The Paper Booklet Is Dead. The Wine Industry Just Hasn't Buried It Yet
The printed wine event booklet survived its purpose by about a decade. What's actually replacing it?
At some point in the next eighteen months, a major wine event in the United States is going to skip the printed program for the first time. It will be slightly awkward. A few attendees will complain on social media. And then everyone will realize they didn't actually need it.
A tradition that outlasted its purpose
The printed wine event booklet is one of those industry artifacts that survived its own usefulness by about a decade. The original purpose was reasonable. There was no other way to give attendees a list of producers, regions, and table assignments. You had to print it.
That hasn't been true since around 2015. Every wine festival you've attended in the past five years could have replaced the booklet with a QR code and a digital wine list or catalog. Most didn't. The reasons given — "our attendees expect a paper booklet," "the producers want their name in print," "it's part of the experience" — are real, but they're loyalty to a format, not loyalty to a function.
Meanwhile, what the paper booklet actually does for the attendee has gotten worse, not better. The print run is set six weeks in advance, so any producer change after that gets a verbal correction at the door. The booklet is heavy or so condensed that you can hardly read the content. Importantly, after the event it goes to waste, gets put in a drawer at home, and never leaves a traceable memory of your tasting. Two weeks later you cannot find the wine you tasted.
What the booklet was actually for
To be fair to the booklet, it had three jobs.
It oriented the attendee — gave them a map, a table list, a producer index. It promoted the producers — printed their names, sometimes a paragraph, in a permanent record. And it served as the souvenir — the thing the attendee took home as proof of having been there.
A digital experience can do all three of these things and do them better. The list is searchable. The producer index can be filtered by region, varietal, or "looking for importer" tag. Table number can be tracked with one click. The souvenir can be a saved profile that the attendee keeps on their phone, with a list of every wine they marked as a favorite, attached to producer contacts the attendee can actually follow.
What the digital wine catalog does that the paper booklet cannot is the fourth thing. It extends the relationship past 5 PM on Sunday.
What replaced it, not always successfully
However, most "digital" wine event programs you might have seen so far have been one of these two things, unfortunately both flawed.
The first is a PDF of the paper booklet, uploaded to a website, with a QR code at the door. This is paper pretending to be digital. It loses the weight of the booklet but gains nothing else. The PDF doesn't search well on a phone, doesn't update in real time, doesn't capture what the attendee saved.
The second is a custom event app that the attendee has to download. Custom apps fail because nobody wants to download an app for a four-hour event. The download rate is typically below 15 percent. The event director thinks they've gone digital. They've actually built a digital booklet that 85 percent of attendees never opened or engaged with.
The format that works in 2026 is the third option. A web-based digital experience accessed by QR code, with no app to download, no login required to browse, and a save layer that captures the attendee's interest without friction. That's the true digital wine list.
"A digital experience can do all three of the paper booklet's jobs and do them much better."
Three things the best wine events are doing now
The events that have moved past paper share three habits.
Food & Wine Classic in Aspen is one of the premier food and wine celebrations in the United States. What Aspen does really well is not only creating digital wine experience for their attendees but also ensuring that every wine exhibitor can use the digital tools to market and sell their wines.
They publish the lineup digitally a week before the event, with full search and filter, so attendees can plan their walk-through before they arrive. Attendance and engagement both jump when this is done well. Colangelo & Partners, a leading New York-based agency that organizes a broad range of wine events across the country, shares the lineup with registered wine lovers so that they can design their wine experience smartly.
They make the QR code at each table the primary mechanism for capture — not a paper note, not a business card. The attendee scans, saves, rates, walks away with a record.
They send a post-event summary to every attendee within forty-eight hours, listing the wines the attendee saved and connecting them to the producer's contact information. This single step changes the after-event behavior more than anything else in the playbook.
The producers who adapted first
A small group of producers and importers figured out the shift before the event organizers did. Their move was to bring their own QR codes to events, even when the event still used paper booklets. The QR code on their table linked to a digital profile, where the attendee could save, rate, follow, and find a contact.
Cork & Bottle Imports publishes their entire portfolio and uses digital catalogs during wine tastings when it is important to capture the audience data, engage them, and provide unique experience.
It's the format every event is going to adopt within three years, so the producers who did it first will have the best after-event relationships when the rest of the industry catches up. The pattern keeps showing up across categories. The early adopters in any format shift collect a disproportionate share of the relationships that compound.
Where the industry goes from here
The path is clear enough now. Print will retreat to ceremonial use — programs for sponsors, framed posters at the venue, maybe a single souvenir card. The working materials of the event — the pour list, the producer index, the map, the lead capture, the post-event summary — will be entirely digital within five years. The events that are doing this now have a significant head start in attendee retention and producer satisfaction.
The booklet will hang on for a few more cycles. It's a comfortable habit. But the math has already shifted, whether or not the budget meetings have caught up.
Where ShareVino fits
ShareVino built its event layer around the assumption that the booklet is on its way out. The digital pour list, the producer profile, the save-and-follow layer, and the post-event summary all live in one platform. Organizers send one intro email to their exhibitors and a QR code. The producers update their own profiles. The attendees scan, save, and walk away with a list of wines they can actually find again. If you're running a wine event in 2026, our wine event solutions are worth thinking through before the next planning cycle. Some of the leading wine events in the US, Canada, and Latin America, build their digital catalogs with ShareVino, providing an exceptional wine experience both to attendees and exhibitors.