Grace to the gold medal and “National Trophy” title for the best Croatian wine, awarded for the Momjan Muscat San Salvatore 2011 at last year’s international wine challenge in London, the Benvenuti winery from Kaldir in Istria is the only one from Croatia invited to participate in the fourth Wine Vision conference, held in December in Santa Rosa in California’s Sonoma County wine region. The Kaldir winery was represented by Albert Benvenuti, who said upon his return that being invited to such a gathering, together with a hundred of the best rated wineries from around the world, is an exceptional honour not just for their winery, but for Istrian and Croatian winemaking in general, Glas Istre reported on January 16, 2017.
“An invitation such as this one places us on the list of most prestigious global wine names and opens up doors to the most demanding markets,” said Albert Benvenuti, who runs the family winery together with brother Nikola. Benvenuti wines are exported in ten countries, distributed in the US in Chicago and Boston areas, while Albert Benvenuti’s stay in California was used to negotiate with local importers.
The gathering in Sonoma, a region with 550 wineries and second only to Napa Valley, was actually a congress on current trends in global winemaking and associated industries, from packaging design to marketing. Through some 20 lectures, presentations, panel discussion and workshops, leading world wine experts presented to the world winemaking crème de la crème the global wine moment, with a tour of several renowned wineries. Among the lectures he attended, Albert Benvenuti singled out the one on exporting wine to the Chinese market.
“We heard precious advice on selling wine in China, to allow local marketing experts to shape the brand and logo, since showing up just with your own, you may go unnoticed or copied,” said Benvenuti. Interesting was also the lecture on trends in wine packaging – the glass bottle is above all, but especially on the American market, wine is more common in paper packaging and even cans, with American experts predicting an excellent commercial future for tin packaging.
The largest rise of interest on the world market is in rose wines, the lecturers added. Results of market research were also presented, which analysed if instead of luring to wine consumers of beer and hard liqueur, if wine could be interesting for consumers who don’t drink alcohol, showing that the segment could be interested in light fresh wines with fruity aromas, which compensates for the increasingly less popular carbonated non-alcoholic beverages.
