At Wine Vision in Belgrade, a Serbian winemaker was trying to explain his wine to me. His English was limited. My Serbian was considerably worse. He pointed to a card written in Cyrillic, which did little to improve matters. We were both struggling. Then we just tasted the damn thing.
The variety was Prokupac. Sour cherries up front, slowly giving way to warmth and soft tannins. Delightful, one glance communicated the quality and respect we had failed so miserably to vocalise.
Every week, I receive at least five emails from French producers offering wine at tempting prices. The wine comes to me, complete with a sales pitch and simple logistics. Finding this Prokupac had involved a flight to Serbia, some hairy negotiations over taxi fares and several minutes of smiling in bafflement at the Cyrillic wine list.
It made me wonder how much of our wine taste is really a preference for what is easiest to buy.
Three Chinese buyers in a taxi
On the bus to the first day of the Wine Vision fair, I was one of only two Westerners. As far as I could tell, everyone else was Asian. On the way home, I shared a taxi with three Chinese wine buyers.
They talked about making a market for Serbian wine. What struck me was their apparent confidence that there was a market to be made. In Britain, a conversation about an unfamiliar wine region can spend quite a long time on whether customers will accept it. These buyers weren’t waiting for demand; they were creating it.
One taxi ride cannot explain a national buying strategy. But it left me curious about what had brought them there. About six years earlier, I had met a Chinese buyer at a Georgian wine tasting at London Wine Fair. She had come to London to understand wines from this part of Europe. Now, in Belgrade, I was sharing a taxi with buyers who could go straight to the source. This shift had some serious macroeconomics behind it.
Before the bottle comes the trade agreement
Belgrade felt busy, eclectic and ambitious. The Chinese businesses and Bank of China presence were visible signs of a relationship that extends well beyond wine.
China has lent Serbia billions for infrastructure, including roads and bridges. The two countries’ free-trade agreement came into force in July 2024, with tariffs on Serbian wine entering China scheduled to fall to zero over five years.
A trade agreement cannot make Prokupac taste different. It can make importing it a more attractive proposition. Lower costs change the calculation for a distributor. More room in the margin can make an unfamiliar wine worth introducing. Commercial relationships help producers find buyers, and buyers find routes to customers.
In April 2026, the Serbian government was explicitly discussing new routes into China for its wineries with the governor of Hebei province. This is a market being actively developed.
The taxi conversation began to make more sense. Those buyers were exploring an opportunity within a commercial relationship being built around them.
China is buying less wine. Serbia is an interesting exception.
There is a complication, and it makes the story more revealing. China’s overall wine imports fell by 26.7% in volume in 2025. Yet Serbian exports of bottled still wine to mainland China rose from roughly 100,000 litres in 2024 to 130,000 litres in 2025. Their value climbed from about US$468,000 to US$1.37 million.
That is a 30% increase in volume and an almost threefold increase in value, against a sharply contracting wider market. So how did Serbian wine buck the trend?
Change the economics, change the wine on the shelf
Serbian wine did not suddenly improve between one harvest and the next. What is changing is the commercial framework around it: falling tariffs, closer trading relationships and an active effort to connect producers with buyers. Those changes help explain why Chinese importers might see an opportunity where others see an unfamiliar wine country.
The buyers in my taxi were talking about making a market. Around them, governments and businesses were making that task easier.
That matters because we tend to think of the wines on our shelves as a reflection of what people like. They also reflect what someone has made available, affordable and straightforward to buy. Before a customer can develop a taste for Serbian wine, someone has to put a bottle within reach.
What if someone did the hard work for you?
For an independent bottle shop, the opportunity is attractive. Finding a delicious wine your customers have never encountered gives them a reason to buy from you, talk about you and come back. But discovering it, checking the producer, arranging transport and committing to stock takes time and money. You already have a shop to run.
The useful question is whether you can get the benefit of that discovery without taking on the whole expedition.
Take Tipchenitza, one of the Bulgarian wineries we work with at Intrepid. The winery’s name takes some practice. So do Rubin and Vrachanski Misket, two of the grapes it grows. On paper, there are several reasons a busy buyer might move on.
In the glass, the proposition becomes much simpler. Our experience is that people taste these wines, enjoy them and come back for more. The first purchase might need a little explanation. The next begins with someone asking for that Bulgarian wine they liked.
Our job is to get the merchant to that first tasting: find the producer, select the wines, bring them into UK stock and provide a story that is useful across the counter. You can try a few bottles through an existing importer rather than commit to bringing in a shipment yourself.
The commercial value is in having something distinctive without making your working day more complicated. Something you can introduce with confidence, sell on its merits and reorder when customers return.
China and Serbia are lowering barriers on a national scale. An importer can do something useful on a much smaller scale. Both change which wines get the chance to find an audience.
Back at that tasting table in Belgrade, the winemaker was still pointing to his Cyrillic card. I still could not read it, but I could taste the sour cherries, the warmth and the soft tannins of his Prokupac. I asked for another glass.