Wine market in Portugal

With a stunning 61 liters per capita, Portugal is the world's leader in wine consumption. It is almost 50% higher than in France and six times higher than in the United States. Portugal is also the only European country where wine consumption has grown since pre-pandemic years.^[5]

Portugal has also been growing as a wine exporter. In 2024, it shipped around 350 million liters of wine worth roughly €1 billion in export prices.

Port and Madeira always have been export products. In 2022, 82% out of 70 million liters of total Port sales were exported. This means that only 2.1% of wine sold in Portugal in 2022 was Port, and quite obviously much of it was bought by tourists.^[6] Similarly, out of 3.1 million liters of Madeira sold in 2023 only 21% accounted for domestic sales, making it only 0.1% of volume sold within the country. Most of it was consumed on the island, again, by tourists.^[7]

The global wine market for fortified wines, Port and Madera including, has been declining since the turn of the century. Madeira sales declined by 17% between 2004 and 2023, and Port by 25% between 2021 and 2026.^[8]

Portuguese dry wines are diverse in grape varieties and production styles. Most of them aren’t varietally labelled. With flexible appellation rules, it’s frequently impossible to infer the varieties only by name, so most of Portuguese in the database don’t have any variety tags assigned. As everywhere in the world, there is a trend towards lighter extraction, less oak and minimal intervention. There is common perception that many dry wines of Portugal are underpriced. In the Douro, it is frequently attributed to the beneficio system of quotas for grape production for Port, which, according to some opinions, effectively subsidizes the production of dry Douro wines.

Although wines from Alentejo dominate in production volume,^[9] there are significantly more Douro placements in the on-premise sector in Portugal.

Portugal imports a significant amount of cheap Spanish wine in bulk to be sold in the lowest price segment.

Compiled and checked by Ilya Zabolotnov