For wine makers and distributors, India is virgin terrain ripe for the plucking (to mix metaphors). Although wine arrived with the Persians around two millenia ago, wine drinking was never popular or widespread.
What little wine production there was got crushed by the phylloxera epidemic of the late 1800s, and hit further hurdles at Independence when many states went dry. The constitution of India itself used to state that “one of the government’s aims was the total prohibition of alcohol” [wiki]
Fast forward to the present, when wine drinking is being pitched heavily to the urban intelligencia, especially younger women:
Bhagwat is single and lives in Bangalore. On a recent trip to her parents’ home in the conservative Chhattisgarh in central India, she sipped wine while her father drank scotch and soda. Her mother, she recounts, looked on silently. “Wine is the only drink I can have without offending the family elders,” she said. [link]
Wine drinking is still at fairly low levels compared to Europe or the US, with average consumption under a bottle a year and large areas of the country where wine isn’t drunk at all [link], although it is increasing at around 20% a year.
Right now there are around 40 wineries in India with around 3,000 acres under cultivation. My advice to them? Invest more in marketing and less in “quality”: wine drinkers are highly suggestible and the “wine experience” is all hype. Why should they listen to a non-drinker? Because I have science on my side:
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p> In two experiments done by Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, wine experts were fooled into thinking that white wine with red food coloring was red wine and judged the same wine entirely differently based on the label on the bottle and price tag:
In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its “jamminess,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.” Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was “agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded,” while the vin du table was “weak, short, light, flat and faulty”. [link]
I’m not saying there are no differences between wines, I wouldn’t know I’ve never had any. I am saying that the science shows that even for experts (in France!) the differences are tiny and easily crushed by their expectations. Buy really fancy bottles. Win lots of irrelevant competitions. Get endorsements. Serve your wine in blind taste tests where you have a chance of winning something by chance alone. At the end of the day, it’s not about the grapes, it’s about the marketing.
Do you honestly think prohibition era America didn’t have derelict husbands drinking away their wages and engaging in domestic violence? Even modern America still has that, and the WCTU has reincarnated itself as MADD and continues to march to a quasi-prohibitionist tune.
The fact is, the reason it’s easier to ban the local moonshine rather than the Johnnie Walker is because the rich urbanites drink the Johnnie and the poor folks drink the moonshine. It has nothing to do with anything inherent to the beverages. Everything else they come up with to justify it is just an excuse.
The reason why the villages that I’m talking about banned liquor is because the WOMEN of the villeges got together and protested and petitioned and demanded it – to save their friggen lives and the lives of their children!
If any rich folk want to do the same – so be it.
And once again, the reason America banned alcohol was because WOMEN got together to protest, petition, and demand it.
That does NOT, however, mean it was automagically a smart policy to enact.
And if you don’t think impulses towards moralizing rather than real concerns for people’s welfare didn’t have a significant role to play I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. Stuff in the real world rarely follows a linear A -> B path.
In either case, a ban on alcohol is not neccessarily a bad idea.
And it is WORKING in those villages. Maybe it would not work in Mumbai or USA – not everyplace on earth is the same with the exact same dynamics. Poor village women in India need their husbands. Other women, with more money and more social clout and government help may not.
48 Village panchayat,
Banning makes it worse, since now illegal moonshine with battery and stuff is brewed and routinely kills or blinds and maims hundreds every year in India. Regulating it would be a better option than a ban, since this would help ensure safety in production as well as give a livelyhood to the toddy tappers. But what use is banning kallu and saarayam, while IMFL (Indian MadeForeign Liquor) which is more expensive is sold. Do you think a determined drunkard who is ruining his family, will abstain instead of spending even more money to buy IMFL? The illogic of these kind of bans is what I am questioning. I don’t have issues with across the board dry states like Gujarat presently is and Tamil Nadu was at one time. Tamil Nadu though realised that potential revenue was going to Kerala and Pondicherry as people were going there to buy liquor. BTW, I am a teetotaler and always have been, but believe that it is a personal decision. What should happen in my opinion is that like smoking is presently totally deglamorised, drinking should be too, in the public discourse. But they should continue to be sold, rather than banned and it should be individual responsibility that should govern people’s drinking levels and addictions.
I completely agree that binge drinking away family resources is a scourge on Indian villages. But I see no evidence of prohibition working. People make liquor in jail with nothing but fruit pulp. Indian police, who for the most part don’t even have the will to maintain general law & order, are not going to enforce these rules. In a dry state they just shake down the laborers and arrack shop owners, so either way wages are not spent on family upkeep. It’s going to take social rather than legal sanction to fix this. I’ve seen the most degenerate drunks keep it together during the weeks leading up the Ayappan pilgrimage for example
cheaper wines give worse hangovers…thats one way to tell, right?
BOTTOMLINE: talk to the village women to see if their lives have changed for the better.
have you? are you one?
prohibition laws in india are more about grandstanding than social change. education and social ostracism have a better chance of fixing the drunkard problem.
The status of the village women is up for debate.
But we do know for a fact that the various Al Capoors of the Indian underworld are certainly better off for it.
@ 43 Pingpong
I would agree with #22; Kudimagan is used almost exclusively for “citizen”, unless somebody is purposely bifurcating the word in speech or writing to explicitly indicate a humorous use. However, you did not try that. You tried to pass it on as a fact. Epic fail.
Perhaps you can check the Wiktionary The word “kudi” is used contextually to mean two different things.