This week saw the return one of our most celebrated industry gatherings: ProWein. Though no longer the superpower it once was, it is still a moment when wine professionals emerge from vineyards and venues to do business and assess the competition. Here is what I learned from the halls of Düsseldorf Messe.
Smaller but more perfectly formed?
Every ProWein veteran will tell you how many more halls ProWein used to have. 20 was the highest count I heard. Düsseldorf Messe officially has 18 halls, but let’s not split hairs.
This year’s fair featured a comparatively lean seven halls. ProWein’s slimming down certainly moves it from international heavyweight to the regional circuit, but is the change a shortfall or a strategic shift?
One factor is the launch of ProWein events in Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, São Paulo, Mumbai and Tokyo. International buyers no longer need to travel to Germany’s favourite functional city to meet winemakers, so a smaller fair makes sense.
On the other hand, the rise of Wine Paris was less of an elephant in the room and more of a charging rhino.
Either way, attendees seemed upbeat and agreed that they had better quality matches and more serious conversations than at previous shows. What is more, some regions were winners in the consolidation. Austrian winemakers were delighted to be sharing a hall with their German counterparts or, more likely, their German counterparts’ contacts.
Intrepid’s partners also benefited. Our Bulgarian friends at Tipchenitza Winery featured prominently in a vast, flashy and well-attended Bulgarian pavilion, which sat conveniently between Italy and Germany. They had a great ProWein, and rightly so.
Whatever your take on the slimline ProWein, there is still a lot to learn from those halls, however many there are.
The vines they are a-changin’
However you view climate change, it is undeniable that the weather in recent years has been more bonkers than normal. Viticulture has felt the impact.
This is less of a problem for our high-altitude friends in Slovenia and Bulgaria, who have learnt the words “diurnal range” in a vast array of languages, and more of a challenge for winemakers closer to ground level.
Portuguese winemakers seem to be adapting wonderfully. The winemaking know-how in the country is impressive, and they are less bound by convention than other nations. The result is exciting. For example, our friends at Quinta da Plansel have released a new, lighter range of wines with lower alcohol levels. Grapes are picked overnight, as early as acceptable, then treated with ultimate care and coolness in the winery.
Other Portuguese winemakers have opted to stop fermentation early. One winemaker I met shared a sweet red table wine at 14% ABV. He said that if they did not stop the fermentation, it would have reached 18%. He added that if I did not like it, then maybe my wife would. Casual sexism aside, it was a good wine, and what seems a little unconventional now may become the new normal for all of us.
Low alcohol becomes a default option
It may be an early and potentially big call, though it looks as if low- and no-alcohol wine may go the same way as its beer equivalent, in that most brands will release their own 0% offerings rather than relying on new companies to fill the space.
To extrapolate the beer example, there are some brands which are exclusively low/no, such as Lucky Saint, but for the most part conventional brewers simply release a 0% version of their bestselling beer.
A growing number of wine producers are following suit and releasing their own low- and no-alcohol offerings. It makes sense. Many wineries bottle their wines on mobile bottling lines. How long until beverage machinery companies are routinely touring regions with reverse osmosis systems?
Or perhaps we will see a spate of acquisitions, with large wine brands buying in no-alcohol expertise and production capacity.
Either way, it is a sobering thought, pun intended.
Indeed, reverse osmosis need not be the answer. At ProWein, our friends at Quinta da Plansel launched a delicious non-alcoholic wine made by preventing the initial fermentation, then enhancing the grape juice with a dash of mineral water and a spritz of carbon dioxide. It was so delicious that I returned to their stand at the end of the day to grab another palate-cleansing glass. Now that is a wine my wife will love.
Final thoughts
The wine winners of the next decade will not be those who resist change, but those who interpret it early.
And whilst ProWein may not be the behemoth it once was, it is still one of the best places to test the pulse of the industry and its future.
Prost!
Henry Clark-Jones