An anniversary...

It is now almost a year since my last post on this blog, so let's see if I can get it restarted...
I am living in France while my wife attends INSEAD for her MBA.  I have been spending an inordinate amount of time in Burgundy and Champagne... not a bad thing considering Burgundy is supposed to be my specialty!
I hatched a business plan to develop wine brands for the emerging market in India, got offers of funding, got customers, got everything lined up, and spent weeks there proving my model and the market.  After all of this, I found that for lifestyle reasons I was unprepared to move to Bombay for the 3-5 years that it would take to get the idea off the ground...  Anyone want to buy a ready-made business?  I'll sell it for an equity stake!
Actually, I was mentioned in "Time Out Mumbai" in the cover article of their wine issue.  It was Seagram, Vijay Mallya (Indian brewing billionaire), Rajeev Samant (the most modern of Indian wine producers) and yours truly.  Pas Mal!

Source : Time Out Mumbai ISSUE 14 Friday, March 09, 2007

Brave new world

Maharashtra’s wine industry is raising a toast to a happy future, reports Leo Mirani.
A few weeks ago, Mint reported that Vijay Mallya’s UB Group plans to
set up India’s largest winery to produce a wine called Four Seasons and
to open a chain of wine bars across India. A few days later, Seagram
India launched its brand of wine, Nine Hills, in Mumbai. Shortly after,
France-based Christian Pillsbury held a market research exercise in a
home in Bandra to discover local taste preferences. The following day,
Sula Vineyards CEO Rajeev Samant held a press meet at Haiko
supermarket in Powai, the first convenience store in Mumbai to retail
wine.
All this hyperactivity is an energetic attempt to quench India’s enormous
thirst for value-added grape juice. The subcontinent’s wine industry is
now growing at 35 to 40 per cent a year, according to India’s largest
wine producer Chateau Indage, much faster than consumption of traditional favourites like whisky,
which is rising at a mere eight every year. For wine makers, the future looks even more delicious.
India’s per capita consumption of wine is roughly six ml, or a little over a teaspoon, compared to
nearly 60 litres in France, said Seagram India’s assistant vice president Rukn Luthra. He said that
Indians now drink twice as much wine as they did five years ago. According to Euromonitor, a
London-based market research agency, the Indian market has grown by 126 per cent in volume
since 2001. They forecast that the market will expand by 97 per cent in the next five years.
The thirst has been intensified both by social changes and by government concessions to the wine
industry. Middle-class Indians now have more disposable income than ever before and they’re
looking for new experiences. Besides, wine’s lower alcohol content (12-15 per cent compared to
40-60 per cent in spirits) means that it’s seen as a healthier alternative to liquor.
“The growth is not recent,” said Vikrant Chougule, strategy head at the
Indage Group. “It’s been a process since we started in 1982 and now all
the new entrants are doing their bit for people to understand wine better,
to realise that wine has all these benefits and is actually a nicer thing to
drink than Scotch and killing yourself.” The greatest yardstick of the
drink’s newfound popularity, he said, is the Hindi movie. Said Chougule,
“Gone are the times when they used to celebrate with Vat 69.”
Christian Pillsbury, who describes himself as a wine business strategy
consultant, plans to get into the Indian wine market by creating wines
that are specifically for the Indian market. “You aren’t like everyone else
in the world,” he said. “International brands arrive with a product made
for places like Sweden and expect to be greeted like conquering heroes.
The future of wine in India lies in the creation of wines especially for the Indian market and
consumer.”
Maharashtra is the theatre of action for the Indian wine industry. The state’s first winery was
Sharad Pawar’s Baramati Grape Industries, which started in 1975. Pawar is now tipped to be a
shareholder in Mallya’s new venture. Regions of the state such as Nashik and Narayangaon have
the right climate to produce the graps varietals needed for quality wine. Many farmers already grow
table grapes, making it easy for new wineries to persuade them to switch to cultivating wine
grapes. (Seagram doesn’t grow grapes. It has 20 farmers contracted for the purpose. Indage has
up to 1,000 farmers on contract in addition to 2,800 acres of vineyards.)
The state government formulated a policy to encourage wine growing at the beginning of the
decade after it realised that the quantity of table grapes being produced by Maharashtra’s farmers
far exceeded demand, said Jaideep Kale, technical co-ordinator of the Maharashtra Industrial
Development Corporation’s wine park projects. “When the government looked at the figures of
worldwide production and consumption of wine, they realised that if they didn’t encourage Indian
:::: Time Out Mumbai - city guide and fortnightly listing magazine :::: http://www.timeoutmumbai.net/client_coverstory/client_coverstory_detai...
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wineries then foreign players would eventually come here and set up,” he said.
The Maharashtra Grape Processing Industrial
Policy of 2001 has been vital in promoting new
wineries. The policy exempts the wine industry
from excise duty for 10 years. It simplified
licensing procedures, established cheaper
licences for bars serving only wine, allowed beer
bars to sell wine and enabled wineries to get
cheaper bank loans by declaring wine production
as a small-scale industry. At the time the policy
was passed, Maharashtra had four wineries.
Today, there are 43, with eight new wineries
coming up this year, said Kale. In 2002, the state
government helped establish “wine parks” –
special zones where the government gives entrepreneurs land and infrastructure to develop wine –
in Nashik and Sangli districts. On December 30, Haiko became the first supermarket in the state to
start retailing wine as a result of a decision in October to allow grocery stores to sell wine and beer.
The cost of a licence to sell only wine and beer in supermarkets and grocery stores is a fourth of
the cost of a regular wine shop licence.
450 Crore rupees
Value of the Indian wine industry.
650,000
Number of cases of wine sold in 2006.
24 Billion litres
Worldwide consumption of wine.
30 Per cent
Rate at which Indian wine consumption is growing.
8.3 Million litres
How much wine we’re expected to be drinking by 2010.
47 Per cent
How much of the wine we import is French.
30 Per cent
The rate at which Italian wine imports is growing per year.
1-1.5 Crore rupees
Cost of setting up a winery with a capacity of one lakh litres.

Comments

[rajeev samant]

Hey Christian - read your blog with much interest! We should meet up sometime and chat!
Cheers
Rajeev

[sujata]

Hello Christian,

Interesting to know that you should want to create a business model for import and distribution of wines into India. I would be interested in knowing what response you got when you were in India.

Sujata

[Rajendra Shende]

We are launching Maharashtra Mandal France on 13th may in France. Its main objective is to launch a Franco-Marathi platform. In year 2008 we plan to organise a wine met of France and Maharastra. In case you are intersted in attending the ceremony on 13th may in paris, please let me know., i could send you invotation. We can then discuss.

[Indians-Wines.com]

Hi,
This article about indage group and indian wine is very interesting.
If you want to discover others great informations about indage group and indians wines, you can
fell free to visit the following website http://www.indians-wines.com/
I will take time now to read others post on this great blog ;-)
Remember dont drink too much wine if you dont want authorities delete it from market :-)