When Bangalore goes to town to taste wine,served by govt

If middle-class Bangalore’s enthusiasm for the country’s first public wine festival was any indication,India looks set to arrive on the global wine drinking scene with a bang and a hiccup.

Where the local winemakers expected to sell a couple of cases,over 1,200 cases of wine sold less than half-way through the festival,stalls had run out of stock and people that would never be seen at the city’s hip drinking joints paid Rs 25 to form snake-like lines at the tasting counters.

Breaking age-old taboos associated with drinking,citizens who showed up at the festival said wine-drinking was becoming socially acceptable as healthy and even trendy.

Teetotaler friends R. Krishna Kumar,a stationary storeowner,and Krishna Murthy,a tax consultant,arrived,clamouring to taste the wine. “Everybody says drinking wine is beneficial so we wanted to try it out,” said Murthy. His companion said they had their wives’ permission for the trial session. “We assured them we will not go the bad way,” said Kumar.

In another corner,homemaker Anuradha Rajesh and her mother Indu sipped red wine from plastic glasses,while Anuradha’s father looked on impassively. “This is a healthy,classy alternative for young Indians like me,” said Anuradha.

Her father Krishna Prasad,a retired public sector bank official sporting a long South Indian tilak on his forehead,said he was against consumption of any form of alcohol. “But wine is fermented grape juice,” his daughter piped in. “As a parent,I would not encourage drinking,” said the father.

His wife and daughter sipped on.

Software engineers Shweta Patil and her husband Chinnu said they had come to Lalbagh for the wine tasting on their day off. Both work for R&D unit of American multinational Citrix Systems and said they saw nothing wrong in recreational drinking.

Multinationals like the one he and his wife worked for were changing Indian culture,said Chinnu Patil who favours beer. “As we become more westernised,drinking and smoking are becoming common amongst younger Indians,” he said. The wine he tasted did not come close to his favourite drink,beer,but his wife said she loved her first sip of white wine.

Karnataka produces close to 2 million litres of wine annually,second only to Maharashtra. The BJP government,recently in the news for its inaction in an incident involving a right-wing group’s attack on girls in a Mangalore pub,is going all out to promote wine drinking.

A new amendment to the excise rules encourages the setting up of wine boutiques and taverns at licence fees as low as 1,000 rupees even though,somewhat contrarily,Bangalore’s pubs and bars still have to close before midnight by government order,despite much public pressure to ease the early closing Cinderella rule.

The wine festival at Lalbagh was promoted by the government’s Wine Board and modelled after popular wine festivals in the West. But even the board did not expect that the festival would turn out to be a mela with thousands of visitors. If even a percentage of the visitors became wine drinkers after the tasting,the governmnent’s mission would be super-successful,said K.S. Kumar,general manager of sales and marketing at Grover Vineyards.

Wine drinking is a better alternative to other types of drinking,eulogised B. Krishna,managing director of the government’s Wine Board. “Wine is not alcohol,wine is derived from naturally fermented grapes and no spirit is added,” he told a crowd that had assembled around him at the Lalbagh festival.

Not everybody bought his argument,however. Ramesh Aradhya,50,from the nearby Anekal town had abandoned his small medical store for the day to travel to the Lalbagh festival. As he went from stall to stall admiring the neat line-up of bottles,Aradhya was clear,“I came to see,not to drink.”