Rajeev Samant developed a taste for wine during his years in California, first as a Stanford student and then as an engineer at Oracle in Silicon Valley. So when he returned to his family’s picturesque farm northeast of Mumbai, he decided to try growing table grapes. The grapevines flourished. Samant brought in some ringers from Napa and imported India’s first sauvignon blanc and zinfandel grapes, and Sula Vineyards was born. He corked his first bottle in 2000. Now he produces 18 different varieties.

Samant is just the kind of upstart winemaker the old guard from Bordeaux and St-Émilion loves to hate. Maurice Large, former president of the Beaujolais producers’ association, once denounced people like him as “philistines” with a taste for “alcoholic fruit drink.”

Although total global wine consumption is down slightly, it is growing rapidly in the developing world. Since 2001, wine consumption in India has soared by 25 per cent a year. Brazilians are mobbing wine appreciation courses, eager to become sommeliers—the hottest new profession since fashion modeling. China, now among the top 10 consumer markets, plants more wine grapes than Australia. North Africa is paved with grapevines, from Morocco to Egypt, which has doubled its annual output since 2000 to 8.5 million bottles, and now exports to Europe. There’s even a successful winery in Bali, encouraging enthusiasts to declare tropical wine a genre unto itself.

It’s not hard to imagine what the old-time winemakers in France and Italy must think. As they see it, the old “New World” producers—Australia, the United States, South America, and South Africa—have been hard enough to stomach. Thanks to them, European vineyards now account for less than half the world’s grape production. But India? Morocco? Bali? It’s just too much for the traditionalists. Très mal, sniffs Large, who accuses the New World dilettantes of “treating wine like Coca-Cola.”

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