Sobhraj & Sauvignon

“The liar said ‘I always lie:
A spider never ate a fly
True love is never hard to find
The lame shall always lead the blind.’”
From Sharam ka Dharam by Bachchoo

Charles Sobhraj, when he was at liberty and chatting, once asked me about the viability of a business proposition he had dreamt up: “Kill a few millionaires, pretend to be their daughters and inherit their fortunes. Hah!” — only kidding folks! He never said that! The proposition he did ask me about was buying wine in France to sell in India.
I recall the story because it’s possible that my drinking habits are about to change drastically. This is because a growing lobby in England blames the consumption of alcohol for half the woes of the nation or at least for a bill of £1.7 billion a year the National Health Service spends on alcohol-related diseases. The government is being pressured to raise the price of alcohol through taxation, a model that Indian states have used — in actuality to raise revenues under the cover of a half-Gandhian measure of disapproval.
When I say my drinking habits might change, I only mean that instead of buying the good Rieslings which may now cost £20 a bottle, I shall probably buy the cheaper varieties of Pinot Grigio which may still cost a fiver. Hey ho!
After a stomach operation a few years ago I asked my Indo-Brit surgeon what I could eat. He said, “Anything you want.”
“And drink? I mean alcohol?”
“Oh moderate,” he said.
“How much is moderate?”
“Less than your surgeon,” he said.
But back to the Sobhraj proposition:
He said he had access to vineyards which sold off their surplus wine at auctions and he was convinced he could get these for a song, if not a faint whistle. He would send the barrels by the container-load to India and the wine would be bottled there and sold as authentic French vintage.
I have no idea why he thought I was the right person to ask or that I knew anything about selling wine — or selling anything else for that matter. He should have gathered by then, through my abject failure to get a literary agent to sell his jail memoirs, that sales and commercial matters were not my strong point.
Perhaps he thought that a person who was fussy about not drinking particular sorts of wine, someone who could discuss, (having read a book and mixed with connoisseurs and drunkards) grape varieties, would know about flogging wine in India. I told him I didn’t think Indians drank great quantities of wine.
I recounted my experience of booze-buying in the shop behind Khan Market in Delhi where the customers stormed the premises with the eagerness of French revolutionaries demolishing the Bastille. None of them were buying wine. They were carrying away small bottles of rum and strong spirits and the red-eyed crowd didn’t appeal to me as aficionados who would appreciate the finer points of a Chateau Rothschild or Puligny Montrachet.
I then told him about another legitimate dodge which a very distinguished and wine-loving French friend of mine executes each year. Yuri, this friend, is very good on fine wines and knows, as does every European schoolchild, that the great vineyards and chateaux of Europe make much more wine than the laws and licences of the European Union allow them to.
These laws limit the number of bottles a Chateau or region can put out under its own label. The restriction is not part of a policy of cruelty to wine-growers, but a policy which keeps the price of European wines buoyant and is therefore ultimately in favour of the wine capitalists.
The surplus wines of even the finest and most famous chateaux are then sold in open auction by the barrel. Yuri goes to these auctions as an observer and notes which wholesaler of cheap wine is bidding for what. The successful bidder is then allowed to bottle and sell the wine under some generic name on the bottle’s label without attributing the contents to the particular chateau or region.
So buying cases of this cheap wine under a new name gets you the same stuff that the chateau sells at the much higher prices that connoisseurs pay for fine wines.
This information didn’t interest Charles. He wanted to know if the Indian population could be induced to buy wines, regardless of their quality. I put him in touch with someone who told him that the tax on imported alcohol was so prohibitive that his bottle of wine which cost him, say, 1 euro (`65?) each to get to the shops in Mumbai, and would then be sold for `800 out of which he would probably get 66. And at that price the toiling masses of India wouldn’t change their drinking habits.
I deduce that Charles took the caveat and didn’t venture into the cross-continental wine trade as I haven’t noticed any bottles labelled “Bikini Blanc” or some similarly alluring name.
There are very many Indian wines now on sale and some of them are perhaps not up to the standards of Bordeaux or Burgundy, but can certainly compare equally with some stuff coming out of California, Chile, South Africa or the plonk of Australia. Sula’s Sauvignon Blanc is one I single out for friends who want a decent wine and don’t want to pay the prices that hotels or smugglers ask for anything with a foreign label. (The publicity apparatchiks of Sula please note the free plug!)
In England one has the recourse of driving one’s car across the Channel to the waiting French wholesale wine markets on the roads just outside the ferry terminals, filling up with wines of all varieties and ranges and returning with enough wine, on which taxes have already been paid, to last a moderate drinker like myself a year — OK, three months!
I keep forgetting how much my surgeon said he drank.