Thursday, 7.30 p.m. It's a busy day for Wine India Inc. At Delhi's spiffy Imperial Hotel, guests sip Beaujolais Nouveau, the first wine of the harvest from Albert Bichot, one of the top wine houses in Burgundy, France. At the Taj Mahal Hotel, another group raises a toast with Beaujolais Nouveau from wine merchant Georges Duboeuf, while an equally fortunate lot of beginners and connoisseurs says "Sante" with a Duboeuf at The Oberoi.

VINTAGE INDIA: Francoise Bichot with her company's export director Ariff Jamal

In well-heeled, metropolitan India, wine dinners have become the hottest events of the social season. Convivial evenings, where names like finicky wine critic Robert Parker and legendary Napa Valley winemaker Robert Mondavi are dropped with deliberate carelessness, are now becoming de rigueur. So is conversation that borders on the RISQUE: a Cabernet Sauvignon is described as having "legs", while a Shiraz is approvingly called "full-bodied". And if you want to justify drinking a cheap Chianti, you can, especially if you are a man, say it is "young and sexy".

The guest list often reads like a must-have social register: pedigreed royals (from Richard Holkar of Indore to Jyotiraditya Scindia of Gwalior); captains of industry like Dhruv Sawhney of Triveni Engineering and Anand Mahindra of Mahindra & Mahindra; food and wine journalists (a well-fed but very competitive breed) and arbiters of social elegance such as Shobhaa De and Sabira Merchant.

CHATEAU CHIC: Thienpont (right) of Vieux Chateau Certan

In the past 15 months, Aman Dhall, one of the largest wine importers in the country, has organised 56 dinners. Sanjay Menon, an equally large importer, has arranged 97 in the past three years. That's not all. From the days when serving a vin de table (got from your local bootlegger for Rs 200) was a badge of honour to now when home-grown epicures can distinguish between a Riesling and a Sauvignon Blanc, upper crust India has travelled a long way on the wine route. Whether it is a wine and cheese opening of a store, the gift of a Chateau Latour during Diwali or even a mid-market Orvieto as an accompaniment to kebabs and curries, wine is becoming more visible and also, socially, a chic alternative to spirits.

So much so that it is spawning societies to promote wine culture: Bangalore has an informal wine society anchored by biotechnologist Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw as well as a wine club started last year by wine consultant Alok Chandra. Delhi also has two: the Delhi Wine Society, the first in the country, was started by travel consultant Ghulam Naqshband in 1996, while the Delhi Wine Club was registered in March by it entrepreneur Subhash Arora. Even Chandigarh wants one-a group of wine lovers has invited Arora to set up a club there-while Nagpur has already acquired one, with help from Chandra.

Yet the incipient wine culture in India is not only about knowing which collector has the to-die-for Sori San Lorenzo, awarded 100 points by Parker. Or about dropping the name of Emile Peynaud, the world's finest oenologist from the University of Bordeaux. Or even knowing how many wines writer Hugh Johnson tastes in a year-10,000, if you must know. Ultimately it is about hardheaded business as winemakers discover India, the last frontier.

Or shall we say the lost frontier? As Jean-Guillame Prats, the 31-year-old English-speaking French chairman of Bordeaux's Chateau Cos d'Estournel, put it at a wine-tasting in Delhi: "Beginning with Louis-Gaspard d'Estournel in the early 19th century, 90 per cent of the wine made at the chateau was sold to India's nobility." It's a habit-like the purchase of Louis Vuitton luggage by India's maharajas-that we hope to revive among an estimated 2,00,000 upper middle-class consumers in India.

Despite the duties on wine rising to 265 per cent even though quantitative restrictions were lifted in April 2001, winemakers are looking at India as the new Japan, or at least China. While the appetite for wine took off in 1993 among Japan's eight million consumers with an annual disposable income of at least $20,000 (Rs 9.6 lakh) after reports about the cardiovascular advantages of red wine (the so-called French paradox), in China, a cognac-drinking habit and lower duties have led to a rise in wine consumption. As Carlos Soriano, the international business development head of Miguel Torres, an international wine house, says, "We had no presence in Japan 15 years ago. Now we sell 60,000 cases (of 12 bottles each). In China, which is as big and heterogeneous as India, without its English-speaking advantage, we sell a little over 5,000 cases." In India, he says he'll be lucky if he sells 2,000 cases this year after eight years of investment.

The figures are quite dispiriting. Only 70,000 cases of foreign wines are sold in India while the tiny nation of Maldives buys 4,00,000 cases a year. Albert Bichot's export director Ariff Jamal gives another comparison: his company sells 3,000 cases in India every year while in Sri Lanka it sells 30,000 cases. It doesn't help that India is traditionally a whisky-drinking market-of the 73 million cases of spirits sold in the domestic market, 50 per cent is whisky which costs less than Rs 200 a bottle. Wine suffers in comparison: a glass of a Rs 500 table wine costs Rs 100 while a peg of Royal Challenge costs Rs 40.

HOPE FERMENTS: Soriano (left) of Miguel Torres has been doing business in India for eight years

Yet foreign winemakers persevere because they have to. For France, exports sustain the industry (last year, wines and spirits made for 83 per cent of the country's agricultural exports). For the New World, it's the only way to offset tiny domestic markets (Australia exports more wine now than it produced 10 years ago). Which is why the visitors' book of Destination Wine India is brimming with names. In the past two months alone, Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore have seen a series of visits by representatives from celebrated wineries-Rupert & Rothschild, a partnership between the sons of the reclusive South African baron Anton Rupert and the late Baron Edmond de Rothschild of France; Kendall-Jackson, California's most-awarded winery; the wine label Henri Bourgeois which sells some fine Sancerres and Poilly-Fumes; Vieux Chateau Certan, a Bordeaux family which has been making wines since 1842; Chateau Cos d'Estournel; Miguel Torres, a Spanish vineyard whose eponymous owner has been named Decanter's winemaker of 2002; and Albert Bichot. For all of them, investment in India is a tiny speck in the vineyard: for instance, the net worth of the privately owned Kendall-Jackson is $400 million. The amount most winemakers spend on one visit, including a wine dinner, is $6,000-8,000.

Ultimately, even if the wines are good, as at Indigo, the trendy Asian-European restaurant in Mumbai, they're just too expensive-one of the reasons why its owner Rahul Akerkar has dropped the prices on his wine list by 25 per cent over last year. The prices are simply a function of ferociously high duties and complicated import conditions. Thanks to that, an Indian restaurant will price a bottle of an entry level wine like Sito Moresco from the fourth generation Piedmont winery Gaja at $100 while it will be available at an Italian supermarket for $18-20. In five-star hotels, the mark-up is higher. A Santa Christina, an Antinori (made by an old Florentine wine family), that costs $8 in a supermarket is $30 in a five-star restaurant.

For those who have acquired a taste for drinking free wine, Amrit Kiran Singh, director of Brown-Forman, which produces Fetzer, George W. Bush Jr's favourite wine, sounds a warning, "If the Government doesn't reduce duties on wine, there won't be any free dinners in 2003. These dinners happened in the past two years only because the wine houses had sent cases to India in anticipation of lower duties after April 2001. When that didn't happen, they were forced to pass them on to the distributors on a pay-as-able basis.''

The still-evolving wine culture can have its comic moments. Like the time a journalist went prepared to meet the Chilean minister of wines but found himself discussing his favourite Chardonnay Curico Valley from Montes with the minister of mines. Or even when a city supplement identified two unfortunate guests at an E&J Gallo dinner as Mr Ernest Gallo and Ms Julio Gallo (unmindful of the fact that the latter was a man who is no longer alive).

As winemakers initiate upper middle-class India into the correct wine manner, they hope when duties are lowered, they will be right there to take advantage. And maybe the next time Akerkar goes to his bank to ask for an overdraft of Rs 30 lakh because he wants to augment his 4,000-bottle cellar, they will not choke on their chai.