Vinod Tandon was savouring a glass of bright, fruity cabernet franc-shiraz at the bar in his club in Delhi last week when his wife Monica uttered words that cause him to sputter and nearly choke.
“It’s not bad for an Indian wine, is it?” mused Ms. Tandon, holding her glass up toward the light.
“Indian! Indian! Is this Indian?” gasped Mr. Tandon.
Why yes – his glass of red was Indian, from Fratelli Wines, the rising star in India’s wine scene. The Tandons had come to the Delhi Golf Club, a bastion of the city’s moneyed elite, for a wine-tasting event, part of a dogged effort by its nascent wine industry to woo over a nation of spirits drinkers – or at least the growing market segment with a taste for Western ways and rupees to spend on luxuries.
Mr. Tandon collects whiskies – but he worked abroad for years and appreciates wine as well, so he might have seemed like an easy sell. But he refused to believe that a wine he enjoyed could be Indian.
Gagan Sharma, the evening’s sommelier, listened to him with a sort of resigned dismay. This image problem dogs India’s wines, both abroad – where Indian wine is viewed as a novelty but not something one would actually want to drink – and domestically, where the tiny pool of wine lovers are sure that imported must be better.
Indian wine, the globally minded oenophile will recall, was supposed to be the big new thing a few years back. Beginning in 2001, Indian investors – many of them toting fortunes made abroad – snapped up land in the heart of Maharashtra and erected huge faux-Tuscan wineries. Their first vintages attracted a bit of international attention, while the vaunted Indian middle class was reported ready to end its love affair with spirits and embrace the grape. Wine, dusted in the cachet that anything foreign has here, was tipped as a new status symbol, and with 1.2 billion potential drinkers, India was meant to be a market just waiting to be uncorked.
Then came the autumn of 2008. The global economy went into a tailspin, and in India the chill was exacerbated by the attacks on Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists. In the mood of national anxiety, consumption of “lifestyle” items fell dramatically. Wine sales fell by half in 2009, and the domestic industry fizzled.
Three long years later, however, there are tentative signs that India’s wine industry is growing once again, and sommeliers and producers agree it is hardier for the harsh pruning it received. A handful of Indian wines have recently been recognized internationally in blind tastings. The British supermarket chain Waitrose now carries one, introducing the idea that India makes wine to a whole new swath of consumers.
At home, wine is slowly catching on. “The market is growing, but not by leaps and bounds like you heard in the hysteria a few years ago,” says Reva Singh, who publishes Sommelier India. (She founded the magazine in 2004, and for the first few years had to explain what “sommelier” meant in a small note in the masthead.) Wine sales are expected to grow by 25 per cent next year, according to the government wine promotion body.
But it’s slow going. “This country has five major religions and four of them forbid the consumption of alcohol,” says Mr. Sharma, who trains hotel and restaurant staff who have never tasted wine all about how to sell and serve it. There is nevertheless plenty of drinking – but here traditional village homebrew meets British colonial legacy. Indian drinkers usually opt for spirits, not wine, which is perceived as “weak” and unlikely to achieve what the drinker wants it to.
True to form, at the end of the golf club tasting the staff tidied up the wine glasses, the 70 participants settled back in their chairs – and nearly all of them ordered a whisky. “They always go back to what they know,” sighed Tarun Sibal, who heads marketing for Fratelli. Tastings, he explained, are a key part of his strategy. “We don’t make a soap, or a laptop, where we could just do an advertisement.” Individual drinkers, such as the skeptical Mr. Tandon, must be won over one by one.
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