Success of wine festival in Macau reflects growing local interests in wine

The Macau wine scene is growing, as a large-scale wine and food festival held to promote wine culture shows.

The third edition of the Macau Wine & Dine Festival, a five-day event with wine and food tasting, pairing, educational seminars and international entertainment, welcomed more than 26,500 visitors, and raised sales by 68%, which made a new record for the event.

‘In the first two days, the majority of the visitors were local people or foreign workers who were off from work around the Cotai Strips area (white collar & blue collar),’ Fanny Ng, from one of the event exhibitors, Claret Wines, told DecanterChina.com.

Under the influence of Portuguese culture, Macau people tend to drink more Portuguese wines that are cheap and easy to match with their food.

In recent years, however, there is a growing interest in learning more about wine and buying wines from other countries.

‘The majority of the Wine & Dine Festival visitors were local people and tourists,’ said Mazea Zhou of Pudao Wines. ‘Our existing local customers held the strongest purchasing power.’

According the official estimation from the event organiser, 60% of the visitors to the event were local residents, whilst tourists from Mainland China and Hong Kong each account for 20% of the total number of guests.

‘Compared to last year, the quantity of Mainland Chinese visitors is decreasing, and expected revenue from this group drops a lot,’ said Zhou.

Ng also noticed that mainland visitors tend to buy a bottle to ‘drink on-site and to accompany with food… due to the restriction from the Chinese customs in which the number of bottles per person to carry has [been] limited to one.’

‘Those who have purchased more than one bottle or cases are local visitors,’ she added.

Additional report by Sally Cheng from Macau