The World Bulk Wine Exhibition ran two days at the end of November at the RAI in Amsterdam. Tenth year of the fair. Work sent me.
It is one hall. The booths are plain: a table, rows of unlabeled bottles, ISO glasses, a spittoon, a price-per-liter sheet. Spain has the biggest pavilion, most of it La Mancha, then Chile, South Africa, Australia, Italy, France. Nobody tells a story about a hillside. A buyer specifies what they need, tastes down a row, and talks volume. Wine that closes here ships in flexitanks, a 24,000-liter bladder folded into a standard shipping container, and ends up under supermarket labels. A large share of the wine that crosses borders moves this way. I find the honesty of it easier to take than most wine marketing.
The market had a particular feel this year. The 2017 European harvest was small, frost mostly, and prices had climbed for a year and a half. Then the 2018 harvest came in big almost everywhere, and you could feel the turn at the tables. Sellers who spent last year quoting firm were asking buyers what would work.
From Amsterdam I flew to Edinburgh to meet a friend from the Australian vintage. We had not shared a cellar since 2016. The city goes dark by quarter to four in December, so the evenings are long and the bars fill early. We found one off the Royal Mile with a few hundred bottles on the gantry and worked through a short list of drams while we traded two and a half years of news. Two more harvests on one side of the table.
It was dark when we walked in and dark when we walked out. The Castle was lit above the rooftops the whole time.
— Lo