Shipping Wine & Spirits to Latvia

Short answer: alcohol is an excise good, so a wine shipment into Latvia needs a licensed importer, an excise status and the right movement documents on top of ordinary freight and customs. Unicore Overseas moves wine and spirits by road, sea container and air, including temperature control, Riga customs clearance and delivery into a bonded excise warehouse.

Excise, VAT and customs duty

Three charges apply to alcohol in Latvia. Customs duty applies only to non-EU goods and depends on the HS code. Excise is charged per hectolitre of product for wine and fermented drinks, and per hectolitre of pure alcohol for spirits. On top of both sits 21% VAT. Rates are set in the excise duty law and revised periodically, so confirm the current figure on the State Revenue Service website before pricing a shipment.

The key planning point: excise falls due not on arrival but when goods leave duty suspension. Delivering the shipment into a bonded excise warehouse defers the payment until the stock is sold, which materially eases cash flow for an importer bringing in a full pallet or container.

Why temperature decides the outcome

Wine is stable roughly between 12 and 18°C. Above 25°C it ages prematurely and loses aroma; below freezing the liquid expands, pushes the cork and the shipment arrives leaking. A standard container in a Mediterranean summer passes 40°C, while a trailer in a Baltic winter drops below zero. Either ruins the wine irreversibly, and insurers often decline the loss if the carriage was not temperature-controlled.

The technical comparison of liners and reefer options is in our guide to thermal insulation in sea containers for wine, and a worked example is the fine wine air shipment case study.

Wine and spirits by sea from Chile, South Africa, Mexico and Uruguay

Chile and South Africa: dry containers, not reefers

Chile and South Africa are Unicore's largest wine lanes into Riga. Since May 2025 Unicore has shipped 94 wine consignments from Valparaíso and San Antonio and 54 from Cape Town to Riga, 325 containers in total. All of them travelled in dry 20', 40' and 40'HC containers, not reefers. More than half of those shipments (82 of 148) had a thermal liner inside the box; a temperature logger and desiccants against condensation are added on request.

On tracked sailings, Valparaíso to Riga took 35 to 65 days port to port, most of them 35 to 50, with transshipment in Panama and again at Hamburg, Antwerp or Bremerhaven. The Valparaíso and Cape Town wine FCL case study shows how Unicore books the containers, fits the liners and clears the wine into an excise warehouse in Riga.

Mexico to Riga: tequila and spirits FCL

Unicore ships tequila and other Mexican spirits to Riga from Altamira and Veracruz. Since May 2025 that has been 15 shipments for 5 customers: 19 containers, mostly 40'HC, and one LCL consignment. At Riga, Unicore handles the port work, then either clears the spirits into an excise warehouse or sends the container on under a T1 transit document.

Uruguay to Riga: wine

Unicore also moves Uruguayan wine from Montevideo to Riga: 5 shipments for 2 customers since May 2025, in dry 20' and 40'HC containers. The paperwork is the same as for other third-country wine: a VI-1 where required, the import declaration in Riga, then an excise warehouse or onward transit.

The usual mistakes

• Shipping third-country wine without the VI-1 document — the cargo waits at the port while the producer arranges the analysis
• No e-AD opened before an intra-EU departure, so the goods lose duty-suspension status
• Excise left out of the sales price — it routinely exceeds the freight cost itself
• A bare dry container, with no thermal liner or temperature logger, booked for a summer sailing
• Missing Latvian-language labelling, which blocks the stock from retail sale

Unicore's wine and spirits logistics service covers the whole chain: collection at the producer, temperature-controlled carriage, Riga customs clearance and delivery into a bonded excise warehouse.