Sipping overseas wines

The Thelema Mountain Vineyards Shiraz 2013 is priced at Rs 3,726 in Bengaluru

It’s no secret that retail prices of imported wines in India are at least twice, sometimes four times, their retail prices overseas.

This is due to a combination of high customs duties (currently a total to 162 per cent of the landed cost, or CIF), state duties (all states levy excise duty by another name, even though goods suffering customs duty should be exempt), and the cost of doing business in India.

“The cost of doing business in India” is, of course, euphemism for the systematic extortion practised by central and state authorities in the guise of regulating alcoholic beverages — both officially and unofficially. The exorbitantly high license fees and state duties are justified by the thought that “imported wines are consumed only by the rich” — true, although this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unofficially, every aspect of obtaining state permissions by the trade enables those concerned to indulge in rent-seeking behaviour, which adds a significant amount to the cost of actually getting the product to the end customer.

The Supreme Court ruling regarding the 500-metre distance required from national and state highways for all vendors of alcoholic beverages must have been a boon for state regulators, never mind that many of the roads so labelled were anything but highways. 

The Thelema Mountain Vineyards Shiraz 2013 is rated 88 points by Wine Spectator and is priced at Rs 3,726 in Bengaluru. A complex, smooth, and full-bodied wine with aromas of ripe black fruit and cassis and good tannins and spice on the palate

For example, in Karnataka, despite three months’ notice from closure of vends elsewhere in the country on April 1, nothing was done till end-June — and even today the matter of denotification of the main roads in the capital city Bengaluru and issue of licences to the affected vends is hanging fire. Why? It is alleged that the state’s politicians are seeking something like  Rs 50 crore to move forward — rent-seeking behaviour indeed, if that were true!

Consequently, a wine like the Saint Clair Marlborough Pinot Noir 2016 that costs $17 (about Rs 1,100) in London has an retail price of Rs 3,297 in Bengaluru — three times. 

No wonder that sales of imported wines in India are so low. In 2016, sales in China of imported wines (both bottled and bulk) were 638 million litres (about 71 million cases), whereas in India this was an estimated 4 million litres. And, India wants to be compared to the middle kingdom?

One hopes that the central government’s push for better governance and less corruption results in lower taxes on imported wines and some control of rent-seeking behaviour so that prices don’t keep growing at the expense of consumption.

Wine I’ve been drinking: The Thelema Mountain Vineyards Shiraz 2013 is rated 88 points by Wine Spectator and is priced at Rs 3,726 in Bengaluru. A complex, smooth and full-bodied wine with aromas of ripe black fruit and cassis and good tannins and spice on the palate, this is a lovely wine, a true representative of 500 years of vineyard development in the Stellenbosch area near Cape Town, South Africa. 

As the Boers would say, proost!

Alok Chandra is a Bengaluru-based wine consultant