The selection available in any country reflects import economics more than it reflects quality. A bottle that is inexpensive at its origin can be impossible to sell profitably elsewhere, and the reasons compound at each stage.
Freight cost is charged on weight and volume
Glass bottles are heavy and mostly empty space, so shipping a drink means shipping a great deal of packaging.
The cost per bottle is the same whether the contents are cheap or expensive, so freight is a far larger proportion of an inexpensive bottle's price.
This is why the least expensive products in a category are usually made locally, and why imported ranges skew toward higher price points.
Duty is charged on alcohol content
Excise duty is generally levied on the quantity of pure alcohol rather than on the value of the product.
A cheap spirit and an expensive one at the same strength therefore carry the same duty, which again weighs more heavily on the cheap one.
Rates differ sharply between categories in many countries, which is why the relative price of wine, beer and spirits varies so much between markets.
Each intermediary applies a margin
An imported bottle typically passes through an importer, a distributor and a retailer, each of whom applies a percentage rather than a fixed amount.
Percentages compound, so a small increase at the origin becomes a larger increase at the shelf.
Where the market structure mandates separate tiers, the number of intermediaries is fixed by regulation rather than chosen by the producer.
Volume commitments exclude small producers
Importers work on containers and need enough volume to justify registration, labelling compliance and warehousing for a given product.
A producer whose entire annual output would fill a fraction of a container cannot meet that threshold alone.
Consolidators who combine several small producers into one shipment exist for this reason, and they are the route by which most small imported products arrive.
Compliance costs are fixed per product
Labelling requirements, registration and testing must be satisfied for each individual product, not for each shipment.
That cost is identical whether a hundred cases or ten thousand are sold, so it falls heavily on niche products.
The combined effect is a market where availability tracks a producer's scale and distribution relationships far more closely than it tracks what is in the bottle.