Lorenzo Biscontin
A week after the end of Wine Paris 2025 and after having read and heard many comments about the fair from Italian and foreign operators, it is time for me to make a cool-headed assessment.
1. Wine Paris is the new wine world fair. This is demonstrated first of all by the numbers: over 5,300 exhibitors (+29% on 2024) from more than 54 countries and over 50,000 visitors (+25% on 2024) of which 45% from abroad from 154 countries.
These numbers are higher than those of Pro Wein 2024, which the Dusseldorf fair will hardly be able to surpass given that for the 2025 edition have been already announced a reduction of 3 halls.
2. The international nature of Wine Paris’ numbers reflects a different mentality of the organizers compared to the Bordeaux Vinexpo: there it was the French wine fair with an international hall, Wine Paris instead aims to be the world wine fair held in France.
It is no coincidence that the space dedicated to foreign exhibitors has increased by 80%. Obviously Paris helps, but also the fact of being placed at the beginning of the year. The same advantage Pro Wein had over London Wine Fair, the previous reference fair for the wine world.
3. Another advantage of the Paris fair over Dusseldorf is that it is more compact, with the halls closer together. It may be trivial, but for a visitor it means not having to walk kilometers (or take the internal shuttle) to visit the various halls. Some people said that Wine Paris is even too compact.
In my opinion, the space was enough for the exhibitors to work properly and the smaller halls have the advantage of always giving the feeling of a good influx.
However, I have not been in the French halls, which I was told were particularly crowded.
4. There were some structural problems: on Monday, already at 12:30, it was not possible to use the cloakroom because … there were no hangers left.
Also on Monday, the temperature in pavilion 6, the Italian one, was rather low (luckily I had to keep my coat on because of the cloakroom problem).
The biggest problem was the conference and masterclass rooms created inside the halls pavilions where the exhibitors’ stands were also located. The “silent disco” solution adopted, with the speakers’ microphones muted and the participants listening through personal headphones is “cool” only if there are enough headphones for all the listeners. Vice versa it is impossible to attend the conference, even if you can understand the speakers without translation, as happened in the case of the “A fresch AI-r is blowing in!” conference.
It may be a problem related to the visitors’ growth, we will see if Vinexposium will be able to solve them for the 2026 edition.
5. Wine Paris dedicated a significant space to spirits, as it was in 2024 Pro Wein. One wonders whether this is only due to the fact that there is no real specific trade fair for liqueurs and spirits or whether the overlap between wine and spirits/cocktail consumption is increasing for operators as is happening for consumers.
6. Another aspect in common with the last Pro Wein was the tasting area for wines with low or no alcohol content. This is evidence of the growing interest in this segment on the market and an opportunity for operators in the business to get an idea of the state of the art in terms of production know how and organoleptic profile. Those who snub these products by saying they are not wine, do so at their own risk.
7. Speaking of 0% alcohol wines, I finally tasted the famous 0% alcohol and 100% organic French sparkling wine French Bloom, the brand in which LVMH recently invested, offered at 28 euros by the glass at the Ritz restaurant in Paris. The one that convinced me the most was the Rosé, but the 2022 vintage also doesn’t look out of place next to certain cremants. If you’re worried about the sugar level, they have also the extra brut at 0 g/l of sugar.
8. Also about 0% alcohol wines, I was practically already with one foot out of the fair when I tasted Lavin, a 0% alcohol project from the French winery Villa Noira, a producer of organic and natural wines (Vin Natur certification). The peculiarity is that instead of doing alcoholic fermentation and then dealcoholizing, they ferment the must with a lactic fermentation.
This has several advantages from a production and organoleptic point of view.
First of all, it reduces costs because it does not require dealcoholization, thus avoiding the huge investments in dealcoholization machinery. Then it is more eco-sustainable, given that the dealcoholization process is particularly energy-intensive (therefore, again, lower costs). Lactic fermentation does not require large economies of scale, therefore it allows the production of 0% alcohol wines even for relatively small quantities. Finally, from a production point of view, lactic fermentation is a process already widely used in many agri-food productions, therefore widely known and studied. Which should make its application in the wine sector relatively simple.
From an organoleptic point of view, by transforming the sugars of the must into lactic acid, lactic fermentation allows to avoid the excessive sweetness that often still characterizes wines with 0% alcohol.
Potentially a Copernican revolution, or rather a Columbus’ Egg, given the simplicity of the concept, in the production of No-Lo wines.
9. Net net Wine Paris was it worth for the exhibitors attending it? Everyone I met, the vast majority of whom were Italian, was satisfied with the quantity, quality and punctuality of the appointments made (at a fair you work with appointments, it is worth repeating). One winery noted that their buyer clients had come to Paris but preferred not to make appointments, which complicated the more
As for the origin of the buyers, at first glance you could see many from Europe and North America. Less Asia, but we must consider that the Chinese were still busy celebrating the Chinese New Year (in addition to the not exactly rosy situation of that market). We’ll see next year.
10. At Wine Paris there were over 1,200 Italian wineries, which occupied the entire hall 6 and some remnants of hall 5. Some Italian operators have expressed the idea that such a massive presence is counterproductive because it would do the French a favor.
This is a point of view that I simply don’t understand: are we saying that the French wineries exhibiting at Wine Paris benefit from the visitors attracted by the Italian presence more than the Italian wineries benefit from the visitors attracted by the French ones?
As much national pride as one may have, it seems sincerely paradoxical to me.
The corollary of this thinking is often that Italian wine should aim to make a wine world fair in Italy too, perhaps by moving “Vinitaly” (the quotation marks are needed, considering that Vinitaly is a Veronafiere brand) from Verona to Milan. A strategy that I wouldn’t support because Vinitaly is the fair of Italian wine, or rather the celebration of Italian wine and it already has an almost bulimic size. Do we really want to add another 3 or 4 pavilions to welcome producers from the rest of the world? In this case, we actually would be doing the French (and Spanish, Australian, etc.) a favor by diverting from the Italian wineries the attention of buyers who come to Verona from all over the world.
See you in a month in Dusseldorf to understand if and how Pro Wein wants to react.
