I just can’t figure out why restaurants price wine the way they do. When we used to complain about the unreasonable pricing of imported wines, especially the supermarket stuff that gets passed off as fine wine in our city, the industry would wring its hands in despair and blame the high customs and excise duties.
The government allowed five- star hotel chains, as well as restaurants that could afford to do so, the facility to spend a percentage of their foreign exchange earnings to import duty- free alcohol. It’s been about eight years since the ministry of commerce showered its munificence on hotels and restaurants, but we have not seen the benefit being passed on to us — the thirsty consumers. Ordinary wine, as a result, comes at extraordinary prices in our quality- deprived city.
What’s more galling, though, is the way Indian wines are priced.
Wines that sell in the market for Rs 480 to Rs 700 are priced between Rs 1,600 and Rs 2,000 even at a regular restaurant. It’s nigh on impossible to get half bottles ( the notable exceptions being The Embassy in Connaught Place and the Barista Crème outlets) and Indian wine by the glass costs more than what a bottle would in the open market.
Add 20 per cent VAT to the menu prices and the bill really hurts.
On average, one ends up paying Rs 2,000 for a bottle of Indian wine, which is what I pay for my favourite everyday drinking wine, Sangre de Toro. I have, in fact, come across international wines on restaurant menus that are priced less than their Indian peers. It hurts my pride to pay more for an international wine ( in most cases, plonk) than for a reasonably decent Indian wine.
I wonder why our hotels and restaurants are being so foolishly snobbish.
The conspiracy theory is that foreign tourists are the most devoted buyers of Indian wine, so hotels and restaurants overcharge this commodity to pad up the bottomline.
I suspect the love of the visitors for Indian wine has to do more with the shocking prices of the international offerings than with any great appreciation for local liquid pleasures — but they end up getting poorer nonetheless.
Restaurant operators have no credible explanation to offer, but I’m told they make more out of every bottle of domestic wine they sell because they extract big discounts from wine producers — they, in other words, don’t pay the price we do when we buy a Sula, Grover, Four Seasons or Nine Hills off the market.
The sufferers, as always, are unsuspecting wine lovers. They have two choices before them — to imbibe at home before heading for a restaurant, or to nurse a whisky, for that’s more cost- effective than ordering a glass of wine.
That’s unfair. More importantly, why are hotels and restaurants diffident about promoting Indian wine? In their green years, Napa Valley wineries found their place in the sun when local restaurants started serving them as an act of local pride.
The more enterprising restaurants even developed a Californian cuisine to complement the region’s wines. Can we expect hotels and restaurants in the city to show similar pride in buying Indian and selling at Indian prices?
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