When the fair is still on. So is the work that comes after.
Four days. Thousands of producers, buyers, importers, and distributors packed into the same pavilions. Tastings that blur together by the third afternoon. Business cards collected in a jacket pocket, a bag, a hastily grabbed envelope at the stand. Conversations that feel genuinely promising and some that are, simply, professional courtesy.
Trade fairs like Vinitaly, ProWein and Wine Paris concentrate an extraordinary amount of commercial opportunity into a very short window. But while the fair is still running, something equally important is already taking shape: what happens in the days immediately after determines whether the work done here translates into something real or quietly disappears.
Reading the Room During the Fair
Not every conversation carries the same weight, and learning to distinguish genuine commercial interest from polite enthusiasm is one of the more useful skills a producer can develop.
The signals are usually there. A buyer who asks about production volumes is already running numbers. Someone who wants to know the ex-cellar price and then goes quiet for a moment is calculating landed cost. Questions about label compliance, shipping lead times, or minimum order quantities are not interruptions, they are the actual conversation. That is when attention shifts from the wine to the business behind it.
Contrast that with the enthusiastic taster who describes your Vermentino as “incredible” and promises to “definitely be in touch.” The compliment is genuine. The follow-through often isn’t, not because of bad faith, but because that person is having twenty similar conversations the same afternoon. Without a concrete next step established before they leave the stand, the momentum dissolves.
Before a promising contact walks away, it helps to anchor the conversation: agree on a specific next step, confirm the right email address, understand what they are actually looking for. A quick note on your phone with their name, what they mentioned, and what seemed to interest them most becomes invaluable two days later when you sit down to write. Those thirty seconds of structure are worth more than ten minutes of additional tasting notes.
The 72-Hour Window
A buyer leaving a trade fair typically walks away with forty or fifty new contacts. Within three days, they are deep in the operational reality of their market: emails, deliveries, client calls, sales team meetings. The window in which a new producer is still fresh in memory is short. By the time a second week passes, most contacts from the fair have already been mentally filed away, deprioritised, or replaced by more recent conversations.
This is not a reason to send a message the moment you get home. But waiting a week because it feels more professional is a miscalculation. The producers who follow up within two or three days, clearly and concisely with something useful attached, are the ones who remain visible when the buyer finally sits down to review fair contacts. Timing also signals something about how you operate. A prompt, well-structured message communicates the same thing a well-run stand does: that the business behind the wine is organised and easy to work with.
A Follow-Up That Actually Moves Things Forward
The message itself matters. A generic “it was a great pleasure to meet you at the fair, please find our catalogue attached” does very little. The buyer received a version of that sentence thirty times already.
A follow-up that works does something different: it connects back to something specific from the conversation. If they mentioned they were looking for a structured white under a certain price point, reference that. If they asked about organic certification, confirm the details directly. If they seemed interested in a particular wine, lead with that one and not the full range.
Attach what they actually need to make a decision: a clean, updated price list with Incoterms clearly stated, a technical sheet in professional English, and basic logistics information. If they have to come back asking for these, the friction starts immediately.
Close with a single, direct question rather than an open invitation. “Would it work to schedule a short call next week?” moves things forward. “Please do not hesitate to contact me” does not.
The Fair Ends. The Process Doesn’t.
The pavilions, the tastings, the conversations: all of it creates a density of interaction that no email campaign or LinkedIn outreach can replicate. But a trade fair is not where partnerships are formed. It is where they begin. And how that beginning unfolds depends entirely on what the producer does next. The real work happens in the days and weeks that follow, in the quality of the follow-up, the clarity of the information provided, and the speed of response when a question comes back.
The producers who understand this don’t measure a fair by the contacts collected. They measure it by the conversations that continued the week after.
Sources & Further Reading
As a writer working closely with wineries, export managers, and professionals across the wine trade, my primary source remains direct observation of market dynamics and everyday interactions between producers, importers, and distributors.
To complement these field-based insights with broader industry perspectives — from trade fair dynamics and buyer behaviour to post-fair commercial strategy and portfolio management — I regularly consult a selection of professional publications, technical reports, and trade resources focused on the international wine business.
- SevenFifty Daily — A Winery Guide to Trade Show Success
- WineNews — Wine Paris, ProWein and Vinitaly: the triangle of major international trade fairs
- The Brand Leader — A Guide to Wine Trade Show Success
- ProWein Business Report (Geisenheim University) – analisi della catena del valore e del comportamento dei buyer internazionali
