On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 10:09 AM, Sriram Karra <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I wonder ... is there *any* way one can do the above in India over a > meaningfully long period of time in without having to, in parallel, plan a > heist at a local bank? Are you friends with an importer? Do you have a lot of friends that travel outside of India regularly? Are you willing to dedicate yourself to this for years? > Charles, can you shed some light on the economics of > running a structured and serious tasting like the one you sent in another > email? We can make some rough corrections for Indian import duties and > stuff. > The basics are pretty obvious. Take number of wines you want to take, the number of tasters, and figure out the cost per taster. Avoid any other costs - hold the tastings at someone's house. Have people bring their own glasses and tasting sheets, buy one set of measuring/pouring devices, get brown paper wine bottle bags from wherever you buy your wine. I haven't been to a tasting in a while, but my memory is that tastings were generally in the $20-$30 range, but the price was kept low because the organiser had good connections, and also because he would buy wines and hold them for years for tasting later. I think the cost per person was roughly 75% the cost of the average bottle of wine in the tasting. Mark? You could reduce the cost by reducing the size of the pour, but you risk not being able to really taste the wines. You need a big enough pour to get multiple tastes of each wine in order to get a good impression of each one, and to compare them. Indian wine import duties make it a daunting task. -- Charles
