Sweden is the only Nordic market where a Portuguese exporter can find out, to the litre, how every competing wine from every country sold last year. Systembolaget, the state retail monopoly, publishes an annual file on its corporate site, Försäljning per artikel, listing each article that recorded sales in the previous calendar year with its producer, category, region, price, packaging and litres sold. NorthSouth HQ downloaded the 2025 and 2024 editions and pulled every row with Portugal as country of origin. The 2025 file has 45,324 articles across wine, beer, spirits and alcohol-free drinks; 674 of them are Portuguese wines, up from 619 a year earlier, and together they sold 8,421,624 litres. That is 4.1 percent less than the 8,780,653 litres of 2024, in a Swedish wine market that itself shrank 3.7 percent, from 209.7 million to 202.0 million litres. Portugal’s share slipped from 4.19 to 4.17 percent, and it remained the ninth-largest wine origin in Sweden for the second year running.
The ranking above Portugal is worth reading closely because it is moving. Italy sold 52.4 million litres (down 3.2 percent), France 35.6 million (up 6.9 percent), Spain 27.9 million (down 10.7 percent), South Africa 16.1 million (down 9.8 percent), Australia 12.6 million, Chile 11.6 million and Germany 10.3 million. The United States, which was seventh in 2024 with 11.2 million litres, fell 22.7 percent to 8.64 million and now sits eighth, only 215,000 litres ahead of Portugal. On the 2025 trajectories, Portugal overtakes the United States on Swedish shelves in 2026 without selling a single extra litre; if the white-wine growth described below continues, it does so with room to spare. Behind Portugal the gap is comfortable: Argentina, tenth, sold 2.9 million litres.
| Wine sold at Systembolaget, 2025 (litres, all assortments) | Litres | Share | vs 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Italy | 52,414,708 | 25.9% | −3.2% |
| 2. France | 35,643,062 | 17.6% | +6.9% |
| 3. Spain | 27,899,201 | 13.8% | −10.7% |
| 4. South Africa | 16,110,710 | 8.0% | −9.8% |
| 5. Australia | 12,550,151 | 6.2% | −3.8% |
| 6. Chile | 11,563,912 | 5.7% | +2.0% |
| 7. Germany | 10,317,041 | 5.1% | +2.2% |
| 8. United States | 8,636,227 | 4.3% | −22.7% |
| 9. Portugal | 8,421,624 | 4.2% | −4.1% |
| 10. Argentina | 2,922,370 | 1.4% | −9.2% |
| All wine | 201,951,261 | 100% | −3.7% |
Red is shrinking, white is growing
Portugal’s Swedish business is still a red-wine business, but less so every year. Red wine sold 5,151,041 litres in 2025, down 7.3 percent, which is 5.96 percent of all red wine sold in Sweden and makes Portugal the seventh red-wine origin behind Italy, France, Spain, the United States, Australia and Chile. White wine went the other way: 2,669,982 litres, up 3.5 percent, 3.88 percent of the Swedish white category, in a category that itself fell 2.2 percent. White is now 31.7 percent of Portugal’s litres, against 29.4 percent in 2024. Rosé fell 16.7 percent to 264,477 litres, most of it Mateus. Sparkling wine more than doubled but from almost nothing, 15,900 to 35,048 litres, a 0.14 percent share of a 24.3 million-litre category dominated by Spain, Italy and France. Fortified and other wines added 301,075 litres, of which port was about 234,000 litres, 2.8 percent of Portugal’s total, and Madeira 43,000.
The articles that moved the white total are not obscure. Periquita White, José Maria da Fonseca’s three-litre box from the Setúbal peninsula, doubled from 176,934 to 356,913 litres. Ramos Elegant White, João Portugal Ramos’s Tejo box, rose 24.6 percent to 767,175 litres and is now Portugal’s third-biggest article in Sweden. Vento’z Alvarinho, a two-litre box from Casal de Ventozela in Vinho Verde, nearly doubled to 145,980 litres. The losers were red boxes: LAB Reserva, Casa Santos Lima’s Lisboa box and still the single largest Portuguese article in Sweden, dropped 16.6 percent to 917,157 litres from 1.10 million; Periquita Reserva fell 25 percent; Galodoro Winemaker’s White from Quinta do Conde, an exception on the white side, halved to 144,135 litres.
A box business with a long bottle tail
The structural fact in the ledger is packaging. Bag-in-box accounts for 5,616,581 litres, 66.7 percent of everything Portuguese sold in Sweden, up from 65.8 percent in 2024. The Swedish market as a whole is 49.5 percent box; Italy is 47.6 percent, Spain 43.3 percent and France 34.4 percent; only South Africa, at 85 percent, is more box-dependent than Portugal. The eight best-selling Portuguese articles are all three-litre boxes and between them sold 4.92 million litres, 58 percent of the national total. Price follows packaging: 76.4 percent of Portuguese litres sell for under SEK 80 per 75-centilitre equivalent, another 13.2 percent between SEK 80 and 119, 9.3 percent between SEK 120 and 199, and only about 88,000 litres, one percent, at SEK 200 or more. Concentration is extreme. The ten biggest articles carry 62.2 percent of the volume and the top twenty 76.9 percent; 20 articles sold more than 100,000 litres, 67 more than 10,000, and 428 of the 674 sold less than 100 litres in the whole year.
| Portugal’s ten best-selling articles at Systembolaget, 2025 | Producer | Format, price | 2025 litres | vs 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LAB Reserva (Lisboa, red) | Casa Santos Lima | 3 L box, SEK 239 | 917,157 | −16.6% |
| GW:s Låda (red) | Scanivinus Lda | 3 L box, SEK 259 | 852,318 | −3.3% |
| Ramos Elegant White (Tejo) | J. Portugal Ramos Vinhos | 3 L box, SEK 229 | 767,175 | +24.6% |
| Ramos Reserva (Alentejo, red) | João Portugal Ramos | 3 L box, SEK 279 | 648,216 | −11.0% |
| Cigarra Reserva Shiraz Touriga Nacional (Lisboa, red) | Casa Santos Lima | 3 L box, SEK 259 | 601,200 | −7.9% |
| GW:s Vita (Tejo, white) | Scanivinus Lda | 3 L box, SEK 259 | 473,187 | −20.4% |
| Periquita White (Setúbal) | José Maria da Fonseca | 3 L box, SEK 239 | 356,913 | +101.7% |
| Periquita Reserva (Setúbal, red) | José Maria da Fonseca | 3 L box, SEK 269 | 305,055 | −25.0% |
| Casal Garcia Vinho Verde | Aveleda | 75 cl, SEK 77 | 159,422 | −3.4% |
| Mateus Rosé | Sogrape | 75 cl, SEK 89 | 153,729 | −15.1% |
Four houses sell more than half
Group the producer names and the industry structure is plain. Casa Santos Lima, listed under two names, sold 1.92 million litres, 22.8 percent of all Portuguese wine in Sweden, though that was 8.7 percent less than in 2024. Scanivinus Lda, the Portuguese producer behind the GW:s boxes, sold 1.43 million (down 10.2 percent). João Portugal Ramos, across its two producer entries, sold 1.42 million litres and was the only one of the big four to grow, up 4.4 percent on the strength of Elegant White. José Maria da Fonseca sold 812,000 litres across 13 articles, up 7 percent. Those four houses account for 5.58 million litres, two-thirds of the national figure. Below them come Sogrape at 275,000 litres (down 13.7 percent; Mateus and Gazela), Casa Relvas at 262,000 (flat, with the organic Merino and Segredos de São Miguel), Aveleda at 162,000, Quinta do Conde at 155,000 (halved), Vidigal at 155,000 (down 24 percent), Casal de Ventozela at 151,000 (up 91 percent), Anselmo Mendes at 133,000, the Borba cooperative at 112,000 with a new Galitos box, Caves Primavera at 108,000 (up 18 percent) and Soalheiro at 82,000 (up 20 percent). The ledger also shows something exporters rarely see: Swedish companies listed as the producer of Portuguese wine, because they own the brand. OVE Reserva, a SEK 79 Lisboa red attributed to My Pleasure in Sweden AB, sold 124,381 litres; Solera Sweden AB is listed as producer of another 47,043; Vintry’s Red Port, a SEK 137 ruby listed under the Andresen port house, was the best-selling port in the country at 47,387 litres in the 75 cl size; and Van Zeller Wine Collection’s Iron Maiden Darkest Red, a SEK 139 regional red with a heavy-metal label, grew 69.5 percent to 53,932 litres.
By region, as Systembolaget labels it, Lisboa remains the largest origin with 2.28 million litres, but it lost 17.4 percent, essentially the LAB and Cigarra declines. Tejo held at 1.42 million, generic Portugal at 1.28 million, Alentejo at 1.06 million, and the Setúbal peninsula grew 5.8 percent to 863,000. Vinho Verde edged up 1.1 percent to 854,000 litres, led by Casal Garcia, Vento’z, Anselmo Mendes’s Contacto Alvarinho (131,816 litres), Gazela and Soalheiro. The Douro is the revealing line: it has by far the most articles in the file, 220 of the 674, yet sold only 356,000 litres, 4.2 percent of Portugal’s volume, even after growing 6.7 percent. The Douro is where Portugal’s long premium tail lives in Sweden, hundreds of order-range references selling a few cases each. Dão fell 21.3 percent to 135,000 litres, almost all of it Caves Primavera’s Casal Mor; the Algarve more than doubled to 87,000 on Casa Santos Lima’s Boca Mar and Pitch reservas; Bairrada rose from 12,000 to 28,000 litres, mostly Casa de Sarmento’s sparkling and Niepoort’s Nat’Cool litre bottle.
Churn, organics and what the file cannot tell you
The assortment turns over quickly at the bottom. 175 Portuguese articles sold in 2025 that had no sales in 2024, together 423,857 litres, a third of that the Galitos box and a new PET-bottle format of LAB Reserva; 120 articles that sold in 2024 disappeared, but they had only accounted for 74,665 litres. Organic wine, flagged in the file, was 289,418 litres or 3.4 percent of Portugal’s volume, up from 3.2 percent, led by Casa Relvas. The file has limits. It records litres, not kronor, so revenue can only be estimated from current shelf prices; it labels producers as the importer registered them, which is why the same house can appear twice; and it does not separate the fixed assortment from the temporary and order ranges. For that, Systembolaget’s product search shows 573 Portuguese products listed today, a hundred fewer than the number of articles that recorded a sale last year, because delisted references keep selling until stock runs out.
The autumn launches against the ledger
This is the context for the launch calendar Portuguese exporters are watching. Pormenor’s Douro Branco (SEK 180, Pompette AB) went on sale last Friday, 18 September. This Friday, 25 September, Systembolaget releases Mural from Quinta do Portal at SEK 129 through Vinunic AB. On 2 October come four Portuguese launches at once: Kopke Colheita White at SEK 499 (Berntson Brands), Graham’s Tawny 20 Years at SEK 559 (Ward Wines), Campolargo Brut Rosé at SEK 259 (Boa Pressão) and the Madeira red Tinta Negra dos Villões dos Profetas at SEK 299 (Handpicked Wines), followed on 9 October by Márcio Lopes’s Pequenos Rebentos O Caminho at SEK 239. Every one of them is a 75 cl bottle in a price band that, on the 2025 ledger, accounts for roughly one percent of Portugal’s Swedish litres. That is not a criticism of the launches; the temporary range is where reputations and importer relationships are built, and where the Douro’s 220 references come from. It is a reminder of the two separate games Portugal plays in Sweden: a volume game decided by six or seven three-litre boxes under SEK 260 and a handful of houses, and a premium game played in small quantities by hundreds of producers. The first game lost volume in 2025, with the market; the second grew where it was white, Alvarinho or Douro. Producers pitching Swedish importers for the 2027 tender rounds now have a public, article-level benchmark for what sells and at what price, and this is it.
Why this matters for the corridor
Sweden is Portugal’s largest Nordic wine market by volume and the only one that publishes competitor sales at article level; Norway’s Vinmonopolet gives category-by-country totals and Finland’s Alko publishes even less. The 2025 ledger says three things to a Portuguese exporter. First, the volume floor is intact but eroding: Portugal held ninth place and 4.2 percent of a shrinking market, with the decline concentrated in two Lisboa red boxes that any competitor with a better-priced red box can attack. Second, growth is white and comes from the same big houses that own the boxes, so a new entrant’s realistic path is the temporary range and the order range, where the Douro already fields 220 references. Third, the box economics mean the Swedish importer, not the producer, decides which Portuguese brand reaches a million litres; the ledger is the document with which to open that conversation.