Wine, the future is autumn. Vinitaly: “available for an innovative event for companies”

Coronavirus emergency is a health emergency, with hundreds of deaths every day. It is hard to know how long it will last. Nevertheless, we also think of the economy, which is also made up of programming, and business events, which we try to put or keep on the calendar, in the knowledge that it is a “calendar of hope”, likely to change at any moment. The Vinitaly affair fully demonstrates this, with the cancellation of the 2020 edition, for the first time in the history of the Verona fair, and with the appointment to 2021 (in Verona, from 18 to 21 April, and with OperaWine on 17 April, ed.) A forced stop, that of the most important business support and promotion platform for Italian wine, which has pushed VeronaFiere to look beyond.
With extraordinary investments on events abroad, it will be essential to grow even more to try to recover the losses, at least in part, of the coming months, namely Vinitaly Chengdu, Vinitaly China Road Show, Wine South America (23-25 September 2020), Vinitaly Russia (26 and 28 October 2020), Vinitaly Hong Kong (5-7 November 2020), Wine To Asia (9-11 November 2020) and the initiatives of the Vinitaly International Academy (Via). And, perhaps, with an autumn event in Italy too, hoping to celebrate, in some way, the end of the emergency and the relaunch of the country also through wine, as proposed by the Veronafiere dg Giovanni Mantovani: “we are making ourselves available to the sector and the promotion system to consider the creation of an innovative event next autumn at the service of companies. In a post-emergency for us, it is called rebirth. The idea, to which the main associations of the sector have already expressed full availability in the last meeting (23 March), is to cross our know-how with the proposals of the sector in the function of an event to be planned for autumn 2020, emergency permitting. We could be the collector of an initiative still to be built and which, I would like to stress, does not want to be a business for VeronaFiere. The watchwords of the rebirth, for the sector but not only, will have to be business and communication: this is what producers want - underlines Mantovani - this is what the market will want, this is the job that Vinitaly and VeronaFiere know how to do”.
An event that could come in the autumn, therefore, which, moreover, already sees confirmed two wide-ranging wine events, one still young, such as the “Milano Wine Week”, which would see its edition n. 3 on stage from 3 to 11 October, in a Milan that today more than ever, along with neighboring Bergamo and all of Lombardy, is the center of the emergency Covid-19 in Italy, and another now historicized, the “Merano Wine Festival”, born in 1992, whose 2020 edition is scheduled from 6 to 10 November. The organizers Federico Gordini and Helmuth Köcher, in a joint note, announced a few hours after the announcement of the postponement of Vinitaly 2020, said: “At this complicated time for everyone, the producers have other priorities linked to the difficulties of managing the companies and their staff. For weeks we have been confronting each other - explains the note - and we are developing a platform of opportunities for wineries to be created between October and November in conjunction with the two main autumn wine events in Italy, “Milano Wine Week” and “Merano Wine Festival”. A Milan-Merano axis increasingly united, but open to other realities and organizations that want to join together synergistically to offer more opportunities to companies stressed by the difficulties of the moment. We are ready to welcome with open arms anyone who wants to collaborate with us. The world of wine never as much as today needs to make system. And we organizers must be the first to give this message. We will soon communicate the news, we are waiting to monitor the trend of the next few weeks to make the project official, also and above all to convey our daily efforts on the very serious situation that the country is going through”.
In short, the world of wine is looking to autumn, hoping that, by then, after months of forced standstill and with so many missed appointments, events, and occasions, everything will have started to flow again with certain normality. Something desirable, possible, but far from taken for granted.