Here's a piece I just wrote about Vinitaly.
Italians make wine in every region of their country, from hundreds of different grape varieties. These wines range in style from completely traditional and distinctive to slick, modern and faceless. This diversity is on display at the enormous trade fair Vinitaly, which is held in Verona every year around Easter. (For San Franciscans, the display area is slightly larger than all of Moscone Center, which is to say: huge.) Although Vinitaly is chaotic (4,300 wineries represented, the occasional staggering drunk on the weekend, parking nightmares) it is an invaluable opportunity for importers. Instead of having to make appointments, drive all over the countryside looking for wineries, and be polite to an anxious producer for several hours even if the first taste tells me I'm wasting my time, I walk over to, say, the Campania area, and go from booth to booth, tasting and moving on; I can research a new area pretty well in a few hours, rather than days or weeks. (Then I visit the producers, of course, but only the ones I know I'm serious about.)
We import wine mostly from very small family-owned wineries, and surprisingly almost all of them come to Vinitaly. (When I think of trade fairs I think mostly of larger companies, but not here.) They will usually band together and share a small area, perhaps with a few café tables and chairs; for example our producers Ignaz Niedrist and Andreas Widmann share a booth with several friends of the same calibre. (If I like the wines of one producer in a communal booth I will usually taste the others, too, as they are often of similar style and quality.) At the other extreme the largest wineries will have palatial 'stands', sometimes with several floors, large multimedia displays, Formula 1 cars, blatant objectification of women, et cetera. The way a winery presents itself at Vinitaly says a great deal about the style of their wines; my wineries might go so far as to bring a jar of soil from their vineyards with them, but that's about it for glitz. Well, soil and salame, lots of salame.
The day starts at about 9:30. Hundreds of visitors from all over the world mill around outside the gates, waiting for the battle to begin. At 9:30 the turnstiles are opened and everyone who is serious about Italian wine starts to crowd into the fairgrounds; I've been doing this for more than 15 years and I have to admit, it's still exciting. You have the sense that the whole world of Italian wine is laid out before you, all sorts of unknown gems lying on the ground waiting to be picked up. Once inside you have the choice of a number of 'pavilions,' which are in fact large brutish industrial-looking buildings (or sometimes huge tents), most of which are dedicated to the wines of a particular region of Italy, for example Tuscany or Campania. The fair is so spread out that most veterans try to taste building by building, as it takes perhaps ten minutes to walk from one end of the fair to the other.
I have found that the best way to find great producers in a region is to ask other great producers, whether already in our book or not, as they know who's doing good work and are almost always willing to discuss it. I usually taste just a few examples of a prospective producer's wines, to see if the style and quality of the wines are consistent with the rest of our selection. Any suggestion of off aromas or new wood (hmm, maybe new wood is an off aroma, there's a thought) and I thank them and move on. But every so often I put my nose in the glass and find just what I'm looking for: distinctive, typical, clean, expressive wine. It makes the whole thing worthwhile.