India wine currying world favour
Land known for spices rebrands itself as grower of quality vintages

Dodballapur, India, Mar 09, 2008: Ever since Indian growers of Thompson's seedless table grapes found themselves with an overabundance of fruit a few decades back, India has produced some very bad wine.

But in these rocky scrub hills outside Bangalore -- a region reminiscent of California's Napa Valley -- well-tended vineyards are now fragrantly heavy with more pedigreed grapes: sauvignon blanc, cabernet sauvignon and shiraz. All are destined for the most remarkable of spirits: really good Indian wine.

In international winemaking circles, India hardly ranks with such superpowers as Australia, Argentina and South Africa. But for a nation with no native wine grapes, little tradition of winemaking and only an emerging domestic taste for the stuff, India is producing surprisingly good vintages, wine experts say.

How good? Last year, the French bought 80 percent of the wine exported by Grover Vineyards, an operation in the Nandi Hills outside Bangalore.

Indian wine "is not an easy sell," admits Santosh Awatramani, who imports and sells Grover wines -- generally considered some of India's best -- in the United States. "In people's faces, we see the hesitation. But when they taste it, they say, 'Hey! This is coming from India?'"

Peacocks beat elephants.

India's emergence in the wine world is driven by two key developments: Better wines, as the country's young vineyards mature and winemaking skills develop, and a better image for India itself.

Not so long ago, India was best known abroad mainly for incendiary curry, ascetic yoga gurus and abject poverty. But in recent years the country has managed to rebrand itself -- prematurely, some would argue -- as a sophisticated land of exotic tourism and high-tech call centers.

That shift "certainly is helping" the country's fledgling wine export business, said Kapil Grover, who runs Grover Vineyards. The company came up with a stylish peacock-feather label to decorate its bottles rather than a more traditional elephant or camel because "the India of 20 years ago, nobody wants to know about. They want to know the new India," he said.

Grover Vineyards got its start when Grover's father, a high-tech equipment importer, developed a love of wine on business trips to France. "My father always said, 'India's a vast country. There must be someplace you can produce wine,'" Grover remembers. Eventually the elder Grover persuaded a French champagne expert to come and have a look around with him. After six years of trying test plots, Grover settled on the Bangalore area to set up a 40-acre commercial vineyard.

Twenty-seven years later, the family has 400 acres of wine grapes -- French varieties on disease-resistant Australian rootstock -- and is adding 100 acres a year as demand for Indian wine soars. Last year the family's winery produced 1.2 million bottles, a figure the 50-something Grover expects to grow by 25 percent a year "for the rest of my lifetime."

Lots to drink to

In India, traditionally divided between teetotalers and drinkers of whiskey and beer, wine still is getting a foothold. Per capita, Indians drink only about a litre a year, compared with 60 litres in France. But in a nation of 1.1 billion people, "even if 2 percent of people drink a bottle a month, that's a market of 240 million bottles," Grover said.

Growing the market has its challenges. Aging wine -- except in a climate-controlled winery or cellar -- is pretty much out in a nation with such scorching weather that getting a red wine to "room temperature" in summer requires a bucket of ice.

Restaurants are still trying to figure out whether it's a nice cabernet blend or a sturdy rose that best stands up to fiery masala. Different state taxes on wine, not to mention falling levies on imported competitors, make selling bottles throughout India a challenge.

Still, wine is surging in popularity as more Indians travel abroad and acquire the wine habit, and as incomes rise and aging whiskey drinkers discover the purported health benefits of a glass of red instead. With the industry growing at 25 percent annually, a rash of new Indian wineries have opened in recent years, many of them in the country's traditional grape-growing region outside Mumbai.

Grover's 23-year-old daughter Karishma just became the family's first trained vintner, after finishing a degree in winemaking at the University of California, Davis and working a summer in the Napa Valley.

She and Yashoda Devi, another of the company's winemakers, say they now aim to make wine good enough not only to impress Indians but everyone else.

Grover "has set the benchmark for Indian wine," Devi insisted. "Now we want to compete with the rest of the world."

The winery already has managed some significant successes. Its top-of-the-line La Reserve Cabernet-Shiraz blend was voted "best new world red" by Decanter magazine in 2005, besting competitors in the U.S., Chile and Australia.

For now, most of India's top-end exports go to Europe, particularly France and England, which is experimenting with Indian wine as an accompaniment to Indian food, a passion throughout the country. But thousands of cases a year also go to the U.S., where a taste for Indian cabernet sauvignon is "growing slowly but steadily," said Awatramani, the importer.

"We're beginning to move into the mainstream," Grover said. "There are a lot of stories about blind taste tests where people just can't believe it's wine from India."

Source – Chicago Tribune