Portuguese wine exports closed 2023 at an average price of EUR 2.90 per litre. The figure rose 0.66% in a year when both export value and volume slipped. Read the combination carefully: the average improved because volume fell harder than value did. That is growth by subtraction, and nobody should toast to it.

The mid-year numbers had already sketched the picture. The first half of 2023 brought EUR 447.6 million in export value across 158.3 million litres, an average of EUR 2.83 per litre. The year firmed up slightly from there and still landed below three euros.

The sector body picked a target

ViniPortugal's president has framed the average export price as a main objective for the sector. The Strategic Plan 2030 attaches numbers to the ambition: EUR 1.2 billion in exports at an average price of EUR 3.19 per litre.

From EUR 2.90 to EUR 3.19 is a climb of ten percent. Ten percent on a national average, across every style and region the country ships, is a demanding target. No single estate can move that number alone. The plan only works if individual houses decide that their own average deserves the same treatment, and then act like they mean it.

An average never rises by decree

An average price is an output. It moves when the mix underneath it changes. For an estate, four levers exist.

Raise prices on wines the market already accepts too easily. If your allocation sells out in March, the price was wrong.

Shift volume toward the SKUs and markets that pay better. The same wine can carry meaningfully different prices in different cities; export allocation is a pricing decision wearing a logistics costume.

Retire the volume that only ever sells on discount. Cheap volume drags the average down and teaches buyers what the label is worth. Some listings cost more in positioning than they return in cash.

Add products above your current ceiling. The top of the range repositions everything beneath it, including bottles whose price never changed.

The ladder, rung by rung

The practical shape, for one estate, is a ladder. Hold the entry wine at its current price and give it a job: it pays the freight and keeps the distributor relationship warm. Build the middle rung with intent. That means one wine with a story a sommelier can retell in a single sentence, priced against the shelf it will actually stand on in the target market rather than against its cellar-door price at home. Keep the top rung scarce: volumes held small and allocated, priced to say what the house believes about itself.

Then sequence the distribution. Restaurant lists anchor price perception in a way a supermarket shelf cannot. A wine that enters a market through the on-trade sets its reference price there, and the retail listing that follows inherits it. Reverse the order and the discount becomes the reference instead.

None of this requires a famous critic or a lucky vintage. It requires the discipline to hold a price through the awkward quarter when a buyer pushes back, and the paperwork to show the importer why the ladder serves their margin too.

The promotion money is already committed

For 2026, the sector holds a promotion budget of EUR 8.07 million spread across 83 actions. That is institutional money spent to make the category's story easier to tell in export markets. An estate that raises prices with a straight strategy behind them moves in the same direction as its own sector body, with public promotion already paid for. The estates that keep discounting are working against a plan their own category published.

What to do next

Map every export SKU you sell: price per litre, per market, next to the sector's EUR 3.19 target. Find the market where your best wine sits furthest below its list neighbours and plan one price step for the next vintage, announced to your importer early and with the Strategic Plan 2030 inside the briefing pack. Decide which cheap volume you will stop defending, and put a date on the exit. Then write down your own average-price target for 2030. The sector body published one for the whole country. An estate that agrees with it should be able to publish its own, even if the only readers are the family and the bank.