With a full house at its exhibition space, Barcelona Wine Week (BWW), which will be held from 4 to 6 April at Fira de Barcelona’s Montjuïc venue, is establishing itself as the benchmark event for Spanish wine. Around 650 Spanish wineries and more than 60 Spanish Protected Designations of Origin are taking part in the second edition, which will focus on international business and on sustainability and digitisation as major trends for the future.

Objective achieved with only a few weeks to celebrate the event. Barcelona Wine Week achieves full capacity in Hall 8 of Fira de Barcelona’s Montjuïc venue, 10,000m2 of net exhibition space, a 20% increase in the number of participating wineries and a 50% increase in the presence of quality labels compared to the previous edition. The event consolidates the leadership of its unique proposal, which brings together a quality offer representative of all the geographical and varietal diversity of wine in Spain, mainly structured by region.

Within the show, the BWW Lands area will grow by 30% compared to the first edition and will bring together a large part of the Spanish Protected Designations of Origin (PDO). The wineries that will add the largest number of wineries will be: DO Cava, DO Empordà, DO Jumilla, DO Montsant, DO Navarra, DO Penedès, DO Ribera del Duero, DO Rueda, DO Terra Alta, DO Ca Rioja and DO Ca Priorat. In this space, structured by quality labels, you will find both small wineries and established groups of the stature of Familia Torres, Bodegas Pinord, Abadal, Grupo Enate and José Pariente.

For its part, BWW Brands will bring together some of the most emblematic and recognised wine brands, together with companies offering equipment, accessories and services for the wine sector. In addition, Protos, Marqués del Atrio, Perelada and the Freixenet group are some of the major wineries that will be exhibiting for the first time at the show, while Araex, Juvé&Camps, Matarromera, Bodegas Manzanos, Iguazú Vinos and Vermuts Miró, among others, will once again be taking part.

“This is a great edition that has received the support of wine companies, quality labels and institutions in the sector. We will bring together the largest offer of quality wines in Spain with the objective of promoting business and the opening of new markets, and thereby help a sector at a key moment to address its great challenges and opportunities for the future,” says Javier Pagés, president of BWW and the DO Cava.

International drive
In this sense, Barcelona Wine Week promotes its clear international focus by contributing to the wine market’s reactivation, encouraging the culmination of business deals and favouring exports. Therefore, through the Hosted Buyers programme, around 350 international wine buyers from 40 countries, mainly from Europe, Latin America and North America, will visit the trade show to meet with exhibitors. These are major opinion leaders from distribution companies, importers and supermarket chains whose presence at the event will lead to more than 4,000 business meetings with exhibiting companies. They will be joined by 1,300 national buyers from large-scale distribution, retail and specialised outlets.

Sustainability at the centre of lectures and tastings
Local varieties as a point of reference for sustainable viticulture will be the main focus of many of the activities that will take place in the BWW Hub, the area in which, with the help of around 80 experts, more than 30 sessions will be held aimed at enhancing the educational and sensory experiences linked to wine, some of which will also be focused on business.

Master of Wine Pedro Ballesteros and Sarah Jane Evans; winemakers Miguel A. and Mireia Torres, Carlos Moro, Mauricio González Gordon and Núria Altés; sommeliers Ferran Centelles and Giorgia Scaramella and the professor of viticulture at the University of La Rioja, Fernando Martínez de Toda, among others, will discuss sustainability in the world of wine and participate in tastings and presentations.

All those attending the show will be able to enjoy the ‘Wine Tasting Journey / Hidden grapes’, a wine bar with 47 local minority grape varieties, some of them as unusual and little known as bruñal, caiño blanco, mizancho, moneu, garnacha peluda or tortosí. In this spacious self-tasting area, you will be able to taste 57 carefully selected references from small productions, many of which are difficult to find on the market.

Wine tourism and digitalisation
Wine tourism 4.0, digitalisation, innovation and business opportunities will be other central themes of the sessions scheduled at the BWW Hub, with the participation of renowned experts such as the president of Chartier World LAB Barcelona, François Chartier; the Master of Wine Frank Smulders; the guidebook authors José Peñín, Andrés Proensa and Lluís Tolosa; the sommeliers María José Huertas and Zoltan Nagy; and the general director of the Spanish Wine Market Observatory, Rafael del Rey.

Likewise, BWW Gastronomy will be the space where wine will be highlighted in the restaurant industry through its wine pairing proposals: a total of 27 wine references will be served -including white, black, rosé, sparkling and sweet wines-, which will be paired with their respective 27 dishes. Nine different pairings will be offered on each of the three days of the show.

In addition, from 1 to 8 April, the BWW Likes the City programme will involve various restaurants, hotels, specialised shops and cultural spaces around the city of Barcelona, which will show their complicity with the world of wine by offering tastings, food and wine pairings and other experiences both to professionals visiting the trade fair and to citizens interested in wine culture.

Some of the establishments and cultural centres that have joined this initiative are the Mandarin Orienta Hotel, MOCO Museum, Bar Treze, Lapso Studios and Colella Restaurant. In addition, within the framework of BWW Likes the CIty, the Barcelona Rosé International Bubbles Awards ceremony and the celebration of the G-Night, the great Grenache party, will take place.