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Vinexpo Shanghai captures the buzz of Chinese wine market

Vinexpo Shanghai captures the buzz of Chinese wine market

It’s a little unusual to find yourself being constantly stopped by fellow visitors at a wine trade show and being asked why you are asking questions to the producers showing their wines. When you reply you are a journalist wanting to find out why and how they are working in China, the same visitors are only then too keen to share their experiences, explain how they buy and sell wine and exactly what they think of the wines they are tasting. It is just like nowhere else you might visit. It is the Chinese wine market that, for my first visit, was exciting, dynamic and a breath of fresh air. In the first of two reports from the inaugural Vinexpo Shanghai, The Buyer examines the key trends, opportunities and challenges facing producers looking to succeed in the Chinese wine industry.

This week ProWein is following Vinexpo in hosting a major wine trade fair in Shanghai. For a market that is supposed to be going through a downturn there is still plenty of business to be done right across China as importers and producers find ever more effective ways to work with each other.

It’s one thing writing about what is going on in a particular country’s wine industry from afar, it is quite another to go and experience and see it for yourself. Particularly one as fast changing, and moving as China.

So perhaps I should have been more prepared for what to expect on my visit last week’s to what was Vinexpo’s first trade exhibition in Shanghai. Particularly as the last time I had been in the city, Bill Clinton was just being inaugurated into the White House in January 1993.

But where else in the world can you go and find a city that has effectively built its double on the other side of the river. Which is, in effect, what Shanghai has done over the course of the last 26 years. It was quite something to look out from the city’s famous Bund, where I have a photograph of myself with nothing but river and marsh land behind me, to see it replaced by a landscape of sky scrapers as far as you can see.

It’s only then do you really start to appreciate just how far and how fast China has changed in the last 20 plus years. For the wine industry those changes have been fast forwarded and squeezed into largely the last 10 years, such has been the pace in which wine has made more than just a foothold in the country.

About the author

Ritenis Aksel

Editor and Publisher of Connoisseur Magazine -Join the Team

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