Posted: Friday, August 24 2007. 11:00 AM

Howling Wolves to howl in India too

Australian wine company Howling Wolves has set up a joint venture to produce wine in India with Indian distiller and distributor Brihans, reports Decanter.

Producing wine locally is a way of reaching the lucrative Indian market, Howling Wolves CEO Damian Knowles said.

India is a notoriously hard market for wine exporters. Import duties and government surcharges reach 550% in some states, while others ban all alcohol sales.

Knowles also said the quality of most locally-produced wine was fairly poor.
'Ninety-five percent of locally-produced wine is average or below. Indian growers are conditioned to growing quantity not quality.'

The new vineyard is at Shreepur, about 300km south of Mumbai. Knowles says the climate is half way between Western Australia's Margaret River (where Howling Wolves is based) and the Swan Valley near Perth.

'We have already planted 10ha of grapes as rootstock and will shortly begin grafting Margaret River scion tissue including Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon Blanc, Shiraz, Chenin and a few rows of Merlot and Semillon,' he said.

Margaret River viticulturalist Tim Quinlan, who flies to Shreepur every other month, is in charge of vineyard design and management in cooperation with the Indian farm manager.

When the winery is in operation an Australian winemaker will also consult.
'We plan to start up winemaking early next year. We will buy in fruit for the first vintage,' said Knowles.

Within five years Knowles plans to sell 25,000 cases of Brihans - Howling Wolves wine into the domestic market.

'There has been a change in attitude to wine in India,' he said. 'Once five-star restaurants set out beer tumblers. Now they set out wine glasses.

Howling Wolves had participated in IFE-India 2006, the premier food and wine show held annually in Pragati Maidan, New Delhi annually .Apparently, it was to gauge the Indian market and has encouraged them to go ahead with the JV..

Duties on wines have been quoted incorrectly by Howling Wolves/Decanter.

DelWine does not agree with their views on Indian wines. Comments from viewers are encouraged.

Source: www.decanter.com

Dear Sir,

Your article posted 24th August and sourced from Decanter has many inaccuracies when referring to quotes made by myself, if I could please comment;

We met our Indian partners in November 2004 in Singapore and in early 2005 sent our first container to India and opened up both Mumbai and Pune markets, since then we have moved into Bangalore and Goa . Myself and my two business partners have visited our Indian markets on at least a dozen occasions and have a long term belief and interest in the Indian wine industries development.

The idea to establish a local vineyard was hatched 2 years ago with discussions in Perth , Singapore and Mumbai and so to suggest that the IFE-India 2006 was the catalyst for the JV is totally incorrect, our meeting with our Indian partners in Singapore was in January 2006 and that was to finalise the structure of the JV.

Duties on imported wines are prohibitive but certainly no where near the 550% that has been suggested in your article, with our global distribution experience and our time spent developing and helping to build the Indian wine market I hope you will except that our knowledge of duties and the Indian industry in general is a little more accurate than that.

In regards to the quality of Indian wines I do not recall quoting percentages to anyone. I have visited many vineyard/wineries in India, some of world class standards and as in every wine growing region (including Margaret River) some not so perfect. One that I visited that impressed me enormously was a Mr Yatin Patil from Nasic who produces a stunning range of wines under his Reveilo label. This is an extremely well managed vineyard with a world class winery that anyone in the industry would be impressed by.

Our investment in the Indian market is substantial and is a critical part of our overall business and so without a great belief in India itself and the ability of the land to produce high quality wine we would not be investing as we are. 

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you would like to discuss our project in more detail as I believe you and your readers would find our story very interesting.

Regards,

Damian Knowles

Dear Mr. Damian Knowles,

When I sought viewers' comments, the last person we expected to hear from was you. This shows the vibrant stage the wine industry in India is going through. I am very glad to hear from you and appreciate the response.

As you could see, the article was sourced from Decanter, a very reliable wine magazine. The article was written by Frank Smith on August 22 nd under the title, Australian -Indian Joint Venture and is published under the URL http://www.decanter.com/news/138701.html

We have made it mandatory at delwine to give full credit to publications from where we source some of our articles- with short comments where we find necessary. Sometimes, the article is written around a news item in which case the basic source is still mentioned.

In this article, Decanter obviously made wrong assumptions of duties (they were presumably referring to the duties on liquor) which we thought appropriate to comment upon. The bit about IFE India was an assumption as I had clearly mentioned in the article. That was the first time I had heard of Howling Wolves being in India.

As you might appreciate, news items such as this are not our direct stories, for which we do the proper checking and screening for quality. We presume that the journalist has done an adequate job. For instance, in this case, the story interested me because I had seen the Wolves in Delhi and the bit about your coming and making in India was extremely interesting. To my mind, the quality of Indian wines could do with a lot of improvement working with foreign collaborations and arrangements like you have been quoted as saying by the decanter.

We sincerely hope that your presence in India will help improve competition and hence quality and wish you good luck in the venture.

Yours truly,

Subhash Arora

Editor, delWine