During a recent visit to Norway, I was surprised to learn how important wine is to many Norwegians. Some of them are prepared to camp out for weeks to secure the best Burgundy, and conversations about wine on stage can become Oslo’s favorite theatrical event. Norwegian taste is unexpected. Norway’s best-selling wine is made by his black metal musician, who also curated an exhibition at the Edvard Munch Museum.
Like most Scandinavian countries, there is only one retailer of alcoholic beverages. Norway’s monopoly Vinmonopolet, like Sweden’s Systembolaget and Finland’s Arco, imposes heavy tariffs on alcoholic beverages. In Norway, a 75cl bottle of wine has a fixed price increase of 54p, plus an additional 22 per cent of the price.
However, unlike the Swedish and Finnish monopolies, Norway has limits on the total mark-up, which for most wines may not exceed the equivalent of £8.36. For high-priced wines in special categories, the maximum increase is £19. As a result, says Steven Fluker, the Canadian-born manager of the Vinmonopolet store in Oslo’s Aker Brygge waterfront district, “cheap wine is expensive and expensive wine is cheap.”
This is why rows of tents can be seen in the narrow alley outside its flagship store for up to four weeks each year in frigid February. Wine lovers, or perhaps opportunists, queue up in anticipation of the annual arrival of the finest Burgundies. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. It’s easy to understand the appeal. Wines that elsewhere cost thousands of pounds a bottle and are carefully allocated to preferred customers are available in Oslo to anyone prepared to queue. For example, DRC’s La Tache 2017 was on sale for £1,230 earlier this year, a quarter of its UK price. You can earn a considerable amount of money by selling these wines.
It is believed that some potential buyers have students and others queue up for them, but there is a strict code of ethics. Cue jumping is not allowed. Tents and toilets will be provided by the building owner. The Cuewers call themselves the Grand Cru Network and even have their own song. When I spoke to the person at number 132 who was in line last February, he sadly told me that his last bottle of DRC wine was at number 131.
However, this is not the only characteristic of Norwegian wine. Since my last visit in the early 1990s, wine is no longer just for connoisseurs. As Norwegians enjoyed oil prosperity, per capita consumption more than tripled between 1980 and 2010.
Unlike in the UK, wine columns are proliferating. Apparently there are about 20 wine writers in Norway. I met 8 of them. Six of them were women, some of whom wrote columns for three different newspapers. Merete Bo has 10,000 subscribers to her newsletter, which comes as part of her £700 subscription to the business newspaper Dagens Næringsliv. The largest wine club, Norske Vinklubbers Forbund, has 4,000 members.
Bo and popular stand-up comedian Thomas Giltzen’s Wine Podcast can easily amass 30,000 downloads. Last month, the three of us were able to fill Oslo’s historic Chat Noir Vaudeville with 350 wine lovers. They paid the equivalent of £100 per ticket and were given 3 small tasting samples while listening to us talk about the wines.
Norwegian favorites are surprising. As an outsider, I expected full-bodied, warming red wines to be most popular in a country with long, cold winters, but dry German Riesling topped the list. At Vinmonopolet’s flagship store, Germany’s top brands line the walls. This is far more than any store I’ve ever seen. I heard that Norwegian tastes are attracted to strong acids. This may also explain the popularity of British sparkling wine in Norway, its most important export market. Apparently 90 brands of English fizz are coming across the North Sea. The store in Sandefjord, a small town in the far south of the country, stocks 51 varieties of British sparkling wine (11 whites and six reds), far more than any UK retailer.
We sampled Komorebi 2022, which is considered to be Norway’s best sparkling wine. This grape is an early-maturing, disease-resistant Solaris variety grown near Kristiansand in the south. Grower John Ryder explained that vines often need to be covered with tight mesh in the spring to speed up flowering. The scale is small. When I asked him about the size of his vineyard, he answered in terms of number of vines (“2,000, potentially 7,000”) rather than hectares.
A recent survey of 150 members of the Norwegian Grape Growers Association found that no one grows more than 9,000 grapes, but about 20 of them plan to make wine commercially. It is said that there is. But so far, he is one of only two Norwegian still wine producers with enough expertise to sell to monopolies. Others are allowed to sell wine to restaurants and visitors, but only by the glass and require a license. The sale of all alcoholic beverages is subject to regulation in Norway. Advertising is not allowed. And relationships between monopolies, importers, and critics are tightly regulated.
Vinmonopolet, which currently has 347 stores, celebrated its 100th anniversary last year and this year ranked top in consumer satisfaction in a survey of Norwegian companies. Most wines are purchased based on bids, followed by blind he tastings. Therefore, Fluker said, “small producers have just as much potential to be in stores as large producers.” And judging by the heavy presentation of American Pinot, of which Fluker is a fan, the staff appears to be allowed to follow their own preferences. As in Sweden, boxed wine is popular and accounts for about half of Vinmonopolet’s sales in terms of volume. And, like some other monopolies, he claims that the weight of a bottle of low-priced wine is no more than 420g. There are advantages to having just one strong wine retailer for him.
However, for a country with only one retail customer, there are an unusual number of wine importers, around 750. According to monopoly figures given to me by one of the wine writers I met, about 10,000 of her 28,000 wines on Vin Monopolette’s shelves are from wine importers. Less than 24 bottles were sold last year. Many of the importers focus instead on Norway’s very vibrant restaurant scene.
So, what about that musician who loves Munch? Sigurd Wongraven performs as a satyr in the band Satyricon, but he deliberately chooses to brand his wine Wongraven rather than using his musical alter ego. . His wines, mainly Piedmontese and German wines, have been so successful that in 2019 Norway’s largest wine company, Vingruppen, which accounts for about a fifth of the total Norwegian wine market, sold 90 percent of his brands to around 4 million yen. Bought for pounds. He still makes blends. but. Judging by the couple who went on trial at Bergen Airport, he conducts the trial with flying colors.
Drink like a Norwegian
I recently rated all these German dry Rieslings 17.5 out of 20. ‘ib’ means ‘insured’ so minus UK customs duties.
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Karl Lowen, Maximin Herrenberg 1896 Riesling Trocken 2022 Mosel (12.5%) ib Justerini & Brooks 6 £135 per case
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Heymann-Lewenstein, Hatzenpoorter Kirchberg Riesling Grosses Gewex 2022 Mosel (12.5%) ib Howard Ripley 6 pieces £156 per case
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Schloss Rieser, Rieser Niederberg Helden Riesling Grosses Gewex 2022 Mosel (12%) ib Howard Ripley 6 pieces £174 per case
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Schloss Rieser, Weerener Sonnenur Riesling Grosses Gewex 2022 Mosel (12.5%) ib Howard Ripley 6 pieces £174 per case
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Heimann-Lewenstein, Winner Röttgen Riesling Grosses Gewex 2022 Mosel (12.5%) 6 ib Howard Ripley £192 per case
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Knewitz, Nieder Hilbersheimer Steinakker Riesling Grosses Gewex 2022 Rheinhessen (13%) 6 ib Howard Ripley £213 per case
old favorite
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Sybil Kunz Riesling Spätlese Trocken 2015 Mauser (12.5%)
£32.33 Unknown Wine -
Peter Lauer, Eiler Kupp Neuenberg Fass 17 Riesling Trocken 2020 Saar (12%)
Various US retailers starting at $50.99 -
Eva Fricke, Lorcher Schlossberg Riesling Trocken 2019 Rheingau (13%)
£79 World Wine Consultant
See the Purple Pages for tasting notes, scores and recommended drinking dates. JancisRobinson.com. See below for many stockists, especially in Germany. winesearcher.com.
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