Wines of South Africa Tasting Trail with Friends, Stockholm 

On the 6th of September 2017 Wines of South Africa opened the doors for the first producer based Swedish trade show in many years. As soon as those doors were unlocked, visitors covering a range of trade as well as local media, started to pour into the room. We had 24 exhibitors in place; all showing the very best wines South Africa has to offer. On top of that we also had three additional rooms with special themes. One room was dedicated to Distell and their Fine Wine selection, the other was the DGB Experience and the last one showed a range of top wines that were selected by local wine trade magazine, Livets Goda. 

It was truly inspiring to see the excitement amongst our visitors and even though we see declining figures in terms of volume in Sweden, it was truly evident that the interest in more expensive wines is growing. As a part of WOSA´s collaboration with one of the Sommelier Education groups in Stockholm we also had 30 students tasting our wines as part of their mandatory lectures. They were given a task to write about and throughout the day we could see these enthusiastic young sommeliers asking questions and tasting wines as if it was their last day on the planet! On the 23rd of October Maja Berthas will also give them a half day lecture about the South African Wine industry. 

As mentioned above, we’d had a lot of visitors (almost 200 of the top trade and media) and by the time we closed the doors that afternoon we could proudly say it was one of the best trade shows ever. Some of the comments we had were about the increasing quality of South African wines and also the amount of new and exciting “new wave” producers focusing on more natural wines in smaller volumes. The room with the Livets Goda Selection was unbelievably busy throughout the day.

As part of this day the Restaurant Gondolen, also made a couple of South African cocktails in the bar and listed twice the amount of South African wines as usual, in support of the South African “Take Over”!  That´s the spirit we like to see!


 

Maja Berthas, Wines of South Africa Sweden – October 2017