The broad availability of United States wine in Sweden’s wine retailer

Recently I produced a post about wine availability in Sweden, pointing out that wine sales are not actually as restricted as is sometimes claimed: The availability of older wine vintages in a wine monopoly. There I noted that some of the currently available vintages in Sweden’s wine monopoly (called Systembolaget) date back to last century. Another way to look at the same issue, which may be of interest to many of my readers, is to consider the extent to which United States wine is available in that same wine monopoly. *

The obvious place to start is with simply how many different wines are currently listed in the Systembolaget catalog. It looks like this first figure.

Well, 672 wines is not necessarily a big deal to an American, but for a small European country it is pretty darned good. As expected, California (= “Kalifornien” in Swedish] dominates, with more than 80% of the wines, but Washington and Oregon also get a look in.

There are 471 red wines, 176 white wines, 12 rosé, 5 sparkling, 6 flavored / fruit wines, and 2 are mixed boxes. Of these wines, 112 are in the standard store assortment (ie. they should be in most stores, and their local supply is renewed), 197 are in the temporary assortment (ie. their supply is limited, and is not necessarily renewed), and 360 need to be ordered (ie. they are not in the shops, but will be delivered to your local store upon request to the importer).

Of these wines, 526 are in standard glass bottles, 88 are in lighter bottles, 28 are boxed wines (with plastic tap), 13 are in PET bottles, 11 are in cans, 5 are in cardboard packaging, and 1 is in a pouch. If you want even more details: 59 of the bottles have a screw cap, and 4 have a synthetic cork.

The wines are mostly relatively recent vintages, as shown in the next figure, but they do go back to 2009. The alcohol content is stated to vary from 7% to 19%.

In US dollars, the wines vary from $3.50 (187 ml) to $4.60 (250 ml) to $5.90 (375 ml) to $7.90 (750 ml), all the way up to $10,000. There are 180 wines (27%) retailing at $20 or less. The six most expensive packages are as shown next (NB: $US1 = 10 kronor). Note that the first item refers to a mixed box of 3 bottles (ie. $4,000 each bottle).

There are many different grape varieties available, as listed in the next figure. (Note that some of the names are actually synonyms).

If we consider what foods the wines are claimed to be suitable to accompany, then the list looks like the following figure. Note that Nut (“nöt” in Swedish) = Beef.

Finally, getting technical, if we define Lower carbon footprint as 0—400 g CO2e/l (carbon dioxide equivalents per liter) then 55 wines are stated to qualify; and we define Average carbon footprint as 401—650 g CO2e/l then 102 wines are stated to qualify; and Higher carbon footprint is 651—1475 g CO2e/l then 511 wines are stated to qualify.

So, all in all, I think that the Swedes do quite well in terms of wine from the United States of America. How long this lasts will be determined by how the current tariff ruckus is resolved, of course.

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* The U.S. three-tier system was originally designed to prevent monopolies, indicating that Americans do indeed object to this business arrangement.

Issues when aggregating wine scores into an average

Wine competitions, and many web sites, involve summing assessors’ scores into a consensus “average” score for each wine. However, as an example for three assessors, the scores of:

5,5,5 have the same sum / average as 0,5,10

However, the former situation indicates complete agreement among the three assessors about the quality of the wine, while the latter situation is no different from random quality scores. Surely this difference matters?

This contradictory situation has long been ignored. Obviously, this issue does not matter when looking at a single critic’s review in a magazine, for example. However, it may matter enormously at sites like CellarTracker, which claim to represent the consensus of wine quality among many people. However, such sites seem not to have cared about this issue at all.

Recently, Jeffrey Bodington has looked at this situation in detail:

Wine Stars & Bars: the combinatorics of critic consensus
AAWE Working Paper no. 284

Here, I will summarize some of his ideas.

First, however, let’s make the situation clear. The following lines indicate increasing agreement around the same average of 5, with 3 assessor scores having a maximum of 10 each:

0,5,10
1,5,9
2,5,8
3,5,7
4,5,6
5,5,5

Furthermore, there can also be clusters of scores (e.g. some scores indicating poor quality and some indicating good quality, with nothing in between), such as:

1,7,7
3,6,6

The basic mathematical issues here are that (potentially) many billions of combinations of scores have the same sum (and therefore average), and that uncertain ratings can have many different sums. Mathematically, an observed wine rating is one draw from a (latent) distribution of all possible ratings that is both wine-specific and judge-specific.

The further practical issues for wine assessments are that: (i) sample sizes (number of assessments) are often small (especially in competitions); (ii) some wine judges are more reliable or consistent assessors than are others; and (iii) clusters of scores can happen, for example in the case of stylistically distinctive wines. These three situations mean that the issue discussed by Bodington can potentially have a big effect.

Bodington proceeds mathematically:

A weighted sum of judges’ wine ratings is proposed and tested that (1) recognizes the uncertainty about a sum and (2) minimizes the disagreement among judges about that sum. A simple index of dispersion is [also] proposed and tested that measures a continuum from perfect consensus (dispersion = 1), to ratings that are indistinguishable from random assignments (dispersion = 0), and then to distant clusters of ratings when groups of judges disagree (dispersion is negative).

To make sense of this for you, he then illustrates his ideas with a straightforward example. This involves the 10 white wines from the 1976 Judgment of Paris comparative tasting of French and American wines, with 9 assessors per wine. The sums of the blind scores are shown in the graph above. The blue bars indicate the distribution of all possible sums of 9 scores of 20 each (ie. a minimum of 0 and a maximum of 180). The black lines represent the sums for each of the 10 Judgment wines (as labeled). As shown:

... the sums of points for the top two white wines, Chateau Montelena and Meursault Charmes are calculated to be the same at 130.5. The respective ranges of points assigned to those two wines were 3.0-to-18.5 and 12.0-to-16.0 ...

So, the overall mathematical assessment is the same for the two wines, but there is clearly much more consensus among the judges for Meursault Charmes (scores 12-to-16 out of 20) than for Chateau Montelena (scores 3-to-18.5). Bodington thinks that this difference should be dealt with, and that is the purpose of his weighted sum and his index of dispersion.

These calculations are shown in the next figure, with the weighted sum shown horizontally (ie. increasing assessed quality of the wine) and the index of dispersion vertically (ie. increasing agreement among the assessors), and each wine represented by a labeled point.

Bodington notes:

Results for the dispersion index show that none are close to zero so they do not appear to be random results, and none are negative to indicate distant clusters. The weighted sum of points for highest-scoring Chateau Montelena has the second lowest dispersion index of any wine and the [other] wine Meursault Charmes has the highest index of any wine. Considering that finding, does it make sense to conclude that Montelena was better than Charmes?

In other words, the consistent critic judgements for Meursault Charmes should outweigh the relatively inconsistent ones for Chateau Montelena. This can be interpreted as indicating the “best” white wine at the Judgment of Paris.

This sort of situation can have a strong effect any time there is a relatively small number of wine assessments.

The availability of older wine vintages in a wine monopoly

Sweden has a single government-owned (but not controlled) alcohol retail monopoly, called Systembolaget (although Swedes often refer to it as Systemet = The System). Many non-Swedes see this as an affront to free trade, and that it obviously must be economically inefficient (e.g. “high taxes are also an issue in the Nordics, where sales are stifled by everything having to be sold through monopolies”).

I have written about this situation quite a number of times, pointing out that the situation is not really the way it is painted by outsiders (ie. sales are not stifled). For example:

• Which countries are dominated by only a few alcohol suppliers?
• Why are there wine monopolies in Scandinavia?
• The WHO is making a mistake about state-owned alcohol retailers

I have also written about the availability of wine under these circumstances, as many people seem to think that it must be restricted in some way, which it is not:

• Wine monopolies, and the availability of wine
• The availability of wines in government-owned retail monopolies
• The availability of older wine vintages in Sweden?

It is the topic of this latter post, about older vintages, that is of interest here. In that post, from 2024, I listed all of the available Australian wines at least 5 years since vintage, available in Systembolaget. There were 24 of them, vintage dated 2013–2018. This seems to me is not too bad a selection, from a single source country, and all of the wines should still be quite drinkable. However, people used to specialist wine shops might find that this selection is nothing to write home about, especially in countries like the USA, where specialty retail is expected.

Today I am going to look at all of the available wines vintage–dated prior to 2000 (ie. last century), irrespective of their country of origin.

The table below shows the results of my searching in the Systembolaget database. These are all table wines, not fortified wines (which can be much older, as their higher alcohol content preserves them). I have shown the Swedish (SEK) price for each wine. Note that US$ 1 ≈ 10 SEK, which makes the conversion easy.

So, there are 7 red wines and 6 whites. This may not impress connoisseurs; but for the Swedish national retail chain, where almost all of the alcohol sold is budget stuff for everyday drinking (the classic “wines for the table not the cellar”), it is as good as I would expect.

All of these wines should still be quite drinkable.

For example, the four Moulin Touchais wines come from a winery that specializes in a semi-sweet wine of great age; so many other old vintages have been available as well (see: Tasting the magical sweet wines of Moulin Touchais through the ages).

Similarly, the current release of the Xavier Vignon wine was not bottled until 2022, and it is widely available elsewhere (Wine-Searcher).

Also, although the company no longer exists, Richmond Grove long specialized in limited releases of its Watervale Riesling (e.g. in 2012 Chris Shanahan noted that the winery offered Watervale Rieslings from 1996 to 2011).

The Luis Pato wine was tasted in 2023 / 2024 by Wine Anorak, and given a score of 95/100.

A perusal of the Wine-Searcher database shows that the Giacomo Borgogno wine is widely available elsewhere. All of the other wines are also still available elsewhere (e.g. Bodegas Campillo, Fontanafredda, Jean Leon, Mastroberardino, Vajo dei Masi).

These wines are rarely actually in any of the Systembolaget retail stores, but are still in the importer / distributor warehouse. They can be ordered through the Systembolaget online order system, and arrive a few days later at my local store, where I collect (and pay for) them. This system works quite well.