I’m a fan of trade fair Wine to Asia in Shenzhen because it goes beyond simply selling booth space to featuring intriguing themes like Living Wines (low intervention), pavilions focused on Chinese wine and popup areas featuring everything from talks about Gen Z consumers, wine bar trends and kombucha to tastings of Champagne, Sake and Yunnan wine.
In some ways, it is an incubator for new wines and trends, and my World Marselan Day project has even done tastings and talks there over the years.
Now there is another reason to go: Wine to Asia and Raw Wine have partnered for next year’s show.
From Raw Wine, which was founded in 2012 by Isabelle Legeron and has held tastings in cities such as London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Tokyo:
From Raw Wine: “RAW WINE is one of the most exciting collections of fine, natural, organic and biodynamic wine artisans ever to come together in Shenzhen. Their wines are pure, kind to the planet, very possibly better for your health and best of all they’re absolutely delicious.”
The partnership is a natural move for Wine to Asia given it launched in 2020 with a pavilion called Living Wines. That pavilion together China’s top natural wine importers and the association Ziran, and has been among Wine to Asia’s most popular ever since.
“This small project in 2020 has led to our cooperation with Raw Wine, an international player,” says Simone Incontro, China head for Wine to Asia. “For us, it’s important news that will allow us to make a better edition of Wine to Asia in 2026.”
Raw Wine has also previously appeared at the trade fair Vinitaly in Verona, which, like Wine to Asia, is owned by exhibition specialists Veronafiere.
The partnership comes as younger Chinese consumers show growing interest in low-intervention wines, which are now well-established in cities such as Beijing, Chengdu, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, and growing elsewhere.
In fact, China has proven to be a good market for the world’s natural wine makers, as explained by restaurateur Isabella Ko of The Merchants during last week’s online panel, Defying the Downtown: Five China Wine Success Stories, by Wine to Asia.
Ko says the wine drinking culture is less established in China and thus new aficionados, drinking for pleasure, have been more open-minded.
“When natural wine hit the Chinese market, you could see that basically all of the importers in China might have the best allocations from around the world,” said Ko. “So, the very difficult-to-find, the very rare ones, you find it in China but might not find it in Hong Kong, where there is a traditional market of drinking fine wine.”
In fact, while I’ve heard many veteran aficionados talk about how weird they find natural wines, I’ve also talked to people in China who started off in natural wine bars and found, say, a Bordeaux Grand Cru, to be disjointing on their first try.
We also now have plenty of examples of Chinese wineries and vineyards seeking to grow “organic” grapes and make “natural wines.” That ranges from Bolongbao in the Fangshan District of Beijing, among the first to get organic certification some two decades ago, to Domaine Aromes in Ningxia, an early pursuer of biodynamic techniques, to the winemakers without wineries who are traveling the country and making wines, often while pursuing low-intervention styles.
For the past half-dozen years, Wine to Asia has been the leader among trade fairs in giving these people and their wines a platform, and a partnership with Raw Wine should be an interesting new chapter in this story.
Grape Wall has no sponsors of advertisers: if you find the content and projects like World Marselan Day worthwhile, please help cover the costs via PayPal, WeChat or Alipay.
Sign up for the free Grape Wall newsletter here. Follow Grape Wall on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. And contact Grape Wall via grapewallofchina (at) gmail.com.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.