WOSA WORLD

South African Wine Festival 24th October 2014

29 October 2014

The 5th South African Wine Festival was presented with style at Serena Hotel in Kampala, Uganda where 16 SA wineries showed their wines to over 500 guests at a glittering event. This has become one of the important event on the calendar for Uganda and Wines of South African and is held in collaboration with South African Airways, Standard Banks, Serena Hotel, Sun International, Star Café and Browns Cheese.

Guests were treated to canapés and different wines in a walk around tasting and entertained by live band performance in the background with over 100 wines that were poured by Vunanai Wines, La Ric Mal, Kanonkop Wine Estate, Longridge Wine Estate, Creations Wine, Cape Diamond, UniWine, Diemersdal Wines, Rainbow’s End Wine, Deux Freres Wines, DGB, Robertson and Zais International an importer of 15 South African brands.  As the Ugandan wine culture has grown,  so has the demand to visit our beautiful country and this was a great opportunity for all stakeholders to interact with key Trade, Media and Consumers and expose them to our wines on offer and our South African tourism offerings.

This year also marked a significant value addition approach by WOSA and the organizer of the event who arranged a B2B session for  exhibiting producers  with importers and distributors prior to the main event. This initiative was to create an opportunity for producers to meet and engage with importers in a formal business environment. We had positive feedback from exhibitors who are confident that our efforts will result in an increase of South African wine exports into the East African markets and not just Uganda, as some trade that visited the event are also active in markets such as Kenya and Rwanda.

Some of the producers attended the event for the second time as a follow-up activity after relationships built from last year’s event and have now secured first orders with their importers.

The event had wide pre-event media coverage and we anticipate more coverage this week.

Detail report and information on Uganda market can be obtained from Matome Mbatha on request emails: matome@wosa.co.za

- Matome Mbatha