Web

Enoforum Web, the first technical and scientific conference for the wine sector held totally online, with 30 speakers in internet connection from Spain, Italy, France, USA, Australia, Argentina, Chile, South Africa – was concluded on May 7, 2020.

Enoforum is a congress format created twenty years ago by the Italian company Vinidea, which has shown a progressive growth in its Italian, Portuguese and Spanish editions, to become the largest technical-scientific congress on wine in Europe. At the last Italian edition, held in Vicenza in May 2019, over 1200 technicians from the sector attended 120 presentations of the results recently obtained by 40 viticultural and oenological research groups from all over the world.

The Spanish edition of Enoforum 2020 was due to take place in Zaragoza on 7-8th of May, but the COVID emergency forced to cancel the on-site conference. However, thanks to the experience in webinar management gained by the Vinidea team over the past years, we successfully accomplished an immediate transfer of original content to an online format which allowed the conference to continue uninterrupted, with only the loss of tastings and live exhibition space.

Thanks to the collaboration of Antonio Palacios of Excell Iberica, and the patronage of the OIV (International Organisation of Vine and Wine), PTV (Wine Technology Platform) and numerous Spanish oenologists’ associations, Enoforum Web has had a wide resonance among the Spanish-speaking technicians to whom it was addressed, and has registered a huge success with over 2000 participants from Spain (60%), South America (23%), the rest of Europe (7%) and North America (4%). Although unfamiliar to many speakers and congress participants, the internet format easily maintained the schedule of events, allowed for presentation of high quality scientific content, highlighted practical and applicative relevance, and supported an unexpected degree of direct participant interaction through written questions and surveys.

According to Gianni Trioli, Enoforum’s creator and President of Vinidea, “Enoforum Web represents a milestone in technical and scientific disclosure for the wine world. The new digital technologies, even if not easy to use, offer enormous opportunities for international experts to interact with technicians from all over the world: Enoforum Web was attended by technicians from 40 countries around the world, many of whom probably would have never had the chance to participate in a high-level face-to-face conference. We are also very pleased to see 13% of students among the Enoforum Web audience: we are happy to offer access to this international perspective to the technicians of tomorrow. I don’t think that webinars and web-conferences will ever become an equivalent alternative to conferences, seminars, face-to face courses and exhibition fairs, but they certainly represent a method of knowledge transfer that will become more and more important over the next years. We are proud to have been a pioneer in the wine sector and to have acquired the tools and skills to reach such a wide audience with quality content”.

The presentation recorded during Enoforum Web are available on www.infowine.com – Internet Journal of Viticulture and Oenology