Grapevine or informed selection: Significance of quality attributes in India's emerging wine market

Abstract

India today is an important emerging market for wines. A number of reasons are contributing to its growth. With a projected population of 1.4 billion, India is likely to overtake China as the most populous country in the world by 2022 (UN, 2015). Thus, the absolute size of the Indian market is going to be large. Also, as borne out in studies by Andersonand Wittwer (2016) and Jiao (2017), while wine consumption in traditional wine-producing countries may fall, macro economic growth phase of emerging markets in Asia is going to play a major role in driving the global demand for wine. Indeed, India has had the fastest GDP growth in the world in the recent past and that she is expected to continue with this trend in the future. For example, if India’s average GDP growth rate in 2015 and 2016 was the highest at 7.55 percent per year, the average GDP growth rate till 2020 is expected tobe the highest at 7.43 per cent per year (World Bank, 2018). Well-travelled Indians belonging to the upper strata of society, coming mainly from metropolitan urban centres are gettinghooked to wine drinking (Holland, 2017). With changingdemographic profile and high disposable income, they areadapting wine as a lifestyle projection tool (Singh and Srivastav, 2018) which primarily has been perceived as a western concept so far.