Wine Related Articles

Who Should Pay For Bad Wine Bottle
By: Subhash Arora	<< back   Page 2 of 2

It would be a tricky situation to handle too, obviously because who is to tell whether the wine is off or not - certainly not the man behind the counter, whose knowledge is limited to the colour and perhaps the race of the wine. In this instance, all other wines served were purchased from the same vendor and were ok. In fact, like on other occasions, the guests polished off the last, Gaja Promis as I was giving them the background of the wine. I did not even get time to tell them that the Super Tuscan was a blend of Merlot, Syrah and a minor portion of Sangiovese but the bottles were polished off with every red wine lover rating it the best.

What nags me always is also the fact that a person drinking out an off wine may also be turned off completely forever by wine, a white wine, a Chardonnay, or Azure Bay. Despite it being a low end wine, its brand name can be sullied, for no fault of the winery. Since the off wine does not physically harm the system, the taster may perceive this to be the normal taste, with no excitement that we find in the beverage.

Fortunately the next two labels of Chardonnay we served saved the day for the varietal and possibly the wine, as the next two were quite quaffable, especially the Banfi from Tuscany. Same was true for the reds- they were all in good physical shape.

Coming back to the basic question, the common business sense would also dictate that the front end retailer take the bottle back immediately and give it back to the importer. The history of the customer would guide him if the complaint is genuine or not.

One hopes that there will not be many cases coming up in our Indian consumer courts in future. With retail opening up in a big way, this problem is likely to be accentuated unless the cool chain is maintained and the importers and distributors clear out the stocks of young wines before they die out.

To this extent, a possible law insisting on ‘Best before…’ on the label would be a good idea. Incidentally, hotels may be accused of fleecing the customers with their high prices but are generally amenable to appeasing the customer in such cases as they have trained service oriented personnel.

If we do not handle the case of the bad wine bottle, we risk the growth in wine consumption in India, even at the current rate.

India consumes about 7 million liters of wine last year including about 1.5 million liters of imported wine. The current annual growth rae is about 30% which can easily go up to 50% if and when the ridiculously high duties of up to 267% on wine are brought down. The reduction is expected very soon.

Subhash Arora

June 15, 2007

< The article has been penned in the Indian context>

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