Wine in paradise: selling to the Maldives

Before I worked with small wineries in Spain and Portugal, I was head sommelier at Niyama Private Islands Maldives. It is a resort on two islands in Dhaalu Atoll, reached by seaplane from the airport in Malé. My job was to choose, buy and serve wine for guests who had flown halfway around the world to sit on a beach.

People call places like this paradise markets. From the outside they look simple. Wealthy guests, beautiful settings, generous budgets. Surely any good wine would sell?

It doesn't work that way. The Maldives taught me more about what a wine has to survive, and what a buyer really needs, than any wine region I have visited. Many wineries never think about these things until a shipment goes wrong. So here is what I learned.

One island, one resort

The Maldives is a country of small coral islands spread across a wide stretch of the Indian Ocean. The tourism model here is often described as "one island, one resort". Each resort sits on its own island, or sometimes on two, like Niyama. There is no town next door, no shop around the corner and no wine merchant down the road.

That means every resort is its own small world. It has its own kitchens, its own restaurants, its own bars and its own cellar. And everything in that cellar has to be brought in from outside.

Almost all goods arrive in the country through Malé, by air or by sea. From there they travel on again to each island, by boat or, for some deliveries, by seaplane. The resorts themselves handle much of this last stretch, because there is no shared transport network between the islands. Hotelier Maldives, the local trade magazine, has written that getting goods to Malé is not the hard part. The hard part is the journey from the port in Malé to the final island.

For a bottle of wine, that last journey matters a great deal.

Why your wine needs to be well sulphured

Here is the first lesson I wish every winery knew before shipping to the Maldives.

When wine arrives, it doesn't always go straight into a cool cellar. Sometimes it waits. It can sit in hot storage, and sometimes in the sun, for hours or even days before it is loaded onto a boat and sent on to the right island. Then it crosses open water in a tropical climate before it finally reaches the resort.

Wine is sensitive to heat. A wine that is stable and protected can handle a rough journey better. A fragile one may not.

This is why I learned to be careful with natural wines and wines made with very little sulphur. I love many of them, and I understand why sommeliers in Europe are excited about them. But in my experience in the Maldives, they tend to spoil. A wine that tastes alive and fresh in a cool cellar in Spain can arrive tired, cloudy or faulty after days of heat and waiting. A guest at a luxury resort will not accept a faulty bottle, and the sommelier cannot simply drive to the shop for another one.

Well sulphured wines travel better. Sulphur is not a dirty word here. It is a form of protection, and in a market like this it can decide whether your wine arrives the way you made it.

This is something to talk about honestly with an importer before the first order. Ask how the wine will be stored on arrival, how it will travel to the islands, and how long it might wait in between. The good distributors in the Maldives take this seriously. Several of them describe insulated, temperature controlled warehouses and reefer shipping on their own websites, because they know heat is the enemy.

A country with its own rules

To understand how wine is sold in the Maldives, you also have to understand the country itself.

The Maldives is a Muslim nation. Islam is the state religion, and under the constitution a non Muslim cannot become a citizen of the Maldives. Foreigners who live and work there do not have to be Muslim. But the society, the law and daily life are shaped by Islam.

Alcohol is a good example. For Maldivians, drinking alcohol is against the law. The penal code treats it as an offence, and Maldivian courts have sentenced people for it. This applies to the Maldivian staff in the resorts too. Many of the people working in restaurants and bars every evening are not allowed to drink the wine they carry to the table.

That creates an unusual situation for a sommelier. Some of the team serving the wine will never taste it. Training becomes even more important. Staff learn wine through words, smell, stories and structure, rather than through a glass of their own.

Alcohol is also tightly controlled at the border. Under the Import Prohibition Act of 1975, liquor cannot be imported without prior approval. If a traveller buys a bottle at a duty free shop on the way, customs will take it at the airport. Wine reaches the country only through licensed channels. Resorts, licensed vessels and bonded warehouses can bring it in under a special licence meant for the tourism industry. So wine lives mostly inside the resorts and a few licensed places. You won't find it in an ordinary shop in Malé.

The same customs rules ban pork without a permit, idols for worship and religious materials considered offensive to Islam. Items that are prohibited are held by customs and, for foreigners, returned when they leave the country. As a visitor you notice these things from the moment you land. They are a reminder that you are a guest in someone else's home, with its own faith and its own rules.

All of this makes the Maldives a very special place to sell wine. The market exists almost entirely for visitors. Every bottle has to come in under a licence. And the people who carry the wine to the table often live by a different set of rules from the people who drink it.

How sommeliers buy on the islands

Most luxury resorts have several restaurants. At Niyama there were many different dining experiences, each with its own style. That is common across the Maldives.

What I learned is that a sommelier rarely buys wine for the resort as a whole. They buy wine for each restaurant, and they buy it to match the food. An Italian restaurant needs Italian wines. A French restaurant needs Burgundy, Bordeaux and Champagne. An Asian restaurant needs wines that sit well with spice, ginger and soy. A grill needs reds that stand up to fire and smoke.

This makes sense. A wine list is part of the meal, not a separate shop. The bottle on the table should belong to the food on the plate. I wrote about this in an earlier Field Note: no serious chef copies another restaurant's menu, so no serious sommelier wants to copy another restaurant's wine list either.

Why it is a hard market for Spain and Portugal

This is where it gets difficult for Iberian wineries.

The restaurants on the islands are mostly international, Italian or French. Those are the kitchens that guests from around the world know and expect. There are not many Spanish style restaurants.

So when a sommelier sits down to build the lists, Spain and Portugal often lose before they start. The Italian restaurant fills up with Italian wines. The French restaurant fills up with French wines. The international restaurant has some room, but it is shared with Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, Argentina and the United States, all competing for the same few lines.

It isn't that the sommeliers don't like Spanish or Portuguese wine. Many of them do. But they buy according to the gastronomy of the restaurant, and the gastronomy rarely points to Iberia.

What a small Iberian winery can realistically do

That doesn't mean the door is closed. It means a winery has to be honest about where it fits, and patient about getting there.

Here is how I would think about it.

Find the place on the list where your wine makes sense. An international restaurant, a grill, a seafood restaurant or a beach bar has more freedom than an Italian or French one. A crisp white from the Atlantic coast can sit very naturally next to grilled fish and a sea view. A sommelier will listen when you show how your wine fits their food, not just how good it is.

Make sure the wine can survive the trip. Before anything else, think about stability, closures and sulphur. A beautiful wine that arrives damaged does more harm than no wine at all, because the sommelier will remember it.

Work through the distributors. Most resorts in the Maldives buy through licensed importers with bonded warehouses. A winery cannot simply ship a pallet to a resort. The first conversation is almost always with a distributor in Malé.

Be ready to support the people who sell it. With so much of the resort staff unable to taste, good information matters. Clear, short notes on the wine, the place it comes from, and what it goes with will help a sommelier train the team.

Think in years, not orders. Lists change, sommeliers move between resorts and groups, and distributors take on new labels slowly. A winery that keeps showing up, with the same honest wines, is the one that gets remembered when a gap opens.

None of this is easy for a small family winery. It takes time, travel, knowledge of the market and patience. That is exactly the kind of work most small wineries can't afford to do on their own.

The wine distributors of the Maldives

If you want to sell wine in the Maldives, these are the companies you will meet. They are all based in or around Malé and supply the resort market. I have kept the descriptions to what each company says about itself on its own website, so you can check for yourself.

SIMDI Beverages (simdi.com/simdi-beverages). Part of the SIMDI Group, it has been supplying alcoholic beverages to the resort market since the 1980s. Its wine portfolio runs from big names such as Penfolds and Montes to smaller producers, and it says it sources directly from wineries, ships wine in reefers and stores it in air conditioned, insulated warehouses. It also represents a strong list of Champagne houses, including Bollinger, Billecart Salmon and Salon.

Di-Vine Cellars (dvcmaldives.com). A fine wine importer with offices in Malé, supplying hotels and resorts across the islands. It lists a portfolio of more than 450 wines, from well known names to smaller, independent and family owned producers.

Navean Wines (naveanmaldives.com). A wholesale wine company started in 2007 by a resort food and beverage director, with sister businesses in Sri Lanka. It says it was the first importer in the Maldives to hire certified sommeliers in its sales team and the first to use insulated, temperature controlled warehousing. It also helps resorts build their wine programmes.

Grape Expectations (grapeexpectations.com.mv). A supplier with more than 880 wine labels from both the Old World and the New, including Spain and Portugal, alongside beer, spirits and other drinks. It also puts a lot of weight on training. It has been a WSET approved programme provider since 2013 and runs wine, beer, bar and beverage consulting programmes for resort teams across the Maldives.

Yeoman Group (yeoman-group.com). A resort supply company that has served the Maldives since the 1970s and was one of the first to open a bonded warehouse in the country, in 1996. From a climate controlled bonded warehouse in Malé it distributes beers, wines and spirits, and it supplies food to resorts as well. Its sales team visits resorts regularly by boat.

Vintners Maldives (vintnersmaldives.com). Founded in Malé in 2015, it sells wines, sakes and spirits and offers more than 250 labels. It describes itself as a top supplier to luxury resorts in the Maldives.

SIP (sip.mv). A newer company, established in 2021, that focuses mainly on premium spirits but also imports wines and Champagnes for resorts and liveaboard boats. It runs a climate controlled bonded warehouse on Thilafushi, near Malé.

Each of these companies has its own style. Some are big and broad, some are focused on fine wine, some are built around training and service. A small winery needs to find the one whose portfolio has room for it, and whose way of working protects the wine all the way to the island.

Where we come in

I didn't learn all this from a book. I learned it on the job, as a sommelier in the Maldives.

At Iberian Aesthetics, we work as the export team that small wineries in Spain and Portugal can't afford to hire on their own. Markets like the Maldives are a good example of why that matters. They are far away, full of rules and details, and very easy to get wrong the first time.

We won't pretend the Maldives is an easy market for Iberian wine. It isn't. But it is a market where a wine with a real story, made by real people and able to survive the journey, can find its place on the right list, next to the right food, in front of guests who will remember it.

That is the kind of wine we look for, and the kind of journey we help it make.