Decanter World Wine AwardsDRC half price in Sweden's Systembolaget
- Thursday 30 September 2010
Domaine de la Romanee Conti (pic courtesy Antique Wine Company)
The Swedish monopoly Systembolaget will release several DRC wines on October 19 on a first-come, first-served basis.
The top wine, Romanée Conti 2006 will cost 24,495 Swedish Kronor (£2300) while leading fine wine merchants in the UK are selling the same wine between £4000 and £5000 per bottle.
However, just 24 bottles are available.
Critics have claimed these prices will attract speculators looking to make a quick profit rather than Swedish wine lovers but Ulf Sjödin MW, head of category management at Systembolaget told decanter.com, 'All orders will be limited to maximum one bottle per cru, so we hope that the bottles will be spread all over the country to wine lovers who intend to keep and drink the bottles themselves.'
The Systembolaget has an equal pricing structure regardless of a wine's type or value. A fixed margin of SEK3.50 (£0.33) plus 19% of the cost price is added to every bottle of wine.
Sjödin added: 'If the wine increases in value while kept in stock before launch, we still cannot increase the sales price, so some wines such as the Romanée-Conti will have a very attractive price tag when it reaches the shelves.'
Have your say!
Tomas Eriksson
September 30 17:52
What the article doesn't say is that Systembolaget has delayed the launch of their allocation of the 2006 DRC wines for almost a year in order to figure out how they should handle their sale of it without getting too much criticism. This happened after the sale of the highly coveted 2005s were seen as not very well handled, to put it mildly. (They have also drawn criticism for handling en primeur Bordeaux, for example.) There will be NO bottles in their shops on 19 Oct, only the possibility to order them from the central storage is opened at a certain time on this date. So it's no use for thirsty Burgundy lovers to visit Sweden just for the day and expect to be able to buy anything.
The problem with the 2005s was that orders had to be placed within a couple of seconds to be succesful for most DRC wines. The handling of this was very random between shops. Last time, some shops opened several terminals in parallel, and pressed "Enter" at the magic time, while other shops had less-than-quick staff starting to enter the order at the starting time, making a few delaying mistakes along the way, which meant that not even a simple Échezeaux was available when they got to "Enter". Since they could only enter one post at a time (unless they opened several terminals for one customer), last time this meant that customers had to gamble: do I ask them to first enter an order for a RC or a Montrachet to have any chance of having it, or do I ask them to first enter an order for, say, a Richebourg or Grands-Échezeaux with a reasonably good chance of getting it? Or will they be quick enough for a La Tâche? Or perhaps it's just more constructive to go to the tobacconist and gamble at number 5 in the upcoming horse race?
Oh, the wonders of having a socialist monopoly! Next to the Lenin mausoleum, Systembolaget must be one of the few things remaining in the world which bring tears of joy to pre-1989 communists!