Growing Love for Wines

Changing tastes of Indians in their drinking preferences has resulted in changing fortunes of the Indian wine industry.

The indigenous wine industry is seeing a constant growth in demand in the country. One of the reasons for the increased wine consumption in India during the recent years is perhaps due to reports of wine being good for your health.

The consumption of wines in India is quite low by global standards. The annual per capita consumption of wines in India is only 11 milliliters, which is 8000 times less than that of France. In European countries, the annual per capita consumption of wines generally varies between 8-55 litres.

India’s pathetic wine consumption levels is strange, considering the fact that the history of viticulture in the geography of the Indian subcontinent can be traced to the Indus Valley Civilisation (3300-1300 BC). Probably our successive governments’ by and large pseudo moralistic anti-alcohol stance during the post-independence to pre-liberalization years had something to do with it, as was the general public opinion of India during the pre-liberalization times, which was against alcohol consumption.

But they are not the sole reason for the low sales of wines in India. One can see that the consumption of beer and whisky was and is much more in India,than that of wines. The Indian alcoholic beverages market is dominated by whisky, rum, brandy, vodka, and gin, and the wine market of India is still very much unexplored.

Generally, Indian drinkers of alcoholic beverages prefer alcoholic beverages with high alcohol content. But tastes of a sizeable section of urban Indians are changing in the recent years, and thankfully, they are changing fast.

Growing Market