Visiting Kamil Barczentewicz
Working on the second issue of the Everyday Classic magazine recently took us to the doorstep of one of Poland’s best winemakers, in the small village of Dobre near the beautiful town of Kazimierz Dolny.
This time we went in a slightly bigger group, not just Tomek and Mateusz - we went there as the whole Poszetka team, in fact! - as our plan for celebrating the brand’s 15th birthday started with some good old-fashioned team bonding.
What’s far more interesting are the topics we got to discuss with Kamil - because as it turns out, making wine and making clothes in Poland actually have a lot in common. Especially when you’re talking about a niche product, with a focus on quality.
A product that proudly carries the Made in Poland label, we should add - even though local production comes with certain limitations and plenty of challenges.
Poland doesn’t really have a long winemaking tradition - sure, there were a few episodes in the distant past, some later attempts to plant vineyards once again in the interwar period and under communism, and the half-forgotten legacy of regions that have wine heritage but it isn’t exactly “Polish” (like the Lubusz region) - but we can’t really claim any real continuity or deep-rooted know-how here. The first contemporary Polish wine appeared only in 2009; local winemakers were basically starting from scratch.
In a way, it’s much the same story with clothes - especially when it comes to classic menswear. We don’t have old, iconic Polish brands; it’s hard to talk about a distinctive “Polish style” in tailoring, like the British or the Italians have. And to make things worse, the last 35 years have mostly been a sad story of factories closing down, brands disappearing, know-how being lost, and production moving far east. Only in the last decade or so have things started to recover - and Poszetka is proud to play a small part in that rebuilding.
So in both cases, we’re almost forced to look to the west - to take inspiration, remix it, and make it our own. But that doesn’t mean just copying. Not at all!
In fact, this lack of local heritage, of a rigid canon or established style, might not be such a bad thing. Long-lasting traditions and stiff rules can easily become a burden, not a shortcut to success. Not having them means more freedom to create, more room for fresh ideas.
Here in Dobre - a small village on the edge of the Małopolski Przełom Wisły mesoregion - a unique terroir combined with Kamil Barczentewicz’s vision lets him craft low-intervention wines that, let’s not be shy, truly stand up to European standards. It’s not Burgundy - but remarkable Pinot Noir is made here. It’s not Austria - but Blaufränkisch thrives here too. Noble white grape varieties - Riesling, Chardonnay, Gewürztraminer - also give fantastic results in the hands of this skilled winemaker. These wines don’t pretend to be from somewhere else, they’re proudly from here.
It all reminds us a lot of how we design our collections - like we wrote not so long ago in our Where North and South Meet piece - blending influences into a coherent whole under the Everyday Classic banner. We make British tweed and Italian soft tailoring ours; we switch between pastel colours for summer and darker hues for winter. Lots of elements with distant heritage - but mixed together, they’re not “foreign” at all. They’re ours.
Maybe because of these well understood similarities our talks with Kamil flowed so well… and we made sure to write down every good thought that came up. Of course, we’ll be sharing them with you very soon.
If you’re curious about what links clothes and wine, how challenging it really is to grow vines in Poland, what the equivalent of sprezzatura looks like in winemaking, and what breaking the rules can bring to the table - don’t miss the full conversation with Kamil Barczentewicz in the second print issue of our magazine, coming this September!