/ Strategy
ProWein and Vinexpo put the whole wine trade in one hall for three days. That is genuinely valuable and genuinely expensive. Here is the honest math on what a show delivers, what it costs, and where steady outreach does the job a show cannot.
/ The short version
Search "ProWein" or "Vinexpo" and you are almost certainly a producer weighing whether to exhibit, and whether the cost is justified. It is a fair question, and the honest answer is not a simple yes or no. Trade shows do something no other channel does. They also cost more than most producers admit, and they leave undone the one task that actually turns a contact into a customer. The point of this piece is not to talk you out of a show. It is to show you exactly what you are buying, so you can decide whether to buy it, and what to pair it with.
These are the two giants of the wine trade calendar. ProWein, held every March in Dusseldorf, has long been the largest wine and spirits fair in the world, drawing thousands of exhibitors and tens of thousands of trade visitors from well over a hundred countries. Wine Paris, the Vinexpo event held every February, has grown fast and recently overtook ProWein on visitor numbers for the first time, pulling past fifty thousand visitors and surpassing the German fair that defined the category for decades. Between them they concentrate the global wine trade into a few halls on a few days, and that concentration is the product they sell.
It is worth knowing that the picture is shifting. ProWein's attendance has slipped in recent years, with exhibitor and visitor numbers down from their peak, while the Paris fair has climbed. The shows are not a fixed quantity, and where the buyers you want actually go matters more than which fair is biggest this year.
Be fair to the format, because it has real strengths. In three days you get face-time you could not buy any other way: a buyer tastes your wine, in person, alongside its competitors, and you read their reaction in real time. You get discovery, the chance encounter with an importer who was not looking for you and finds you anyway. You get the handshake and the human connection that a relationship-driven trade still runs on. And you get density, dozens of conversations compressed into a few days, in a setting where everyone present is there to do wine business. For a producer breaking into a new market, or for one whose wine genuinely needs to be tasted to be understood, that can be worth the price on its own.
Now the part the brochures skip. The booth is only the beginning. At a major fair the bare floor space is charged per square meter, the stand build is charged again on top at a few hundred euros per square meter, and then come the costs nobody puts in the budget: travel, accommodation in a city where hotel prices triple during the fair, shipping samples, glassware, printed materials, and the days of your own time, before and during. A modest independent stand at a major show, all in, commonly runs from the high thousands into the tens of thousands of euros once everything is counted. Regional and collective pavilions, often part-subsidized by a trade body or interprofession, are the cheaper way in and worth seeking out, but even those are not free, and they still cost you the days.
Then there are the three frantic days themselves. Standing for eight hours, talking to everyone who passes, collecting cards and scribbled notes, hoping the right buyer walks by at a moment you are not mid-conversation with someone else. It is real work, and it is exhausting, and at the end of it you go home with a stack of leads and a feeling of momentum.
Here is the uncomfortable part. The leads you carry home from a show are not deals. They are not even prospects yet. They are names that have to be contacted, qualified, and pursued in the weeks after, and that is precisely where the wheels come off. The research on trade shows across industries is brutal: the large majority of trade-show leads are never followed up at all. Studies put the share of leads that get zero follow-up around eighty percent, and the share of exhibitors who never follow up at all even higher. The money was spent to collect the contact. The contact then dies in a drawer.
This is the single biggest reason producers conclude a show "did not work." The show worked. It put the right people in front of them. What failed was everything after, the unglamorous, disciplined chasing that a tired producer back at a working estate, in the middle of a season, almost never sustains. A show is an event. Turning its leads into business is a system, and the show does not give you one.
You get the handshake and the human connection that a relationship-driven trade still runs on.
Set the two approaches side by side and the economics get clearer. A show concentrates a lot of contact into a high fixed cost. Targeted outreach spreads a much lower cost across a campaign that reaches a chosen list of importers, in the markets you want, on a schedule, with the follow-up built in. Across industries, the cost per qualified lead from a well-run outreach campaign tends to undercut the all-in cost of a show stand, not because the show's contacts are worse, but because so many of them are wasted for lack of follow-through, and because the show's cost is front-loaded whether the leads convert or not. The show's value is real but lumpy and one-off. Outreach's value is steadier and compounds, because the list, the sequences, and the relationships carry forward.
The trap is treating this as a choice. It is not. The producers who get the most out of a show are the ones who run outreach around it. Before the fair, you email the importers you most want to meet and book real appointments, so your three days are spent with qualified buyers instead of hoping they wander past. After the fair, you run every card you collected into a proper follow-up sequence, the thing eighty percent of exhibitors never do, so the leads you paid so much to gather actually get worked. Outreach is what makes a show pay. It fills the calendar the show cannot, warms the room before you arrive, and chases the leads after you leave.
Decide on purpose. A show makes sense when you are entering a market where your wine has to be tasted to land, when you can afford the outlay without betting the year on it, and, crucially, when you have a plan to work the leads afterward. Outreach wins when budget is tight, when precision matters more than spectacle, when your markets are spread across time zones a single fair cannot cover, or when you need a system that runs all year rather than an event that runs for three days.
That is the real distinction. A trade show is three days a year. Reaching importers is a year-round job. The fair can be a powerful part of the plan, but it cannot be the whole plan, because deals are not made on the show floor. They are made in the weeks of follow-up afterward, which is exactly the work a steady outreach system is built to do.