Editorial Article
India: USD 6.85 Billion of Beer and No Wine Market Anyone Can Size
India’s beer market is sized to the decimal. Its wine market has no number at all, and that is the story.
Pheonix Research sizes the India beer market at USD 6.85 billion in 2025, rising to USD 10.72 billion by 2033 at 5.6 per cent. That is a normal, defensible market report with a base year, a forecast and a rate.
For Indian wine, no comparable figure exists — not in our library, and not, so far as we can establish, in anyone’s. This article is about why, and about the one series that does exist, because a market that cannot be sized and a market that is small are two different findings and only one of them is worth writing down.
The beer number is smaller than it sounds
India is the most populous country in the world and its beer market is worth 1.30 per cent of the world wine market. Set it against the global context and the scale is sobering: USD 6.85 billion is a rounding error beside USD 528.4 billion of world wine and USD 493.7 billion of world spirits. The Indian beer market, sized properly, is 17.75 per cent of the global vodka market, which is USD 38.60 billion.
Which is the first thing this article has to say plainly. India is not an under-served beverage market waiting for a category to arrive. It is a large country with a small alcohol market by value, and any wine strategy built on its population is built on a number that does not appear in any profit and loss account.
What actually exists on the wine side
There is a recorded series, and it comes from a state excise department rather than a research house. Maharashtra, which accounts for roughly ninety per cent of India’s grape wine production, sold 12.1 million litres of grape wine in the 2024-25 financial year, up 14.2 per cent on the 10.6 million litres of 2023-24. Ten years earlier, in 2015-16, the state sold 5.92 million litres. That is 104.4 per cent growth in a decade — the market has doubled.
The concentration is extreme. 52 per cent of Maharashtra’s sales — 6.3 million litres — took place in the Mumbai-Thane region. Pune took 2.44 million litres and Nashik, the state’s wine capital, 1.15 million. So the industry’s own producing region drinks less than a fifth of what its capital drinks — Mumbai-Thane sold 5.5 times Nashik’s volume.
The structural picture, from an industry association deck covering 2014-18, has not been contradicted since: around 93 wineries in the country, of which about 77 are in Maharashtra — some 83 per cent — on roughly 2,300 hectares under wine grapes. Karnataka is the second state, with around 17 wineries. On consumption, the same source put national wine consumption at 11.5 million litres in 2014, estimated to fall to 10.1 million litres by 2017, with Goa at 26.40 per cent, Maharashtra at 25.90 per cent, Karnataka around 19 per cent and Delhi/NCR 10.7 per cent.
Read those two paragraphs together and one thing stands out. Maharashtra alone now sells more grape wine than the industry association estimated the entire country consumed eight years earlier. That is a real market growing from a very low base, and the growth is not in doubt.
The number that puts it in perspective
12.1 million litres is 0.121 million hectolitres. The world consumed 208.0 million hectolitres in 2025.
0.058 per cent. One state producing ninety per cent of a country’s wine sells roughly one seventeen-hundredth of the world’s.
Per capita is where the scale becomes impossible to argue with. Even if Maharashtra’s 12.1 million litres were the whole country’s consumption — it is not, but take the generous case — that is on the order of 13.4 million litres across about 1.45 billion people, or roughly 0.0092 litres a person a year. The world average is 20.8 billion litres across roughly 8.1 billion people: 2.568 litres a person.
India drinks wine at about one two-hundred-and-eightieth of the world average per person. Not a tenth. Not a twentieth. The gap is two and a half orders of magnitude, and it is not a gap that a marketing campaign closes.
Why nobody can size it
Four reasons, and each of them is a policy fact rather than a data-collection failure.
Alcohol is a state subject. Excise, licensing and retail are set state by state, so there is no federal series. Karnataka’s wine board counts its own wineries; Maharashtra’s excise department publishes its own litres; nobody is obliged to add them up.
The tax is multilayer. The industry’s own account of the 9.8 per cent annual decline in production between 2014 and 2018 names a multilayer tax structure and restricted inter-state movement as the two causes. Wine moving from Maharashtra to Karnataka crosses a tax boundary in a way that beer and spirits do so too — but wine is the smallest category and therefore the one least worth a distributor’s compliance effort.
Ninety-three wineries is not a market; it is a set of businesses. At that count, and with 83 per cent of the capacity in one state, a national total would be an aggregation of small numbers reported inconsistently, on different bases, for different years.
And the volume that is measured is excise-recorded sales, not consumption. What is drunk is a different number from what is sold, and in a country where a state runs the retail network, the difference is not trivial.
What we will and will not publish
We will publish the Maharashtra excise series, because it is a government record with a base year and a growth rate. We will publish the winery count, the hectareage and the state split, because an industry association measured them and nobody has refuted them.
We will not publish a size for the Indian wine market. Anyone who gives you one is either quoting a global vendor’s model — built by allocating a share of a share — or quoting a project pipeline. The honest figure, on the evidence above, is a market in the low hundreds of millions of dollars: 13.4 million litres at any plausible Indian average retail price lands there. That is an order of magnitude, not a size, and we are labelling it as one.
The thesis a report would have to test
Two numbers, one contrast. Beer: USD 6.85 billion, growing 5.6 per cent, sized, forecast, investable. Wine: under a tenth of one per cent of world volume, growing 14.2 per cent in its only well-measured state, doubling every decade from a base so low that the doubling is invisible.
The interesting question is not whether Indian wine will grow. It is whether the constraint is demand or distribution. If it is demand, the market stays where it is and the growth rate is arithmetic on a small base. If it is distribution — multilayer tax, inter-state restriction, 93 wineries and one dominant state — then the growth rate is a policy variable, and policy variables change faster than drinking habits do.
We lean to the second, on the evidence of the 9.8 per cent production decline between 2014 and 2018 in a country whose middle class was growing throughout. A category that shrinks while incomes rise is not being held back by consumers.
More in this series: What a wine company actually earns · Why a USD 528 billion market can’t sell direct · Spirits passes wine in 2031.