Plenty to whine about at Shanghai's Intex wine show

For someone from Australia accustomed to international wine shows, the Shanghai wine show in early June was a fascinating experience. Sadly, most of those experiences were not pleasant.

Companies clustered around the entrance to Intex, the international exhibition center in Shanghai, and employed attractive young women in miniskirts to market their wines. Most winemakers I spoke with talked of the inverse relationship of the skirts and the wine. The shorter the skirts, the worse the wine. Many of the skirts were very revealing.

Some companies presented their wine in the most appalling way, offering white wine in paper cups at room temperature. This was an insult to the wine and the customer. White wine needs to be chilled for one to appreciate the flavor, especially in Shanghai's humid summer heat. And to offer wine to someone who knows about wine in a tiny paper cup the size of a thimble is both stingy and silly. It is simply not possible to appreciate the wine in that sort of container.