Norway registered a decline in its wine imports in 2024. The 2024 country report from the Spanish Wine Market Observatory (OeMv) notes a decrease of 4.8% in value and 4.9% in volume compared to the previous year. What initially appears as a uniform decline, however, proves to show significant variation when looking at the different wine categories.
The volume of imported bottled wines (sparkling wines, bottled wines < 2L, BiB) actually increased by 0.5% to 85.7m liters, while the bulk wine category, which is only marginally significant in Norway, fell by 78% to 1.4m liters. In terms of value, bulk wines also dropped sharply by 76.5% (now €2.58m, whereas revenue from bottled wines decreased only slightly by 3.1% to €457.4m. The average price for bottled wines declined by 3.6% to €5.34/liter, while the price for bulk wine rose by 6.7% to €1.85/liter. Bag-in-Boxes were solely responsible for the respectable figures, nonetheless, for bottled wines, increasing by 2.8% in value and 6.3% in volume.
Italy and France in the lead
Among supplier countries to Norway, Italy traditionally ranks first in terms of volume (ahead of France), while France ranks first in terms of value (ahead of Italy). Both nations saw declines compared to the previous year; however, France's volume gap to Italy narrowed, while conversely, its lead in value increased. Germany and Spain have competed for years for the favor of Norwegian consumers in third and fourth place.
Volume-wise, Spain has led for many years, but its lead shrank to only 200,000 liters last year. Indeed, Germany was able to keep its wine exports to Norway nearly stable in 2024 at 8.52m liters; however, since 2017, these have increased by 3.9%, more than any other of the top 10 supplier nations. If this trend continues, Germany is set to overtake Spain in volume terms in Norway next year. In terms of value, Germany already surpassed Spain in 2020 and in 2024 reached €40.72m (+0.4% vs 2023), significantly ahead of Spain (€35.04m /-5.5%). Currently, German wines account for 8.8% of total Norwegian wine imports by value and 9.8% by volume.
However, regarding the average price per liter, Germany dropped to 4th place in 2024 at €4.78 (+0.6% vs previous year), because the USA made a big jump with +14.8% (now €4.80) and now holds 3rd place behind France (€8.53) and Italy (€4.95).
Bag-in-box instead of sparkling wine
Looking at individual categories, it is noticeable that Germany underperformed significantly in sparkling wines in 2024: -11.1% in value and 19.9% in volume. This translates to only 5th place in value and 7th in volume, respectively, behind the UK, which in 2017 exported less than one-tenth the volume of sparkling wine to Norway compared to Germany. In contrast, there were strong figures for Bag-in-Boxes: here, value increased by 15% (Rank 3) and volume grew by 18.3% (Rank 4, behind Chile). For bulk wine, Germany is not among the Top 10 suppliers to Norway. SP
