Selling wine in India

Some of you might know this already, but I have left France to go to Mumbai for the summer.

This explains the lack of posts lately.

I am working for a French company selling Indian grown wine in the West region of India (Maharashtra, Gujarat and Goa mainly) for 3 months.

What’s interesting about this mission is that wine in India is only nascent. So I’ll be at the vanguard of any further development for wine in a country whose population should outgrow China’s by 2030.

To tell you the truth, wine is only at its premises here: although Indian wineries have emerged as soon as in the 1980’s (Château Indage) and developed in the mid 90’s (Sula), the local population is still very far from having the reflex of drinking wine when they go out for dinner.

For most Indians, there are no such things as varietals and wine is only red or white. Women are still very reticent to drinking any alcoholic beverage whatsoever.

And men … well they prefer whiskey.

So you can imagine that the quality of Indian wines has long been the least of Indian producers’ worries…

Thus, education and tasting opportunities during weddings or banquets will probably be the only means to carve in Indians’ minds that wine is not a drink whose sole purpose is to be mixed with orange juice (true story) in order to make cocktails.

The higher classes are starting to get more and more interested in wines, although they are focusing on international brands for now. The trouble with imported wines though is that they are submitted to very heavy levies. For instance a bottle of Moet champagne which revolves around 28 euros in France would be 118 euros here.

Ouch.

India has been part of the WTO sine 2007 but when you see that imported spirits are taxed at more than 250% you understand why Europe and the US are regularly in dispute with India.  

I’ll try posting when I can, although my days are pretty packed.

I’d like to let you know about my experience here, with a main focus on wines of course but I will also certainly just talk about living in Mumbai and getting accustomed to the Indian life style.

Next post will be about my first Indian wedding…

Have you seen Bollywood movies? It was just like being in the middle of one…