error the other day. Had some guests from a far-away Polish town. One middle-aged woman - and her friends - all claimed she was a sophisticated wine expert. So to impress, out comes my only bottle of Chateau Haut-Brignon 1985 (a brilliant vintage!!!) which I bought in France ages ago. When I showed them the label they all ignored it. When I wouldn't put it down one of them eventually piped out: "hmmmm, looks nice". Too late to put it away again. When tasting, the so-called wine expert asks: "z czego to jest?". The words pearls and swine came immediately to mind. I could have kicked her butt!!!!! Wine expert my flabby backside! From now on it's a litre of bełt (aptly labelled 'FART') or the cheapest vodka. I'll never take Polacks seriously again. 99.99% of them are such potato republicans. F them!! And yes, I'm F angry with myself I wasted such good wine. I made a fool of myself for being so trusting and naive.

lol, good story, but I can see the frustration with such people:) and if you are a wine lover, keep the vintage for yourself:).

That's mainly your own mistake. Did you talk to this "expert" before about wines as an intro to what you were planning to serve? Why?

But I also understand the frustration, however this can happen everywhere not just Poland.


-BUT if you write such a thing and still think that, then F your flabby backside;)

Like in a salt mine in outer Siberia?

No Olaf, I didn't talk to this "expert". You're right that I should have grilled her first. Being naive, I took her at face value. She seemed very intelligent and very plausible.

Yes I'm still angry, so I'll bend over so you can F my flabby backside. I deserve it.

Buying wine in Poland is no more difficult, it is very easy now. Auchan and Biedronka are the best seller. Especially Auchan have some very good wines.

I hate that supermarket man,its so unorganized,they dont even stock it properly and there products are inferior thus cheap so people go there.I only have Carrfour by me and I shop there.I use to like there 10 Pln red wine from Portugal.Yes Auchan is pretty good,but still they also dont have all brands and sizes.1.75 litre is non existent there.I only can buy Finlandia in that size.Also to sell chilled wine or Champagne is not common,sometimes even in some restaurants.The private wine stores in malls are a rip off and I suspect they sell fake stuff too.Years back when I was in that business I would always buy Cristal champagne duty free to sell and a store in Galleria Mokotov tried to sell me a fake one with chincy packaging.

Biedronka varies from location to location. In better areas they have a better range.

And I like Biedronka. The Portuguese have good fruit, good Portuguese and Spanish wines, and Polish products in Biedronka are tasty.

They occasionally have some real surprises on the wine shelves.

It does vary a lot from store to store though.

I hate the way they stock there shelves and stores are dimly lit

Not at our local one.

It's surprisingly good quality; much better than the ones in the city centre.

A tower block with one-room flats in Srodmiescie? No thanks.

There are a couple of Biedronki there however the wine selection isn't good in those. It's more vodka, cheap beer and 'fruit wines' for the customer base.

Marks's on Pasaz Wiecha had a decent range however that's gone now.

In Biedronka, however, you can buy Portuguese wines, and with a bit of luck, quite good ones. No big deal, it is a Portuguese store after all.

With a lot of luck.

They have a few good things however ours seems to specialise in dull wine in fancy bottles.

I used to buy as M&S which had a good (ish) selection but now it's gone. Leclerc has some good wines at reasonable prices though.

Yeah, Poland has never really understood good Off Licences or even supermarkets supplying quality booze.
Maybe there is no market for it.

Here in the UK the Poles seem to be happy with strong Polish beer and wodka..... they don't care about wine.

There are some fairly posh wine shops in Poland that have a really good selection.

A lot of the market is sweeter and semi sweet wines. Our Biedronka has a few nice ones (especially from South America, good Chilean Merlot and Argentinian Grenache) but way too many gimmicky ones in gold bottles or bottles shaped like things. Even in the posh shops, there's ones bought because they're fancy rather than how they taste. I once went to a wine tasting evening that the Chamber of Commerce had for its members. Everyone got crazily drunk but the one they all wanted to sample was 120 year old sherry that cost a fortune. It had actually gone black and was a bit nasty but it was the kind of thing that people with some money buy to show off to guests.

There's a good wine shop called Darwina on ul. Widok in Warsaw though generally we get boxes from the supermarket (and if it's white, stick a bit of Aperol in to take the taste away) or have a look at what Biedronka or Leclerc have on special offer.

I know certain European countries, notably Sweden, once had state run liquor stores during the 1970's.The reasons were that the Swedes had a notorious reputation for being terrible lushes. The Finns too, I'm told. The point was that Swedes en masse couldn't be trusted to just purchase alcohol moderately.
Not sure about Poland though.

Swedes (like Norwegians and Danes) actually don't drink as much as some nationalities but when they do drink they tend to binge....

Finns are a separate case and have a very weird relationship to alcohol.... they seem to use drinking jokes like others use sex jokes...


Well in the PRL everything was state run which is where the everyday term for liquor store (monopolowy) came from.