India is getting serious about wine. What will that mean?

When I arrived in India for a few days recently, I was puzzled by Indian consumers’ and producers’ attachment to powerful reds. The country’s most celebrated wine, J’Noon, is a blockbuster if ever there was one. Surely, in India’s sultry climate, the refreshment of whites and rosés is needed, or at least a lighter red such as a Pinot Noir?

When, for the third night running, I got back to my hotel room shivering from the aggressive air conditioning during dinner, the penny dropped. Wine in India is becoming increasingly common, but it’s the drink of the well-off and the well-off are devoted to fiendish air con. Perhaps they need those full-bodied reds to warm themselves up?

Despite punitive import duties of 150 per cent by value, and complex regulations and taxes that differ state by state (some of which are dry), wine has steadily been replacing cocktails and whisky among affluent Indians.

During my time in Delhi and Mumbai I was told that many Indian drinkers believe that red wine is good for their health. The World Health Organization may disagree but the burgeoning Indian wine trade is not minded to draw their customers’ attention to this. And the theory that India’s highly spiced food doesn’t go with wine has largely been abandoned.

We enjoyed a range of wines carrying nine of India’s most respected labels with the excellent Indian cuisine of Masque restaurant in Mumbai’s old mill district, the fashionably grungy equivalent of east London or Brooklyn. This was at a special dinner organised by India’s one and only Master of Wine, Sonal Holland. The wines had improved considerably since my last visit in 2017.

Hridhay Mehra, Masque’s head sommelier, confirmed the cultural hurdles that wine has had to overcome in many sectors of Indian society. “It took ages for me to convince my parents that I drink for a living. I used to have to hide bottles of wine in my bedroom cupboard,” he told me. A few days later, back in London, I was to meet a young Indian-born wine writer who emigrated to America with her parents as a teenager. Her mother, a keen wine drinker, still drinks it out of a cup rather than a more revealing glass, she said.

The Masque dinner was the first time these nine producers had met socially. Holland asked them each to provide one wine and found, perhaps inevitably, that most of them wanted to show a full-bodied red. A notable exception was the LVMH-owned sparkling-wine producer Chandon, which provided our sparkling rosé aperitif made in the same way as its stablemate in Champagne, Moët & Chandon. But even this definitively effervescent company has just launched a still red, Aurva Shiraz 2021, under a screwcap.

Shiraz is the most-prized variety of winegrape in India and does well in the heartland of Indian viticulture, Nashik, a four-hour drive north-east of Mumbai. Cabernet Sauvignon does better in Solapur, seven hours to the south-east of Mumbai, where the nights are warmer. Chenin Blanc is the most popular grape for white wines.

There is now a Wine Growers of India association, encouraged by Ashwin Rodrigues, owner and chief winemaker of Good Earth Wine, who gained his winemaking experience in the Barossa Valley. He excitedly told me that the association now holds technical meetings “for winemakers, not CEOs” at which they serve each others’ wines blind and comment on them, all in aid of improving the quality of Indian wine overall.

He was seated at our table at this dinner, and I heard him ask Ipsita Das, managing director of Moët Hennessy India, why she recently raised the price of Chandon quite substantially, to the equivalent of about £25 a bottle. “We thought India was ready for a premium wine,” she answered with a careful smile, before admitting, “It has been a tough journey.” As a fellow Indian wine producer trying to balance the books, Rodrigues expressed deep gratitude for her move, although a more cynical diner at our table observed, “Indians are still learning to drink sparkling water, let alone sparkling wine.”

Per capita consumption of wine may have risen in recent years, but it’s still not much more than two centilitres a year. Although, as one wine professional pointed out, “If we all consumed wine, there’d be none left for anyone else in the world”. This seems unlikely, given the extreme poverty experienced by so many Indians, but a report from research group IWSR on prospects for alcoholic drinks identified India as the country with the greatest volume growth last year and one of the few expected to grow in future.

Partly because of those import taxes, 75 per cent of wine sold in India is Indian and Rajeev Samant of Sula Vineyards has a 60 per cent share of that 75 per cent. Inspired by what he saw in California, Samant has been in the business for 25 years. Countless Indians have had their first-ever taste of grape-based wine at Sula’s tourist-focused winery in Nashik, so Samant bears considerable responsibility for the prospects of the Indian wine market. Sula has become so ubiquitous that Samant has been developing other labels such as The Source and RĀSĀ (another full-bodied red).

But the really well-heeled drink imported wine. At another dinner, I sat next to one wine lover who commutes between London and Mumbai and told me he always loads up at the Mayfair wine treasure trove Hedonism before travelling back to India and goes gamely, and expensively, through the red channel on arrival.

When Holland started out in wine 17 years ago, there were very few Indian wine professionals, but the Indian wine importers I met recently were admirably well informed. I was told that Italian reds, particularly from Tuscany, are currently popular but that the reputation of Bordeaux has been harmed by too many poor-quality wines.

In another sign of the times, this month sees the establishment of the Sommeliers Association of India by Bordeaux-based Master of Wine hopeful Amrita Singh. There are apparently already 35 to 40 candidates for professional somm exams, and the first Indian qualified as a Master Sommelier in August. Kamal Malik currently works for a wine importer in the Maldives.

The Indian sommeliers I met were unanimous that more somms are needed in their country, pointing out that there are probably a thousand bartenders for every wine waiter. Supply is hindered by the fact that even top hospitality schools are not allowed to serve alcohol to anyone under 25 — virtually all their students.

There may be only 10 Indians resident in India who have reached the top, Diploma, level of Wine & Spirit Education Trust courses, but early evening wine tastings have become a popular leisure activity. Devati Mallick, a young woman who organises them, assured me that when Indians travel, they tend to become interested in wines from the regions they explore.

Susmita Bomzon worked in Dubai before returning to her native India to set up, in 2023, the country’s first wine bar, Captain’s Cellar, in the basement of the Taj Mahal hotel in New Delhi. Thanks to Enomatic wine dispenser cabinets, she offers 48 wines, Indian and imported, by the glass. According to Master of Wine Holland, “Fifteen years ago this would have been unthinkable.”

It’s no wonder that Australia, having been crippled by punitive tariffs imposed by China in 2020, decided to look to India for new export opportunities, concluding a trade agreement in 2022. This is one rapidly growing market that gives the world’s wine producers, concerned about shrinking sales elsewhere, some reason to be hopeful.