UK Market Report claims youth driving the Indian Wine Market

If the report released by the British market survey company Canadean is accurate, the country’s wine consumption is being incredibly driven by youth with young adults between the age of 16-34 years representing 46.5% of the drinking population which naturally includes a sizeable chunk of illegal consumers as most states have the drinking age of 21 years with states like Delhi and Punjab pegging it at even 25 years.

According to the report, on the Indian Wine Market, early young adults of 16-24 years were the highest consumers, among various age groups, at 25 %. The next category between 25-34 years consumed 21.6%, says the report in Drinks Business Review. Some of the other interesting discoveries of the report are: · Changing age structures has been the most influencing trend with 41%, while fun and enjoyment came next with 32%. · Whereas the affluent section formed 43% of the market, the highly affluent held only 13% share. · Consumers having one to three hours of leisure time held 44% share while those having more than seven hours formed 4%. · The higher the education, the more the consumption of wine; consumers with a postgraduate qualification accounted for 64% of the wine drinkers while the consumers with only primary level education have been only 0.8%. ‘This report provides the results for the wine market in India, from Canadean’s unique, highly detailed and proprietary online survey of consumers’ Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) consumption habits, and forms part of an overall series covering all CPG product markets,’ according to the Canadean website. One of the interesting revelations is the consumption pattern of the type of wines; ‘among the two categories of the wine market, still wine dominated with 59.7%, and sparkling wine held 40.3%’. However, the report would be music to the ears of the Indian wine producers/ marketers like Turning Point who are betting on the age segment of 21-35 years driving the wine consumption in future and are focusing on this segment. It would perhaps also validate the increase in production and the growth of the lower priced wines in the Rs.150-300 price category across the production spectrum with more and more producers adding cheaper wines to their portfolio- sometimes bottling the same liquid in a bottle with a cheaper label to increase  the sales. No doubt, we have many people in India  who believe that any report that comes from the British Island must be the Gospel Truth. Since we don’t have a sophisticated system of conducting surveys in the wine market due to the choking regulations, one may be an optimist and hope some of this information will become public knowledge. Perhaps the detailed report would also provide some specific details of the sparkling wine which supposedly forms 40.3% of the Indian wine market. SOURCE http://www.indianwineacademy.com/item_4_524.aspx