By Jim Boyce

The 88th China Food and Drinks Fair — Táng JiÇ” Huì / 糖酒会 — officially starts Thursday but thousands of people are already pouring into Chengdu in China’s central province of Sichuan for meetings and preparations. Look for over 100,000 of them to pass through by show’s to wheel and deal and take a toll on the collective liver. I aim to post daily and pass on comments, tweets, stories and the like from the fair.

Kiwis in the Middle Kingdom

Christopher Adams reports in The New Zealand Herald that eight of the country’s wineries, including Villa Maria, Babich, Giesen, Ngatarawa, Invivo and Trinity Hill, will head to Sichuan Province to be part of a New Zealand Trade and Enterprise pavilion:

[Invivo co-founder Tim] Lightbourne said one of the main challenges in China was enticing Chinese consumers away from French red wines, which made up the bulk of wine imports to the country.

It was also a highly fragmented market, with Invivo having a single distributor who appointed around 50 sales agents across China, Lightbourne said. “Generally you don’t see your wine in retail chain wine stores and [the market] is not overseen by five to 10 key buyers operating large chains like you would see in Australia or the UK.

“The channels to consumers are varied and there is a lot of gift giving, which often means you need to single package your wine in wooden boxes.”

More details here.

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