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In wine friendly territory

This is from Goa. And it would have been about something altogether different had it not been for the bottle of Sicilian wine placed conspicuously in my hotel room. A blend of Syrah and Nero d’Avola (the indigenous red varietal that has lately come into its own), the bottle was priced at a tempting Rs. 700.

Plonk, was my first suspicion. But pouring through the wine list later that evening, at one of the hotel’s restaurants, disabused me of my naivety. There is a perfectly acceptable Australian Pinot at Rs. 1,300. Even better, there are two Beaujolais — made by Georges DuBoef and Louis Jadot, the two best known producers of this very easy and approachable wine — each available for a modest Rs. 1,200. I plan to order one of them this evening, only for the perverse pleasure that an equivalent restaurant in any other Indian city would charge twice as much or more.

Okay, these prices are not cheap by international standards. And in dourly pragmatic India, where the alcohol is measured by how much bang you get for the buck, wine is never a cheap option. But it is something of a pleasure to discover, at the non-descript but well-stocked Tom’s Wines in Panaji, a bottle of an eminently quaffable Sicilian Merlot for just Rs. 570.

Relatively, Goa is a wine haven. But it is also a reminder of the frustrating and irrational differential tax regime on wines in the country. Duties vary hugely across states and common sense demands the implementation of a rationalised and uniform tax structure on a low-alcohol product such as wine. States decide on their own taxation regimes and wines are subject to a plethora of duties and fees such as excise duty, sales tax, label registration fees, gallonage fees, turnover taxes, etc.

Goa increased its excise duty on wine recently, but its tax structure remains amongst the most liberal in the country. As a result, wine consumption in this small state (population: 14 lakh) ranks third according to some estimates after Mumbai and Delhi, which together account for a huge share of the market in India. Sometime back, supposedly wine-friendly Maharashtra hiked the excise duty on wine to 200 per cent.

If tax structures vary, so does the experience of shopping for wine. You can get a bottle of imported wine from a Delhi liquor store, but it isn’t much fun scouring the dust-laden shelves of a typical government-run store to identify your bottle. The ambiance for shopping in Bangalore, where stores such as Spencer’s Daily stock a tidy range of wines, is much better. As for Chennai, where the liquor policy is truly mystifying, it takes courage and a stoic disregard for cleanliness to fight your way to the head of the counter of a state-run store. Yes, they are called wine shops. But are you looking for wine? You had better go elsewhere.

All in all, Goa doesn’t seem like a bad place to be in. Another visit to Tom’s Wines is on the cards and then a bottle of Beaujolais awaits this evening. As they say in Portuguese, Saude, or to your health.

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