A glass of wine with your samosa?
India's new cutting edge fashion: Women drinking wine.
When Bhagwat invited friends over recently, she served dal-roti (lentils and flat bread) with wine. When she visits friends, she sometimes brings wine as a gift.
Still, in a country where the upper crust loves scotch and the masses enjoy cheap rum with cola, wine consumption is still small.
Only some 1.5 million cases (12 bottles to a case) of wines were sold last year, according to Kewadkar. That amounts to 10 milliliters per capita consumption compared with 50 liters per capita in Europe and 17 liters in the United States.
But domestic wine producers and foreign wineries are heady about future prospects — the market is growing more than 20 percent a year and experts forecast tenfold growth over the next decade.
As newbie drinkers panic over how to hold a wine glass or whether to serve the chardonnay chilled, wine clubs are sprouting in Indian cities, helping dispel some of the snobbery.
In Bangalore, the local club is run by an all-female team and its membership tilts heavily toward women.
Also pumping up the popularity of wines are fine dining restaurants, such as Bon South in Bangalore’s hip Koramangala neighborhood. Dispelling old notions that wines do not complement Indian cuisine, the restaurant offers fiery south Indian food paired with wines.
A surefire sign of the growing popularity of wine-drinking is the fact that supermarket shelves in bigger Indian cities now stock wines from as far as Bordeaux, California and Cape Town, as well as a growing range of Indian wines from companies such as Kewadkar’s.
High tariffs and distribution challenges have long hindered wine sales. Yet, while wines didn't make it into the homes of the uber-rich and onto wine lists of luxury hotels, they now swirl inside the long-stemmed glasses of many middle-class women.
So, while the masses scoff at wine as lacking the alcohol “kick” of whiskey, rum or vodka, Indian women like Bhagwat are learning to enjoy their butter chicken with a glass of rose, and their lamb kebabs with a riesling.
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Vintage wines are generally bottled in a single batch so that each bottle will have a similar taste. Climate can have a big impact on the character of a wine to the extent that different vintages from the same vineyard can vary dramatically in flavor and quality.[32] Thus, vintage wines are produced to be individually characteristic of the vintage and to serve as the flagship wines of the producer. Superior vintages, from reputable producers and regions, will often fetch much higher prices than their average vintages. Some vintage wines, like Brunellos, are only made in better-than-average years.
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