China Wine Summit

“Discover China: Chinese Wine Summit” is the largest and most prestigious wine summit in China hosted annually by Shanghai Morning Post and Tastespirit. The summit serves as a focal point where Chinese fine wines and wine critics of the highest-caliber meet and a bridge for an exchange of ideas and knowledge between renowned wine critics and wine professionals in China.”

Date： 15-16/05/2021

Venue：Shanghai International Convention Center, No.2727 Binjiang Avenue, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China

Organizers：Shanghai Morning Post, TasteSpirit, Terroir Sense Wine Review

Supporters：Shanghai Press Group

2021 Expert Panel

Ian D’Agata

Editor-in-Chief of Terroir Sense Wine Review

President of Terroir Sense Academy

Vice President of Association Internationale des Terroirs

Chief Scientific Officer of TasteSpirit

Ian D’Agata has been writing and educating about wines for over thirty years. Internationally recognized as an distinguished expert, critic and writer on many wine regions, his two most recent, award winning books Native Wine Grapes of Italy and Italy’s Native Wine Grape Terroirs (both published by University of California Press) are widely viewed as the “state of the art” textbooks on the subject. The former book won the Louis Roederer International Wine Awards Book of the Year in 2015 and was ranked as the top wine books of the year for the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times and the New York Times, while the latter was named among the best wine books of the year by Food & Wine Magazine and the NY Times.

As a former staff writer at Stephen Tanzer’s International Wine Cellar, Contributing Editor at Decanter, Senior editor at Vinous, and contributing writer at numerous other magazines and websites, he has also written extensively on the wines of France, Canada and other wine producing nations. Along with his former student and best pupil, Michele Longo, Ian is also currently the co-author of the Italy section in Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Book of Wine, the world’s best-selling wine guide.

In recognition of his work devoted to the communication of wine knowledge and research, in 2015 Ian was named to Italy’s prestigious Accademia della Vite e del Vino, Italy’s association of university professors, researchers and academicians in the field of wine.

Over the years, he has been honoured with numerous other awards and titles, including the Foglia d’Oro from the city of Dolegna in the Collio viticultural area, the Comitato Grandi Cru’s “Italy’s best wine journalist”, the 2016 Les Plumes d’Or awards nomination by French wine producers, winemakers and chefs (associated with Le Grandes Tables du Monde) as one of the world’s eight leading international wine writers and the 2017 Cuvée Award of Excellence (Ontario, Canada).

As a trained medical doctor at the hospitals of the Universities of Cincinnati, Harvard, Montréal and UCSF, Ian has won grants in cellular and molecular biology, which explains his interest and current research focus on the discovery and correct identification of forgotten, native, grape varieties all over the world and to have wines made from all of them once again.

Online Participant Experts

Paolo Basso

Paolo Basso, one of the most refined palates in the world, has excelled in the world of fine food and rare wines for over twenty years and acquired an extraordinary range of professional experience of activities, partnerships and international awards. He has won several awards starting from the most prestigious World’s Best Sommelier awarded by the “Association de la Sommelerie Internationale” in 2013. He has also received a long list of other major awards: Best European Sommelier in 2010, Second Best ASI World Sommelier in 3 consecutive years (2010, 2007 and 2000). His “international career” was launched in 1997 when he was crowned Best Swiss Sommelier.Born in 1966, he has dual – Italian and Swiss – nationality and is originally from the Varese area. He has worked in various restaurants with one or more Michelin stars in both Switzerland and abroad and has become a specialist in rare and collectors’ wines. He has also been a member of the jury for renowned international wine competitions such as the Decanter World Wine Award, the Mundial du Pinot Noir, the Mundial du Merlot, the Swiss Wine Guide. Furthermore, he is a professor at the prestigious Swiss Changins Wine School and the Hotel Management School (Ecole Hôtelière) in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Worldsom Sommelier Academy in Bordeaux, France. He has been Guest Speaker at many workshops on wine as well as fine food events all over the world. He is a wine trader and consultant through his company Paolo Basso Wine in Lugano (Switzerland) as well as a wine producer. His first own label red wine was dedicated to his daughter, “Il Rosso di Chiara”.

Bernard Burtschy

Bernard Burtschy is a world-renowned wine critic, President of the Wine Press Association of France (APV) , board member of the International Federation of Wine Journalists and Writers and special advisor of TasteSpirit. He has worked as senior contributor of La Revue du Vin de France and Gault & Millau. Since 2007, he is the wine expert and columnist of France’s most prestigious and largest daily, Le Figaro and Le Figaro Magazine. He co-founded the website Avis du Vin of Le Figaro, the No.1 French wine website in terms of traffic. He holds a Ph.D. in Statistics and is a retired professor at the prestigious Telecom ParisTech in France.