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The Indian wine market – as opposed to the Indian wines that I had come across from time to time – first got my attention two years ago, when I was attending the Skalli & Rein Wine Experience conference in Paris. Speakers presented the opportunities of various emerging wine markets, and while the advice to exporters to China was that the traffic lights there were still on amber, the advice from Rajeev Samant, founder of Sula Vineyards, was that for India they were definitely on green.
The annual consumption of wine in India is less than 10ml per head – hardly even two small spoonfuls a year. Only 1% of the country drinks wine, but with a population of 1.15 billion people, that leaves a target market of 11.5 million, and one that is growing just as fast as the number of Indian millionaires. Furthermore, the average Indian is by no means an abstainer, for there are 1.2 billion litres of branded spirits sold every year alongside the 3.1 billion litres of ‘country liquor’. And India is reputedly the world’s largest market for beer.
Yet advertising, promoting and soliciting the consumption of any form of alcohol is totally illegal, so brands are deprived of any marketing support. It is said that the ebullient Dr Vijay Mallya, owner of United Breweries (purchaser of Scottish whisky firm Whyte & Mackay) and referred to in UK newspaper The Times as ‘the Branson of Bangalore’, created the startlingly successful Kingfisher Airlines as a standard bearer for his Kingfisher beer.
Despite high taxes, wine consumption has almost trebled since 2000 to 1.2 million cases, and though imported wines continue to be hampered by outrageous taxation to protect local wine production, their growth continues at 30% a year.
I have to confess that such growth is very much in my own interest, for I am one of the founding partners of The Wine Society of India, a mail order company that supplies its members with six bottles of wine four times a year, under the Four Seasons Wine Discoveries programme . Shortly after the conference in Paris, I was approached by an old friend and wine lover, David Banford, who had launched a similar venture in the US in the early 1990s. India was top on my list of countries, as yet unvisited, to spend time in, and the idea of being involved in such a buoyant market very much appealed to me. Banford, who grew up in Mumbai, was prepared to return there and run the business, while I looked after the wine selections. Over 18 months we spent a lot of time and money launching our new baby, including giving the largest wine tasting – 900 thirsty guests – ever held in India (a record that will not be broken soon by anyone with any sense) without actually getting very far.
Following a meeting at Vinexpo in Bordeaux last June, we decided to team up with Dr Vijay Mallya’s companies, who were creating their own wine division, and earlier this year held our first launch party in Bangalore. We will launch in Delhi in the summer.
It was evident from the start that what consumers lacked was information. There are numerous wine clubs in India where members meet to drink and discuss wines. Even the Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET) has recently opened under the tutelage of Mumbai-based Sanjay Menon, the second largest Indian wine importer. Aman Dhall, the country’s largest importer, with such brands as Jadot, Guigal, Frescobaldi and Gaja to Menon’s Laroche, Bouchard Père et Fils, JP Moueix and Antinori, is heavily into wine education in Delhi.
The advantage, compared to my forays into China and Japan, is that English is the national language. Since this language dominates wine information, communication is easy. The disadvantage is that although there is a culture of drinking wine in India, and the Indians themselves are generous and social animals, up to now there has not been a culture of buying wine. The government-controlled liquor stores are places that a wine drinker would never set foot in, and only last year were supermarkets and other retailers allowed to sell wine. Since it was the UK supermarkets that democratised wine here from the early 1970s, there is hope. A new chain of shops called Sante, eight-strong at the moment, with 25 planned by the end of 2008, is seeing wine outperform beer sales on a ratio of two to one. One day soon, even Decanter may be on the newsstands.
On my last visit, I spent a day at Rajeev Samant’s Sula Vineyards in Nashik, four to five hours north of Mumbai. Samant sold his first bottle in 2000, and projections for this year are 180,000 cases from his own vineyards. His tasting room is packed at weekends and with a four-lane road planned for completion by the end of the year, the journey time will be halved. Napa coming to Nashik? It could just be something to bet on.
Steven Spurrier is Decanter’s consultant editor, and a renowned taster
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