India: wine

Winemaker to the maharajas

Richard Orange

8 December 2007

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

But for Samant, exports are not a priority: selling to the Indian market is much more profitable. Even after the WTO succeeded in bringing down tariffs on wine from 260 per cent to 150 per cent, India’s winemakers are heavily protected. And their products are not cheap. Sula’s mass-market wine, a Chenin Blanc, sells for 350 rupees a bottle (£4.30); its premium Dindori Reserve Shiraz sells in Mumbai for 675 rupees (£8.25).

This is partly because wine is still marketed at the upper echelons of Indian society.

‘I know all the maharajas through my wines,’ Samant says. ‘They love wine and they love champagne.’ But costs are also high. Bottles and screw-tops need to be imported. Expensive irrigation systems are needed. Unlike established winemakers, Indian producers face the cost of planting new rootstock. Their only advantage is cheap labour — but wine is not a labour-intensive industry. As the industry scales up, though, costs will start to fall and the hope is that by the time the WTO forces India to bring tariffs into line with the rest of the world — inevitable by 2010 — Indian producers will be ready for an influx of cheap New World wines.

Samant puts it starkly. ‘India has 1.1 billion people becoming every day a little bit richer, and everybody in the city wants to drink wine. It’s not rocket science. You’ve just got to keep pumping out as much as you can, so that by the time the tariffs come down, you’ll have the market share and scale to compete.’

To his advantage is the fact that Indian wines are often impressively drinkable considering the unique conditions Indian winemakers face. Unlike every other major wine region, India’s grapes are grown in the winter, after a heavy prune to induce dormancy over the hot summer and monsoon months. It is this technique, combined with the cooler climate of the Nashik plateau 2,000 feet above sea level, that makes winemaking possible.

Sula’s Chenin Blanc is tailored to India’s sweet tooth, but its Sauvignon Blanc, Shiraz, Zinfandel and méthode champenoise are well matched to global tastes. Samant says his best decision was the one he took with his Californian wine consultant Kerry Damsker to plant Sauvignon and Chenin Blanc. Running his hands over a vine, just budding with the season’s first grapes, he says, ‘These are the first Sauvignon grapes planted in India. I think Sula could end up being a pretty historic place.’

But Samant knows India’s winemakers still have a way to go before they have an understanding of the soil and local climate to rival old-world winemakers. ‘Of course, in France and Italy they’ve been building that knowledge for hundreds of years. We’re trying to compress it into a very short space of time. We’ve got to go slow: we’re making wine, not widgets.’