Italy Comes to Shanghai, Brings 500 Wines, Leaves Nobody Sober

Shanghai Coffee Capital... Now... Wine Capital?

Every year, Shanghai does the thing where it quietly becomes a more credible wine city, and every year the people who've been saying "yeah but it's still not really a wine city" are standing there holding a glass of 2008 Barolo looking a little sheepish. The Xinhua-Ian D'Agata VINO100 Italian Wine Fair, which ran May 22-23, is making the sheepishness worse.

This was the third edition. Last year, the event landed well enough that everyone involved decided to do it bigger, add more producers, add more masterclasses, and also, in a move that should get more headlines than it's currently getting, publish a guide to Chinese wines under the same Xinhua-D'Agata banner. We'll come back to that.

Over 60 Italian Estates Landed In Shanghai

The main event on May 23 was the trade floor, which packed in close to 60 Italian estates pouring upwards of 500 wines. Barolo and Barbaresco, obviously. Amarone, Brunello, Super Tuscans. The stuff that wins every "Italy's Greatest Hits" quiz night at whatever wine bar you've been going to. But also: wines from Sardinia and Lazio and Abruzzo, obscure indigenous grape varieties that most of us cannot spell or pronounce but that a certain kind of Shanghai oenophile (you know who you are, you have strong opinions about Etna and you use the word "terroir" in conversation without apology) will absolutely lose their minds over. Orange wines made by traditional methods. Sparkling wines nobody's heard of. The producers themselves were physically present, which is the kind of thing that sounds unremarkable until you're actually standing there having a winemaker from Sicily explain, via interpreter, exactly why their single-vineyard bottling is different from the one next to it, and you realize you've been standing there for forty minutes and your glass is still full.

The crowd itself skewed older and was almost entirely Chinese. The only foreigners in the room were mostly the producers standing behind their own tables, which is a detail worth sitting with for a moment: an Italian wine fair in Shanghai in 2026, and the international contingent is on the supply side. (Make of that what you will about where the serious wine money in this city actually lives now.)

The China Wine Guide Announced

The night before, May 22, was the gala dinner and announcement evening at Jin Mao Center on North Bund. Ian D'Agata, the Italian wine writer and expert who is the D'Agata in Xinhua-D'Agata, unveiled the annual 100 Best Italian Wines list. Fine. Grand. Important if you care about that sort of thing. But the more interesting announcement was the launch of the Xinhua-D'Agata China Wine Guide, a systematic attempt to document Chinese wineries, domestic bottlings, and the country's producing regions the same way the great European guides have documented Burgundy and Tuscany for decades. It's a real thing. Someone sat down and actually did it. (This is actually a significant event in the development of China's wine industry and probably deserves a longer piece than we're giving it here, but this is a post-event wrap and you're busy, so: notable, watch this space.)

Stuff You Might Have Missed...

The seven masterclasses deserve a brief obituary for every other masterclass you've attended in Shanghai in the last five years, because this is the kind of lineup that makes those look like a Tuesday afternoon tasting at a Gubei bottle shop. Elena Walch's Kastelaz Gewürztraminer in vertical, going back through rare old vintages. Fifteen years of Isole e Olena's Cepparello, vertical. Lupicaia across sixteen years, ten vintages. A Castello di Ama and Tiberio session featuring two female winemakers on a world tour, with Shanghai as a stop. Jermann's old-vintage whites against current bottles. Passopisciaro's Contrada G from Etna, vertical. And Cogno's Barolo Ravera, vertical. All of it with the producers in the room. All of it co-hosted by D'Agata. If you got into more than three of these, you either know someone, planned very far ahead, or have a flexibility of schedule that the rest of us actively envy. Oh, and before we forget, jamon vendors made an appearance as well.

The VINO100 fair has figured something out that a lot of wine events in this city are still working on, which is the difference between a trade event with consumers in it and an actual event that means something to both. The producers made the difference. The China wine guide announcement was genuinely newsworthy. And the masterclasses were, by all accounts, legitimately excellent rather than just very expensive.

So, How Was It?

Same time next year. You probably already know if you're going.