In Bangalore’s famed Lalbagh, sari-clad women with flowers in their neat plaits jostled with seniors sporting safari suits to grab plastic cups brimming with the wines on offer. Red? White? Today, the choices were rather limited.

Unexpectedly wine tasting had spilled out from its usual plush backdrop, where usually men in business suits and women in stilettoes nibble cheese between sips of wine, to a public park swarming with families this weekend.

If middle-class Bangalore’s enthusiasm for the country’s first public wine festival was any indication, India looks set to arrive on the global wine drinking scene with a bang and a hiccup.

Where the local winemakers expected to sell a couple of cases, over 1,200 cases of wine sold less than half-way through the festival, stalls had run out of stock and people that would never be seen at the city’s hip drinking joints paid Rs 25 to form snake-like lines at the tasting counters.

Breaking age-old taboos associated with drinking, citizens who showed up at the festival said wine-drinking was becoming socially acceptable as healthy and even trendy.

Teetotaler friends R. Krishna Kumar, a stationary storeowner, and Krishna Murthy, a tax consultant, arrived, clamouring to taste the wine. “Everybody says drinking wine is beneficial so we wanted to try it out,” said Murthy. His companion said they had their wives’ permission for the trial session. “We assured them we will not go the bad way,” said Kumar.

In another corner, homemaker Anuradha Rajesh and her mother Indu sipped red wine from plastic glasses, while Anuradha’s father looked on impassively. “This is a healthy, classy alternative for young Indians like me,” said Anuradha.

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