The customer is always right, so when he asks for his wine in a 3 litre bag-in-box (as they do in Sweden, so Mrs. Larsson will not see how much Stieg is drinking) guyconic producers (iconic, but applied to men) like João Portugal Ramos and KWV queue up to offer their jewels in a box like the ones below.

There is a fairly serious downside to shipping flagships in bladders as the wine soon becomes oxidized, with about six months shelf-life. Not that this is a problem in fast drinking Stockholm. And then there’s the subtle discounting aspect, as wine merchant Johan Hermansson told me. “Four bottles of Roodeberg will cost SEK87 x 4 – roughly R96 x 4, or double the local price – but the bladder sells for SEK269, a discount of 23%.”

I bumped into Johan at João’s winery at Estremoz, the St. Émilion of the Alentejo, last week and asked him why SA exports are flying in Sweden and tanking in the UK. He made a couple of points:

• The Swedish liquor monopoly Systembolaget is very conservative and is not under the same price pressure as are UK supermarket chains who are snapping up Chilean wines at the minute as sources of extreme value for money. A cynic might also point to recent well-publicized cases of corruption at Systembolaget and wonder whether this may not have something to do with it, too.

• UK consumers buy by style, not country (which coincidentally calls into question SA’s policy of generic national marketing which doesn’t seem to be working in the UK). This is not yet the case in Sweden where there is still a feeling of political payback to SA from a society which supported the political struggles of the previous generation.

• Those smoky, reductive burnt aromas in some SA reds may have become an acquired taste for Swedish consumers.

• SA producers readily embrace bag-in-box and PET bottles, packaging less popular with high-end Old World producers.

But whatever the reason, SA has around 20% market share in the land of Lisbeth Salander, as compared to 3% for Portugal. Which, says Johan, “confirms the power of marketing. In general, the New World is better at marketing than the Old. Sometimes, 1000 years of tradition can be a heavy baggage to carry.”

But WOSA (Wines of SA, the exporters mouthpiece) should not relax in their slacks, for as Johan concludes, “for SA, the only way forward, is down.”