With Hong Kong established as the most important city in Asia for the global wine trade, VINEXPO Asia-Pacific 2012, which opens today at the Convention and Exhibition Centre, is one of the trade show highlights of the year.
More than 14,000 visitors from 33 countries are expected to attend the three-day show. They will meet exhibitors and attend conferences, seminars and tastings.
Professional visitors should be able to leave with an expanded list of business contacts and an enhanced understanding of the dynamic wine and spirits business in the Asia-Pacific. The sophistication of the wine and spirits trade, and of consumers, around the region, has greatly increased since the first Hong Kong show in 1998.
'Many exhibitors were impressed by how visitors' knowledge, curiosity and appreciation of the products on show had improved [at the last show in 2010]', says Dominique Heriard Dubreuil, president of VINEXPO Asia-Pacific. 'This was reassuring for wine and spirits exporters.'
This year's exhibition is the seventh edition of the show, and although it was staged in 2000 and 2002 in Tokyo, it returned to Hong Kong in 2006 and has been held here every two years since.
The wine and spirits business in Asia is booming. According to the annual VINEXPO/IWSR Study of the global wine and spirits market last year, overall sales on the mainland, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines and Malaysia were worth US$142.5 billion, including US$18.6 billion-worth of wine. Asia remains the region with the world's highest consumption of spirits.