Wine tasting a lucrative career for Indian youth
by Nidhi Gupta

       New Delhi: As the custom of drinking wine gains popularity in India, an increasing number of Indian youth are finding that wine tasting is becoming a lucrative career in the country. As wine making is still at its nascent stage, there is a lack of qualified and experienced wine tasters in India. Indian wine makers therefore have been left with no other choice but to hire tasters from abroad, for this very unconventional job that involves a combination of art and science with a thorough knowledge of wines and its flavours. However, with recent studies indicating that India's wine market is growing fast, at around 30 percent a year and that in 10 years the industry will grow to an output of five million cases a year or 60 million bottles - or a 10-fold increase from now, wine enthusiasts feel wine tasting would prove to be a lucrative career in the near future.

      Magandeep Singh, a sommelier said, "I find that the market is now finally opening up and there will be a lot of scope to work with wine, and I find there a lot of youngsters who have done or are doing hotel management or hospitality management with wines. They are opting out of hotel streams to work in wine that's just like not being a doctor but being a surgeon, people are qualifying and specializing more and more into wines". The job, however, is not as easy as it sounds. Wine tasting requires a sharp sense of taste and smell along with natural talent. It requires a trained eye to detect wine quality by just looking at its colour, brightness, strength and flavour. Wine tasting can also be combined with a love for food in the perfect profession of a sommelier or a wine steward. A sommelier also has to have a good knowledge about wines so that he can help customers choose wines according to the occasion, meals and time of the year. "It's a very good opportunity for youth like us, who are pursuing a course in hotel management, to take the line of wine tasting because it is a new career and there are a lot of opportunities present. It will be growing very fast in India since people are moving towards wine from their whisky and vodkas," said Rupinder Singh, a student. And although there are no structured courses available in India to teach wine tasting or wine making as yet, a professional degree in hotel management or viticulture is helpful. But despite the figures, India is still far from being a wine- drinking country. Its annual consumption is .006 bottles a head against a world average of five bottles.
-Jan 26, 2006