NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Think of VinExpo as the Cannes Film Festival of wine: 2,400 sellers from 45 countries and 49,000 buyers from 147 countries, all gathered in one spot in Bordeaux to schmooze, show off, make deals and party hard.Add to this the world’s longest floating bridge, at 1,400 feet, linking two huge exhibition areas on opposite sides of a man-made lake just north of the city’s centre. Looking like a red carpet rolled out over the water, it’s guaranteed not to sink under the weight of all the moving bodies, so they say.

VinExpo is the world’s largest wine and spirits trade show, a five-day event held every other year since 1981. Here wine people look for trends, deliver manifestos, reveal market surveys, launch new products, hear the latest industry gossip, attend fabulous chateau dinners and, depending on their stamina, taste hundreds of new wines from everywhere.

Last Friday night, hundreds of thousands of bottles were delivered under tight security; by opening time on Sunday morning, the whites were chilled, the glasses polished. A single customs official held up giant Gallo’s wine shipment, even though the company had paid big bucks to inhabit one of the ritzy new air-conditioned lakeside pavilions with private gardens and outside tables with umbrellas. The wine eventually arrived.

This year I’m the US journalist on the Jury Decouvertes, which means I’m tasting, spitting and talking at hundreds of elaborately decorated stands to discover what’s new and hot.

Rose wines are ubiquitous; a group of Provence producers is hosting a “pink hour” for “rosesmaniaques” at cafe tables that recall Saint-Tropez. I give stars, though, to a new Chilean bottling, 2007 Torres Santa Digna cabernet rose.

Other discoveries include a delicious Corsican white, 2006 Cuvee Castellu Vecchiu, and Fonseca’s luscious Terra Bella, the world’s first organic port. And who knew Moldavia made wine?

I should have worn sensible shoes: The main exhibition hall is more than a kilometre long. Several times a day I also cross the two-metre-wide floating bridge, soggy underfoot from rain on Day One. Handrails prevent exuberant attendees from falling or jumping in.

My days are bookended by bumper-to-bumper traffic jams, and my nights end long after midnight.

Monday evening at Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, after the 18 sweet Sauternes accompanied by foie gras, dinner included a parade of great vintages and ended with as much legendary 1961 Mouton and 1998 d’Yquem as you want. Drum rolls on wine barrels announced each course — no kidding — and the party’s finale was a simultaneous blend of opera, gold-and-white fireworks and dancing fountains against a backdrop of real lightning and thunder.

No one sleeps in. VinExpo is big business, which is why market leaders like Concho y Toro, Gallo and Grupo Dos Sete are here. So are the proverbial little guys, the ones making niche wines like premium kosher bottlings from organic grapes.

The worldwide wine and spirits market generated retail sales of $277 billion in 2005, and studies carried out for VinExpo predict it will rise to about $300 billion by 2010, with consumption growing by 266 million bottles a year. According to the study, the US will become the world’s leading consumer of wine by 2010, replacing current number one France.

Young, relentlessly hip Jean-Charles Boisset — Burgundy negociant, creator of cheap French Rabbit wines sold in shiny Tetra Paks and new owner of California’s De Loach Vineyards — is showing off packaging. The silky 2005 Deloach Sonoma Stage pinot noir ($85) is the first expensive US wine with a high- end screwcap known as the Stelvin Lux +.

His new Beaujolais comes in a quickly chillable, recyclable aluminium bottle: At the perfect temperature, an icon on the back turns blue. Forget the wine inside; the container has insouciance.

Clad in a mod-striped Gucci suit and swirly blue Gucci tie, Boisset’s got pretty good packaging himself.

At the Omnivins stand, I sit on a heart-shaped pink velvet cushion while sipping fruity Soif de Coeur (thirsty heart), which promises to help lonely hearts. If you go to the company’s website (www.soifdecoeur.com) and enter the code hidden on the back of the wine label, it puts you in touch with a soul mate. The wine is plonk, but I give the package an “A” for amusement.

In a version of the 19th-century art world’s Salon des Refuses, a dozen or so wine organisations, like brand-new Haut- les-Vins, are holding tastings outside VinExpo.

“VinExpo is so expensive,” says Eric Texier, a Rhone valley vigneron. “For me to have my own very small stand would have been at least 7,500 euros. Besides, the buyers I want aren’t there.”

No part of the wine world is left behind.

“It’s a no-brainer that the largest auction house in the world has to be here,” says David Elswood, international head of Christie’s wine department. One of the founding partners in VinExpo, Christie’s has the exclusive on holding auctions at the fair.

Normally I’d attend the auction, but this week I’ve snagged a coveted invite to the Fete de la Fleur at Chateau Smith-Haut-Lafitte in Graves. I’ll just have to sleep on the flight back to the US, right?