10 locations across the world – London, Munich, Moscow, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York, San Francisco, Miami and Toronto – hosting digital events and physical experiences where wineries will be able to present their products to key markets directly from Italy, in a rich calendar of events designed to exhibit the fascinating world of Made in Italy.

Overcoming Covid 19 restrictions, Milano Wine Week transforms into the most innovative and digitalized world wine event

Milan, May 14th, 2020 – Digitalization and internationalization: these will be the keywords of Milano Wine Week 2020, the first Italian agribusiness event to mark a significant shift by accelerating the changes imposed by the particular period the whole world is going through.

Relying on last year’s significant numbers (over 300 events, over 300,000 attendees, 1,500 companies involved and over 300 venues activated all over the city), the third edition of the biggest wine event in Milan, created by Federico Gordini and produced by SG Company’s Format Division, will take place on October 3-11 with the even greater ambition of turning Milan into an international wine culture hub, just like for other fields of excellence such as fashion and design, in compliance with the Covid-19-related limitations.

Hence the rapid transformation of the format, which in the course of two months has been reimagined, redesigned and turned into an even greater and more ambitious project, still projected into the future. By creating the first-ever digital platform supporting a wine event, wine lovers in Italy and all around the world will have the chance to participate, even at a time when travel is restricted.

“When our reality changes – says Federico Gordini, President of Milano Wine Week – we need to change accordingly. Milano Wine Week was the first to rise to the challenge, by turning a gap into an opportunity to produce a system project increasingly at the service of the wine world and its production chain. During the lockdown, we decided to reimagine and adjust our business model, in order to create something that was revolutionary and suitable for these times, trying to achieve an even bigger endeavor at an international level, while complying with the strict emergency regulations”.

BUSINESS AND INNOVATION

The event is addressed to a wider business and consumer audience, sparking a technological and qualitative growth for the whole industry, gathering opinion leaders, international professionals, organizers, operators and consumers with an innovative and synergetic approach. This goal will be achieved through a tight schedule of meetings and seminars, masterclasses, tastings, walk-around tastings, forums and many more wine-related events.

Besides all the participating companies having their own virtual stand, hosted in the platform’s innovative Wine Networking Hub, this edition’s greatest innovation will be the international Digital Tastings: exclusive wine tastings addressed to international buyers and press operators. In an actual “space”, conceived as a TV studio hosting a selected team of Italian operators, restaurateurs and journalists, the wine producers will have the chance to present their products in several countries around the world at the same time, thanks to MWW’s 10 international branches located in London, Munich, Moscow, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York, San Francisco, Miami and Toronto, thus tapping into the main reference markets of the wine world. Along with Milan’s headquarters, international traders, press operators and restaurateurs will interact with Milano Wine Week overcoming the geographical distances, thus fueling a wide international network active all year long.

“This platform – explains Gordini – does not just operate to carry out Milano Wine Week, but to service the wine world, with the purpose of giving birth to a wide international network, featuring business and formation activities all year around, being able to cope with thousands and thousands of users connected at the same time. In this respect, we will act as a sort of ‘broadcaster’, a big TV studio streaming a series of programs that can be accessed in real time all around the world but will also become permanent contents”.

Milano Wine Week 2020 will be a big-scale event which, by combining digital and real-world experiences, will involve an international audience, thus making Milan the world capital of Italian wine.

LEARN TO CHANGE

Milano Wine Week’s training events will also be remotely accessible: firstly, the Wine Business Forum’s third edition (October 6th), produced in partnership with BS-Strategies and coordinated by Silvana Ballotta, which will focus on the internationalization process in some of the Italian wine sector’s main export markets; the Wine Generation Forum’s second edition (October 10th), in partnership with AGIVI (Young Italian Wine Entrepreneurs Association), hosted in English and addressed to millennials working in the wine business, along with the newly added Shaping Wine (October 8th), in partnership with SDA Bocconi, which will contemplate new innovative trends and wine retailing.

FINAL CONSUMER ACTIVITIES

The Wine Districts are still confirmed: consolidated partnerships between the neighborhoods and its bars, restaurants and wine cellars, and a wine consortium. For the whole week, as usual, the districts will be branded by the consortia’s signs. The participant venues will host special MWW events (aperitifs, dinners, tastings).

As an additional boost, the world of food and wine service and retail will have an even more central role, with the purpose of giving new life to one of the sectors more severely hit by the pandemic and the related financial crisis.

During the event, hundreds of restaurants and wine bars around Milan will be activated, hosting wine-related activities, to be experienced either inside the venues (depending on the capacity regulations) or by means of the restaurants’ delivery services, offering special menus including a paired wine bottle. Milano Wine Week aims at representing a new start for the food & wine business; an industry Milan has become a capital of in the last years; a sector the wine world depends on.

Through the Wine Pairing project, born within Milano Food Week – the “twin” event created by Gordini in 2009 whose 2020 edition has been cancelled due to the health crisis – the communication impact will be made even stronger in a business that has been severely damaged by the lockdown and is deeply connected with the wine world. The project will feature some of the most important Italian and international chefs who have taken part in the 10 previous Milano Food Week editions. Each will perform a story-cooking featuring a special recipe based upon one of MWW’s supporting producers’ and consortia’s wines. The event will be streamed on the digital platform and social media pages, becoming tutorials that the audience can recreate at home by purchasing both the wine and the ingredients through MWW’s Wine Cellar, an innovative real-world wine shop hosted in Palazzo Bovara’s headquarters and, at the same time, an e-commerce platform, where the attendees can taste and buy a wide selection of Milano Wine Week’s featured wines.

The Winetellings will also be confirmed, thanks to their huge success during the lockdown: digital tastings hosted by wine experts and producers, addressed to the “wine lovers” – connected remotely through the event’s dedicated platform and social media pages – who can purchase the wine bottles online. The Winetellings, already started in the past weeks, will go on for the whole teasing period, until October and also during the Wine Week, when MWW’s Wine Cellar will also be open.

These instruments and many more will be available to focus on a constantly-evolving wine world, made of people in the first place: not just producers, enologists and agronomists, but also technicians, communicators, bloggers, start-uppers, hoteliers, restaurateurs, managers, sommeliers, advisors and retailers. And consumers, obviously. In one word: the Winers, the real protagonists of Milano Wine Week’s next edition.

“For the first time in our history – adds Gordini – we have decided to create a common thread connecting all the events in our schedule. The Winers are the wine people: a set of different professional figures, both classic and innovative, taking part in the wine production chain. We wanted all our activities to be focused on the “human factor” at the foundation of the world of wine and its evolution, where several new roles and jobs have emerged lately, adding to the business’ growth on the international market. These characters and their stories will be the real protagonists of our wine narrative”.

Milano Wine Week was presented just one week ago by means of an innovative digital event with over 1000 registered guests (a real record, and an unimaginable attendance for a traditional press conference) to inaugurate the new platform, hosted by President Federico Gordini, with the participation of Fabio Rolfi, Agriculture Department Councillor – Lombardy Region, Roberta Guaineri, Tourism Department councilor – Municipality of Milan, Riccardo Ricci Curbastro, President of Federdoc, Silvana Ballotta, CEO of BS Strategies and Wine Business Forum coordinator, Helmuth Kocher, President of Merano Wine Festival, and Luciano Ferraro, Chief Editor of Corriere della Sera and President of Milano Wine Week’s event committee.

For registration please click the following link:
Digital Wine Fair Pre-Registration