On my first visit to India, in 2002, I met one of the country’s first wine writers, a young woman who told me that her friends would routinely ask her, “What’s the point of wine? Whisky gets you drunk so much quicker.” How things have changed. Despite punitive taxation and mind-boggling regulation and paperwork, India now has a thriving wine culture – or at least its vast middle class and “upper crust” (the name of an Indian glossy magazine) do.
Taxes and duties on imported wine are imposed by both national customs and the individual state. They are cumulatively so high that consumers can pay 10 to 12 times the initial cost of a bottle when they buy wine from one of India’s relatively small but growing number of wine retailers. A basic bottle of Jacob’s Creek, the leading imported brand, could, for example, easily cost the equivalent of £20 off a shelf, and many times more on a hotel wine list.
The hotels, in particular the big chains, played the crucial initial role in introducing Indians to wine, and they still largely provide the setting for the wine dinners sporadically organised by foreign wine producers trying to establish themselves. Château Margaux, for example, a first growth keen to repeat Lafite’s success in China, flew in Alain Passard of L’Arpège in Paris to design and cook a vegetarian dinner to go with their wines last December.
