India: wine

Winemaker to the maharajas

8 December 2007

Richard Orange meets Rajeev Samant, an entrepreneur whose products please the palates of new-rich India

Some of the world’s biggest drinks companies, including Diageo and Pernod Ricard, are rushing to set up wineries to capture a market that is growing at 30 per cent a year. Bollywood’s leading ladies can now be seen clutching glasses of wine on and off screen. For the new professional classes of Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi, fresh from business trips to Europe and the US, wine is a major status symbol. And Samant’s enterprise grows apace. ‘We’re planting 500 acres a year,’ he says. ‘There are very few wineries in the world that are planting that kind of number.’

The vineyard amid the Nashik hills is breathtaking. The vines, hoisted high above the ground to keep them cool in the baking summer, stretch down towards shimmering Lake Gangapur. If it wasn’t for a tiny Hindu temple flying an orange flag on a nearby hillside, you would scarcely believe this is India. Sula will produce 1.8 million bottles of wine this year and 2.4 million in 2008. When a newly acquired second winery is up and running, capacity will double again.

Could Indian wines follow Chilean and Australian wines on to Britain’s supermarket shelves? Sula already exports almost 10 per cent of its production, with Japan and, perplexingly, Finland, being the biggest markets. Smaller quantities go to Britain and France — primarily to upmarket restaurants such as St Tropez’s Hotel Byblos.

The obvious potential has generated international interest. In the haven of Sula’s tasting room, Samant is ambushed by an Italian consultant pushing a deal with one of Verona’s wine producers. ‘There’s so many people wanting to come and take a piece of me,’ Samant says with a long-suffering smile. He already has an agreement with Bosco of Italy to make a cheap sparkling wine costing just 200 rupees (£2.45), and a joint venture with Hugh Ryman, an iconoclastic British-born winemaker who inspired the Ridley Scott film A Good Year; the two have jointly created Maison Pierre, a French wine designed for the Indian palette.

Land is available for India to become a major producer. The state of Maharashtra alone has 150,000 acres planted with table grapes — many destined for the shelves at Tesco — compared to just 5,000 planted with wine grapes. This is the opposite of the norm elsewhere in the world, where more than 90 per cent of grapes are used for wine. The region around Bangalore is already well established, and Sula and others are researching the suitability of states such as the Punjab and Himachal Pradesh.