My annoyances with my alcohol monopoly

The European Union (EU) officially discourages monopolies, but actually bans only commercial ones, not government ones. One of these exceptions that has thus been allowed to stand involves retail sales of alcohol. The Nordic countries have long had government ownership of alcohol sales, and for a good reason, which I will discuss in a future blog post. However, the only alcohol monopoly left in the EU is Systembolaget, in Sweden, although Vinmonopolet continues to operate in Norway (which is not in the EU).

I have written about Systembolaget before, and I recently pointed out its principal advantage — wine is often cheaper than elsewhere in the EU, and sometimes cheaper than in its homeland (Can we trust between-country or between-state comparisons of wine costs?). This has apparently annoyed some of those readers who object to monopolies just on principle.

So, in order to balance things, in this post I will discuss some of my pet peeves about having to deal with Systembolaget. This is just to make it clear that not everything is roses, and also to get my annoyances off my chest (I am glad that you are here to read about it).

The objection to government monopolies is usually that they “manifestly cause waste and inefficiency, while denying consumers the range of price and service options they desire”. I have previously argued that this is not true for Systembolaget: (i) I have pointed out that, as the third biggest alcohol retailer in the world, Systembolaget provides me with a wide range of wines (Wine monopolies, and the availability of wine), and (ii) decent wine is less expensive in Sweden compared to most other places (Why is wine often cheaper in Sweden than elsewhere?).

Any beefs that I have must therefore be about service. Below, I list the five things that have annoyed me over the years.

1. Crazy choices of wine name in the database

A wine database should list the name of the wine, the name of the producer, and the name of the grape-growing region (along with other information, of course). However, Systembolaget is likely to choose something quite arbitrary as the main title for their database entry — some of the staff apparently cannot distinguish between the brand name, the producer name, and the appellation. Sometimes they swap the wine name and the producer name, and sometimes they leave one of them out entirely. Indeed, the largest name on the bottle label may not be the one chosen for the database title, which can be confusing when you are looking for a bottle in a store.

Here is an example of three apple ciders released for sale at the same time. Note that in the third case the brand name and the producer name (Pomologik) have been swapped. This is sadly typical of what the database presents to users.

2. A cavalier attitude to vintages

Systembolaget has an explicit policy not to care about wine vintages. The staff in the store apologize for this, since it is obviously crazy, but there seems to be nothing they can do about it. Anyway, you can imagine the confusion this can cause.

First, the database may list one vintage while the central warehouse supplies a later one, without warning; and the database may not be updated for some time (see below). For example, on 12 September I ordered half-bottles of 10 different wines, and 4 of them had different vintages to what was advertized (two whites were 2017 instead of 2016, one red was 2015 instead of 2014, and one red was 2018 instead on 2015 (!)).

Second, what is available in any given shop may not match either the database or the warehouse, depending on how long the bottles have been in the store. Indeed, the information on the shelf-talkers may not even match what it on the shelf bottles. A fortnight ago I came across two different white wines where the shelf-talkers said 2017 while all of the 20 bottles except one were the 2018 vintage.

Finally, it is entirely likely that the staff will simply shove the bottles of the new vintage in front of the old ones. So, if you look carefully, you will sometimes find old vintages at the back of the shelf. In the white-wine example in the previous paragraph, one of the 2017 bottles was in the back row and one was in the second-back row.

This can create interesting situations, of course. I once ordered a red wine from the warehouse of a particular vintage, and then found two previous vintages of the same wine in my local shop. So, I got to do an interesting 3-vintage comparative tasting, just because Systembolaget does not care about vintages. A similar situation occurred more recently, when I found two Australian rosé vintages (2018 and 2019) — the older vintage was considerably darker, and the aroma considerably more muted, presumably from sitting in the shop for an extra year. It is not all bad (just annoying most of the time).

3. The database is sometimes not up-to-date

There are three main ways this can happen.

The first one is the vintages, as referred to above. The vintage listed in the database may not be the one actually present in any given store. There is only one way to find the vintage you want — go to each store and check every bottle on the shelf.

Second, if there are only a few bottles listed as being present in a particular store, then it is probably a database error. Indeed, if only one store lists a particular wine, then it will definitely be a database error. Do not get your hopes up.

Third, most wines are not actually available in the main warehouse, but are instead stored by the distributor (mostly an importer, of course). This causes an information disconnection — if the distributor does not inform Systembolaget of changes in availability, then the database will be wrong. Things are much better these days, compared to a decade ago, but it can sometimes be a lottery ordering a wine that has to come directly from the distributor.

4. The ordering of “temporary assortment” wines

The Tillfälligt sortiment refers to bottle collections that are released c. 20 times per year (c. 60-90 products per release). This is the assortment from which I get most of my wines, because it is usually here that the interesting stuff appears.

The products are released at precisely 10 am on Fridays, and cannot be ordered beforehand. The products will appear only in a selected few shops, depending on the quantities available, but they can all be ordered from the central warehouse, and will then turn up at my local store a few days later. How long the products remain available after release is determined entirely by the quantities — once they run out, that is it.

Sadly, I usually have to order them, because my local store is not one of the selected few stores where they are available (see below). So I always order within an hour of the release, just to be safe. Obviously, this requirement to order online at a specified moment is a real pain in the butt. However, the only other way to do it is to go to one of the stores that actually has the wine — they are unlikely to run out as fast as the warehouse.

And the warehouse can run out very fast. For example, last September 6 I tried to order one of the 360 bottles of the 2009 Viña Gravonia stated to be available in the warehouse. I clicked the order button literally within the first few seconds after 10 am, but I was still told that the product was now “not available” from the warehouse.

The really annoying part, though, is that even days later there were still bottles of this wine available in all three of the stores where some had been placed. However, I cannot order any of those bottles during the first week after release — I have to go one of the stores; and, of course, after a week (when I could order them) they had all gone.

There must be a better way.

5. My home town is discriminated against

I live in the fourth largest town in Sweden, and the government recently “upgraded” it to city status (due to population size). Systembolaget does not know any of this. This is mostly annoying with regard to the Tillfälligt sortiment referred to above.

First, rare bottles are distributed only to the three largest cities — we get no allocation whatsoever. Second, when the bottles are supplied, we clearly do not get enough for the local populace, because we are always the first place to run out. Therefore, if there is any county without a particular wine, it will be mine. I used to feel that I should be paranoid about this, but I got over it — it is just a fact of life. Occasionally, a town in a nearby county will have what I want, and a 30–45 minute drive will snare me a bottle before it disappears; but this is a ridiculous way to have to do it, even when it works.

It is time for Systembolaget to get into the modern world. If the government can do it, then their monopolies should be able to do it, too.

Conclusion

None of these issues is a deal breaker. They are annoyances and frustrations, but not unendurable. Perhaps it is the price that I have to pay for getting wine more cheaply than elsewhere. If so, then so be it.

Historically, monopolies can be very effective, but they are also known for their abuse of power, and sometimes just sheer laziness. The latter seems to be the case with Systembolaget. However, even within this context they are amateurs compared to one place I worked as a teenager — the TV Times magazine (in Australia), which was the government-owned competitor to the commercial TV Week. What went on there beggars belief; it is no wonder that it folded soon afterwards.