Brief history of wine

Wine is known to have been produced 8,000 years ago in modern-day Georgia. The first wines were probably much older, perhaps going back to the start of agriculture (around 8,000 BCE, which is also when the first beers were brewed). Wine was common in ancient Greece (8th - 4th Century BCE), and classical Rome (up to 500 AD) propagated viticulture and winemaking all over Europe along with their empire.

In India grapevines were believed to have been introduced from Persia as long back as 5,000 BCE, at the start of the Indus Valley Civilisation. Certainly, usage was common enough by the 4th Century BCE for Chanakya (a key minister in the court of Chandragupta Maurya) to write about the perils of imbibing too much Madhu.

Not much is known about wine consumption in India till the Portuguese introduced Port in Goa in the early 1500s. French troops stationed at Hyderabad in the second half of the 18th Century had planted an ‘Angoori Bagh’ (presumably to make wine), but the British prevailed in India and set the stage for a whiskey-swilling Raj.

Fast forward to the 1970s, when Vittal Mallya collaborated with Dr Rossi to start producing Cinzano vermouths at Baramati, while Shaw Wallace set up a small vineyard at Hyderabad and started producing Golconda (a very different product those days).

It was Sham Chougule of Indage who pioneered the first genuine wines from Vitis Vinifera grapes when he launched Marquise de Pompadour sparkling wine in 1986 — everybody called it ‘Champagne’ those days and exulted at the arrival of ‘genuine’ wines. Perhaps catalysed by this initiative, Kanwal Grover located vineyards outside Bangalore and introduced his eponymous wines in 1992. International Distillers India (with yours truly) re-started Cinzano in 1996 at Indage’s winery at Narayangaon, but it was Rajeev Samant’s return to India to set up winemaking at Nashik and launch Sula in 1999 that really got Indian winemaking going.

Nashik and parts of Maharashtra were already hubs for grape-growing and exports, particularly of the Thomson Seedless table grape, and it was a short step to convert such vineyards to growing wine grapes. This was given a fillip by the ‘Maharashtra Grape Processing Policy 2001’ (calling it 'wine' was politically incorrect), which stimulated a boom in wine production in that state — from 712 kl in 2002-03 to over 20 million litres in 2008-09, with the number of wineries jumping to over 75 in the same period. Of course the double whammy of falling demand due to global recession and higher taxes in key markets played havoc in 2009-10 and 2010-11, but that’s another story.

The Karnataka Wine Policy in 2008 not only made it easier and cheaper to obtain a winery licence, it also permitted issue of new licences for Wine Taverns and Wine Boutiques to expand marketing channels for the product. Several new wineries have come up subsequently, in areas not previously known for wine grapes: Bijapur, Bidar, and Belgaum (apart from Bangalore). Warned by what happened in Maharashtra, the new producers have been more cautious and more focused on sales.

Last (but not least) was the formation of the Indian Grape Processing Board (the powers that be still cannot seem to utter the W-word) in Pune in 2009 under the aegis of the Ministry of Food Processing Industries. IGPB has subsequently helped Indian wine producers participate in several international Wine Fairs (Hong Kong in November 2010, ProWien Düsseldorf in March 2011, London in May 2011) as a means to taking Indian wines overseas. The wine industry in India is still very young — I expect volumes increasing from 1.5 million cases in 2010-11 to over 20 million cases in 15 years, watch this space.

The writer is a Bangalore-based wine consultant