印度也爱上了葡萄酒_时事_双语阅读-查字典英语网

印度也爱上了葡萄酒

On my first visit to India, in 2002, I met one of the country’s first wine writers, a young woman who told me that her friends would routinely ask her, “What’s the point of wine? Whisky gets you drunk so much quicker. How things have changed. Despite punitive taxation and mind-boggling regulation and paperwork, India now has a thriving wine culture – or at least its vast middle class and “upper crust (the name of an Indian glossy magazine) do.

我第一次去印度(India)是在2002年，当时我与该国一位年轻的女葡萄酒作家会了面，她说自己有一位朋友常常问一个问题“既然威士忌(Whisky)能让人醉得更快，那么喝葡萄酒的意义到底是什么呢？伴随着时光的飞逝，世事已经发生巨变。尽管税额高昂令人咋舌，法规公文也繁琐不堪，如今印度的葡萄酒文化已经相当繁荣——或者说至少大批的中产阶级和上流社会(upper crust)（该国有一本流行杂志也叫做《上流社会》）对葡萄酒有狂热的爱好。

Taxes and duties on imported wine are imposed by both national customs and the individual state. They are cumulatively so high that consumers can pay 10 to 12 times the initial cost of a bottle when they buy wine from one of India’s relatively small but growing number of wine retailers. A basic bottle of Jacob’s Creek, the leading imported brand, could, for example, easily cost the equivalent of ￡20 off a shelf, and many times more on a hotel wine list.