Diwali falls on 8 November this year. For luxury, the festival is now as much a fixture of the commercial calendar as Lunar New Year or Christmas. For wine, the lights go on only in parts of the market.
Dīpāvali means “a row of lamps”. The festival is older than any luxury house, and its logic of prosperity is older still. It is the night Lakshmi, goddess of fortune, is invited into a house swept clean and brightly lit. Merchant communities, notably the Marwaris and Gujaratis, open their new account books with a chopda pujan, and the financial year of the old trading castes still begins in Diwali’s light. Dhanteras, two days earlier, is the day to buy gold, silver and, increasingly, a watch or a handbag. In India an acquisition made at the right moment is an offering as well as a purchase.
Luxury has understood this. Jewellers, couturiers, watchmakers, leather houses and the great Scotch and cognac names now build whole seasonal narratives around the festival. They bring out limited editions in gold and saffron, run gifting programmes for corporate clients and stage private evenings in Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru. The logic is sound. India’s affluent households are multiplying, and the Indian consumer does not use Diwali to mark a year’s end but to open a new cycle of confidence. A brand that is present, tactful and fluent in the ritual’s codes enters the family’s intimacy. That is a rarer asset than a sale.
Wine is also invited to this table, and it stands at the door with its coat still on.
The first obstacle is arithmetic. For decades India has applied a federal import duty of up to 150% on wine, and individual states add their own levies on top, so the retail price of a bottle bears little relation to its value at the cellar door. The EU-India agreement concluded in January should change this. Duties are to fall over time to 20% for premium wines and 30% for mid-range wines. The phrase “over time” matters.
The second obstacle is constitutional. Alcohol in India is largely a matter for the states, which means there is no Indian wine market, only a mosaic of them. Each state sets its own excise rules, label registrations, pricing structures and retail licences, and it decides how, whether and where a bottle may be sold. Some states are permissive, and Maharashtra and Karnataka have long cultivated wine as a policy goal. Others are dry or nearly so. The tradition of regulating liquor is ancient, since Kautilya’s Arthashastra already describes a state superintendent of spirits. A brand that thinks in terms of “India” will find itself negotiating twenty-eight different ones.
The third obstacle is subtler. Wine is hardly a category in India. Wine made up less than 1% of alcohol consumption in 2022, against 53% for spirits and 46% for beer. The Indian premium drinker is formed by whisky, which is poured at the wedding, offered to the business partner and given at Diwali. Wine has no equivalent ritual and no obvious place in the festival’s gestures. Its gifting codes are underdeveloped, its price signals are confusing and its vocabulary can seem more intimidating than seductive. The ban on direct alcohol advertising forces brands into indirect communication. Cellaring in a hot climate is also a practical problem, because a prestigious bottle that has travelled badly makes a poor gift.
Diwali teaches patience in its own way. The lamp is lit and nobody expects the sun to rise on the same night, but the light is kept burning until it does. The wine industry’s task in India is the same: to keep the flame going through the tariff schedules, the state licences and the education, until a bottle is as natural a Diwali offering as a box of sweets or a piece of gold.
Contact Guillaume Jourdan via LinkedIn
