Must Wine Summit starts today in Estoril and travels later to the Azores
The Must Wine Summit starts today at the Estoril Congress Center in Cascais, Lisbon district, and ends on Friday, with some participants traveling later to the Azores.
The Must – Fermenting Ideas (fermenting ideas, in Portuguese translation) summit is an international forum that attracts professionals, journalists and opinion leaders from the wine world to Portugal.
According to the website of the organization of the event, the summit will have more than 500 specialists from the wine industry, coming from 31 different countries.
Must start today at 9:00 am at the Estoril Congress Center, with the first speaker being Adam Lechmere, editor of the London magazine of the luxury segment Club Oenologique.
The summit ends on the afternoon of Friday 28, but 30 people, including speakers and journalists, travel the next day to the Azores.
This group of 30 wine specialists will visit Pico Island and the city of Horta, in Faial, between June 29 and 30, said the regional director of Tourism of the Azores, Cíntia Martins.
The official said that she “sees this trip with great pleasure” because it is “a vehicle that privileges the promotion of the wine of the island of Pico and the region of the Azores”.
The group of speakers and journalists from the United States, Canada, and Europe will travel to Pico Island on June 29, where they will visit the Wine Museum, have various activities, meet producers and wine culture on the island and visit various institutions.
This group of 30 people will be in Horta, on the island of Faial, on June 30, returning to Lisbon the same day.
Cíntia Martins said that “the primary vocational matrix of the Azores is nature” and that the region wants to “consolidate” itself in this type of tourism.
But he added that the Azores could also “boost wine tourism in the region”, saying that with this momentum, since the wine tourism market has “great potential”, the region could “capture new high-value markets” so that ” can continue to grow and have sustainable tourism. ”
He also recalled that the landscape of the Pico Island vineyard was classified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2014.
The Regional Director of Tourism of the Azores said that the region should “boost all resources without mortgaging nature, which is the best,” and recalled that at the end of 2018 the autonomous region recorded about 2.5 million overnight stays and that this year has continued to observe “a growth”.
“We are in a phase of growth, but we do not intend to massify the destination,” said Cíntia Martins, considering that betting on wine tourism could boost tourism with greater value and more sustainable in the coming years.
