International, digital, cultural: the future of Vinitaly in support of Italian wine in the world

More and more international, because the horizon is now the markets of the world; more and more digital, because modern tools allow you to do business, training, and communication at the same time, more and more cultural, because to consolidate the mature markets and open new ones, you need to do training and culture of Italian wine. These are the three legs on which the increasingly solid “table” of Vinitaly stands, which today in Milan has revealed its future. Starting from bringing together all its activities under the single Vinitaly brand (and all accessible, soon, from a single web portal). On the international front, if VeronaFiere has just returned from Brazil, where it has just closed “Wine South America” n. 2, the big debut, in 2020, will be “Wine to Asia”, in Shenzhen (9-11 November), the first wine event organized directly by an Italian fair in Asia (in partnership with the Chinese agency specialized Pacco Communication Group): “it is a project that finally comes to life, and on which we are very committed - said to WineNews dg Veronafiere Giovanni Mantovani - and the goal is to put together a team of 400 leading exhibitors of Italian wine”. An Event that debuts in a fundamental area for China. Considered the Silicon Valley of the Dragon and strategic square for the wine business, with 30% of total Chinese importers, Shenzen “is a key city in Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, which has over 100 million people, and with an average young age, of 32 years, and therefore strongly projected to the future ”.
Overall, the journey around the world of food & wine of Veronafiere in 2020 will be over 113,000 kilometers (and back). The United States, Russia, China, Brazil, Hong Kong, Thailand, Holland, Canada, Poland, Germany, Mexico, and the United Kingdom are the stops on the calendar. On the digitization front, Mantovani explains, “we will bring together all the activities under the single Vinitaly brand, and from a single portal you can access the entire platform, which will increasingly become a tool for knowledge and in-depth study of Italian wine, for professionals in the sector, but also consumers around the world”.
With a Vinitaly, therefore, which, with projects such as the Vinitaly International Academy, or as wine2wine, the training forum for companies (in Verona, on 25 and 26 November), but not only, is increasingly becoming a cultural tool, “but also an incubator of trends through the physical and virtual representation of emerging trends in the panorama of Made in Italy wine,” explains Mantovani, who adds: “Vinitaly will go into the world, but we will take the world to Vinitaly”. And so, in Verona, in 2020 (edition no. 54, 19-22 April), with regard to trends, if the area dedicated to organic growing (with the Organic Hall), there will be the entrance of Orange wines, the growth of the presence of new foreign producers (Central and Eastern Europe, Balkans area), but also the new space maintained by the wine-writer Ian D’Agata “Micromega wine”, dedicated to companies with small productions of indigenous varieties with high quality. Technology will also cross wine trends: thanks to the indexing of all data using ugc techniques (user-generated content) from the Vinitaly directory, it will be possible to follow thematic routes through an app that can be accessed by smartphones, the device most used for info by operators at the fair (60% of cases).
The Enoteca bio and Vinitaly Design have also been confirmed, but news will also come from Enolitech, the historic international exhibition on production technologies which, thanks to its dialogue with companies, has defined a structured path of presence also for the main foreign initiatives of Vinitaly, as well as a content prologue planned at Fieragricola.
And we will continue in the wake of the increasingly marked separation “between business at the fair and enthusiasts in the city and its surroundings, a path that we have started a few years ago with conviction, and that our exhibitors have appreciated,” explains the president of VeronaFiere, Maurizio Danese. A satisfaction that is expressed in the numbers: “despite mergers and exits from the market, in the last five years, Vinitaly has seen 95% of its exhibitors remain unchanged. A high level of loyalty, unique on the international exhibition scene, which represents the best business card for an event that does not change its protagonists but aims to make them increasingly smart and global. Not only that: the customer satisfaction, detected by an independent body, also tells us that 95.1% of exhibitors and visitors are generally satisfied with the event, and this tells us that we are on the right track”.