Sunday, August 22, 2010

Wine

I've posted before about the allure of boxed wine for island residents. The Swedish alcohol monopoly, Systembolaget, prides itself on providing a wide range of wines. Many of their boxed wines are pretty decent, although there's rotgut on offer, too.

We decided to treat ourselves, and splurged on a nice bottle of Riesling. It turned out to be a real winner, so we hit the internet to see where we could buy it back home. My most interesting find was a blog which concerns itself with the wines for sale at the System. However, I had no luck finding that wine online.

I did find the winery, online, though, and asked a German-speaking friend to call on my behalf. Interestingly, she was told that wine is only sold in Sweden! The Systembolaget has contracted to buy all they can make of this particular vintage. My friend is persistent, though, and she asked the winery if they sell anything similar in the UK, and they obliged her with the website of a distributor in Luton.

I contacted them, and received good news/bad news. The good news is they do indeed carry many nice Rieslings by Schloss Johannisberger. The bad news is they're quite pricey; we're talking £20 and up per bottle. That's well out of our price range!

Sooz came upon the simplest solution, though: we'll just buy it in Sweden and take it home! The equivalent price is £7.70, which is more in our ball park. It seems odd to bring alcohol from Sweden, but then again, I did bring an IKEA cabinet into Sweden, so there you go.

2 comments:

Dawn Fields said...

Mark belongs to the wine society here. I'll drop by the current catalog and you can check it out. He said he wouldn't mind at all ordering something on your behalf if you found something you wanted. A friend of his at work did that for him for a few years until I gave him a membership for Christmas one year. They have wine coming out the Wahzoo!

Marcia said...

As it turns out, I'm going to Systemet.....;-) Let's see if I can swing by today! You know the reason the price is decent in Sweden (even with our extremely high tax) is because Systemet is the biggest wine importer in the world and they buy in such huge amounts that the price on more expensive wine actually is cheaper here then in a lot of other countries.....some trivia for you :-)