Cav. Subhash Arora: He started drinking wine as a least of the ‘evils’

Arora is an electrical engineer from IIT Delhi and an FIE (Fellow of Institute of Engineers), the highest level of membership in the national professional association. After working in Germany for a year, he went on to the US and completed his MSIE and MBA from the University of Minnesota.

He started drinking wine as a least of the ‘evils’. Arora had always been a teetotaler, even during his university days in the USA and thereafter. He was in an export business involving travel and meeting people outside. His partner, who loved whisky, insisted that he should have some alcoholic drinks as it was embarrassing otherwise. First time he tried beer, it put him off. Then he tried a few liquors but the high alcohol put him off again. He remembers drinking a German off-dry fruity wine. Arora liked it and the love affair started.

For now, Subhash Arora is a prolific wine writer, author, journalist, international judge, speaker, consultant, educator and a wine club promoter of international repute. He is the Editor and major content provider of delWine. He is also the India Correspondent of Meininger Wine Business International Germany. He also writes for several newspapers and magazines in India and abroad.

He regularly visits various wineries in the world, tasting different varietals. He has addressed several delegations and groups of interested producers in Italy, Spain, Chile and Napa. He addressed the producers of British Columbia in Canada through video conferencing in 2013 and helped them launch an export programme to India. 

Subhash Arora is the founder of Indian Wine Academy (IWA) – a New Delhi-based market development consultancy firm with extensive contacts among wine and food professionals and hotel management institutes around the country. It helps professionally to facilitate increased consumption of wine and promotion of wine culture in India. It organizes and conducts programmes throughout India to help foreign companies enter the Indian market and Indian producers to sell more wine, besides motivating more consumers to drink better wine in moderation.

IWA launched delWine, the country’s first online eNewsletter on wine, food business, and retail and hospitality sectors in April 2006. It disseminates useful information about the Indian wine industry while briefing about the world markets. Today, it is a benchmark for bold, objective and timely reporting about the Indian market.

Subhash Arora is also a co-founded of Indian Wine Day (2017). Three editions have been held successfully. Earlier he had founded the delWine Excellence Awards in 2016, the second edition of which was organised very successfully on April 21, 2019 at Hotel Pullman, New Delhi Aerocity. The Awards also included the Indian Top Ten Women of Wine Biennial Award started in 2013 by him to encourage and recognise women in the wine industry in India.  

He also co-authored the Italian Wine Guide 2006, the first book of its kind in India. He was the first-ever Indian to be awarded the prestigious OIV Merit Award at the 34th International Conference on Vines and Wines in Porto, Portugal on June 24, 2011 for his outstanding service to the vine and wine industry globally. 

In the first-ever survey conducted by Wine Business International, he was voted the best wine journalist of India in 2006.

He was nominated for the ‘Best Foreign Wine Journalist Award’ by the Grandi Cru d’Italia in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. Arora was knighted by the Italian President in 2009 and awarded the official title of Cavaliere for his meritorious service in building friendly ties between India and Italy through wine promotion and education.