Comment: Forget the wine fair

Every May a familiar flurry of emails drops into my inbox. They are from wineries and PRs all begging me to visit their stands at the London International Wine Fair.

As a forward-thinking licensee you might think visiting the fair is a vital opportunity to get some real insight into the market and obtain some great sales contacts. Particularly in view of the Wine & Spirit Trade Association's call this week for pubs to a make more of their wine offer in pubs.

To be frank, I wouldn't bother. No matter how much the organisers try to dress it up, the fair is in no way designed for the pub trade. In previous years I have attended the attitude towards licensees from exhibitors has ranged from the completely ambivalent to the borderline hostile.

While I exclude the big wine brand owners and generic bodies such as Wines of South Africa and Sopexa from this criticism, the fact remains that the majority of exhibitors are more concerned with getting their wines onto the shelves of Tesco.

And many of them have quite openly told me this. Or, on seeing my badge displaying the name 'The Publican', they have pretended not to have seen me. It is a quite incredible attitude!

So keen have the organisers been to try to convince licensees of the need to go along that they have created an on-trade-only section. In comparison with the rest of the fair it looked like supermarket shelves late on a Saturday night, after the weekend shoppers have ploughed through them.

And until the many wine houses and wholesalers that believe the pub trade is beneath them change their tune, I have no intention of encouraging licensees to waste their time by attending.