The Significance of Direct Sales for Swedish Wineries

As I was sitting in my hometown Ystad in Sweden, where I am visiting my family, thinking about what to write in the next monthly newsletter, I was not sure what the theme would be. I was like, hmmm, why not write something about wine linked to Sweden?

Wine in Sweden has taken huge leaps forward in the last two decades both as regards drinking wine and producing wine.

Earlier this year, I wrote an article in The Vintner Project - Meet Swedish Wine’s Top Trailblazer Percy M?nsson From Dom?n S?nana - about a sort of ‘pioneer’ vintner in modern-time Sweden, namely Percy M?nsson of Dom?n S?nana. I visited him at his winery the other year and had a great time learning more about winemaking in my own backyard. He was the first in the mid-1990s to plant vines in Sweden, next to his house, just a few steps from the sea.

“Dom?n S?nana is located between Ales stenar (the Swedish version of Stonehenge) and Simrishamn, just a few kilometers south of the little picturesque fishing village Skillinge in Sk?ne.” (See The Vintner Project article)

I was very fascinated by his stories about how his wife started a wine club in the 1960s, creating a group that together tasted and learned about wine. When he sold his business and retired, they sailed for a couple of months in Europe, through channels in France, visited wineries, and got back home more convinced than ever to grow grapes and produce wine.

When I visited him the other year together with my mom and my brother, he told me about the difficulties Swedish wine producers have as they are not allowed any direct sales at the winery. The Swedish state has been quite firm in its opinion to not allow sales of alcohol outside the monopoly. The monopoly itself has been lobbying against the petitions from the Swedish wineries.

Percy says:

I have been waiting for years for the vintners in Sweden to get the same rights to sell their wines at the wineries as in most other countries all over the world. Direct sales are allowed even in Muslim countries where practicing Muslims are prohibited to drink alcoholic beverages, but not in Sweden. I sincerely hope that the government will change its mind and allow direct sales to winery visitors. (See The Vintner Project article)

A Brief Overview of Alcohol Policy in Sweden

Earlier this year, the Swedish Minister of Energy and Economic Affairs said that the legislative proposal wanting to allow Swedish wine producers to sell their wines directly at their farms would be ratified. But when? Well, that is not entirely clear yet.

In Sweden, you can only buy alcohol via the shops of the monopoly. If you visit a small winery for a wine tasting, the wine producer is not allowed to sell his wines to the visitors. He can only tell them to go to the closest monopoly shop. Are the wine producers losing sales because of this? Probably!

There is a long history of alcohol consumption and problems in Sweden, also involving the temperance movement, that lead to the founding of Systembolaget in 1955. Already from the beginning, it stated its main mission to promote health and limit alcohol intake. Still today, it defines itself as a state company taking care of public health without any economic interest.

Historically, in agricultural and later more proletarian Sweden there were many reasons why access to alcohol started to become a problem and needed to be limited. Home distillation was limited in the mid-19th century and soon after forbidden. The agricultural society and often rough conditions for lower-class people, also for those working in mines in northern Sweden, likely contributed to the consumption of alcohol.

Tax income was certainly another reason for the state to step in and limit access to alcohol. During the first attempts at centralizing the sales of alcohol at the end of the 19th century, the tax income on alcohol amounted to about 20% of the state finances in total. Today, I believe it is more about tax income for the state than any public health theory, which is more of indoctrination to justify the existence of a monopoly. The Swedish state gets 17 billion in tax revenue per year on alcohol sold via the monopoly, which does not include the excise tax.

Alcohol in today's Swedish society is tabu like talking about sex often is in Catholic countries. You want more of what you can't have.

Take the ferry from Trelleborg in southern Sweden to Sassnitz in northern Germany on a normal day, and you will be amazed by how people of all ages and class fill their trollies with wine, beer, and other spirits to take home. It is like an obsession. However, it is cheaper to buy alcohol in Denmark and Germany than in Sweden.

Would Swedish people succumb to extreme alcohol consumption and self-destroy if the sales of alcohol were liberalized? Probably not, we are not living in a society today where farmers experience bad vintages, famine, and bad working, and housing conditions, often with no future other than to stay in the same place as they were. The welfare society, globalization, and access to information for everyone have changed things.

But then who knows?

The world is rapidly changing as we speak, in many cases for the worse, we are in a reactionary period, and the wealth gap is constantly growing all over the world... We might be back in dire situations before we know it, seeing no other way out than to look for a bottle of vodka to make us feel good.

Well, that was a bit exaggerated...sorry! LOL

Rather, it is all about money today. The Swedes who are doing their shopping sprees to Germany are trying to get cheaper alcohol and evade the high prices of the monopoly. They probably would not drink more if alcohol sales in Sweden were liberalized or at least less limited. They would just spend less on alcohol. The big loss would be for the Swedish state in tax income so you cannot really fault them for not wanting things to change.

However, to allow the few and small wine producers in Sweden to sell their wines directly to visitors at their wineries would be a small and very much-needed concession.

Hi, I'm Katarina, thanks for stopping by.

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