The world’s biggest wine fair opens in France’s Bordeaux region today with vintners eyeing new tipplers in Africa as global consumption rises in Asia and elsewhere.
The US and China are the world’s top wine-lovers, but Africa is the industry’s next “future destination,” according to the Vinexpo wine and spirits fair, with a market predicted to grow 3.5 percent over the next three years.
In Bordeaux, 45,000 buyers from 120 nations are to hop from luxury chateaux to prestige vineyards partying and guzzling as France, the world’s leading wine producer, lays out its best bottles and fare for a five-day get-together starting today.
Warning: Excessive consumption of alcohol can damage your health.
Photo: AFP
Wine is France’s second-biggest export after aeronautics, accounting for half a million jobs, and French President Francois Hollande is to be the first head of state to open the Vinexpo fair.
However, wine and spirits consumption, though buoyant, faces “a changing picture” and “many uncertainties,” Vinexpo chief executive officer Guillaume Deglise said.
“We’re at a moment of transition with well-developed markets on the wane, such as France, because of changes in consumption patterns and differences between generations,” Deglise told reporters. “It’s important to identify markets that will drive our exports outside of China and the US.”
Data surprisingly puts populous Nigeria — where just over half the people are Muslim — as one of the fastest-growing countries for champagne consumption, with the bubbly popular among its oil-rich middle class, its hip-hop artists and its movie stars.
As sales of cognac and other spirits slow in Asia, Nigerians spent US$700 million on spirits in 2012 and are expected to double that to US$1.5 billion by 2017.
The Vinexpo fair is to gather 2,350 exhibitors from 42 nations, two-thirds of them from France, which last year produced 523 million 12-bottle crates.
Big producers Italy and Spain too are to be well-represented along with Portugal, Chile, Argentina, the US, Britain, Germany, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
Raising glasses will be buyers and traders in all tipples — reds, whites, roses, bubblies, sweet and dry wines, sherries, cheap plonk and boutique brands.
Even Georgia’s famed old-world wines — aged in amphoras according to a tradition that dates back thousands of years — are set to get headline attention as its wine techniques become increasingly popular.
In France itself, some of the talk is likely to focus on a controversial vote by French MPs last week to loosen the country’s tough 25-year-old laws on alcohol advertising.
The 1991 legislation, aimed at discouraging young people from drinking, banned TV advertising of drinks with alcohol content of more than 1.2 percent and showing brands in stadium hoarding.
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