No vines, no problem. How Dubai invented its own cellar.

I have lived in Dubai for 20 years, and have watched it go through waves of development and growth that most other cities would be lucky to experience in a century. I have explored most parts of the city, eaten and drunk in more restaurants than I did anywhere else, and discovered some absolutely fantastic wines along the way.

Yes, Dubai has wines. And very good ones too. And a growing wine culture.

There is no vineyard in the desert. No ancient château overlooking Dubai Creek. No moss-covered cellar beneath the dunes. No fifth-generation viticulturist wandering out at dawn to inspect the Syrah.

To build a wine culture here, from scratch, required something considerably more useful than terroir.

It required an airport.

Spirits had been selectively available in this market for well over a century. Wine, however, is a relative newcomer to Dubai's social landscape. It did not arrive with an ancestral story, a local grape variety or some beautifully preserved family recipe involving barrels in a cave.

It arrived with people.

Dubai is perhaps the most relentlessly international city I have ever lived in. Its daily life is a remarkable dance between its local roots and a vast expatriate population from almost everywhere. People arrive, settle, leave, return, bring families, change jobs, open restaurants, run hotels, import things, and generally get on with it.

It works quite nicely.

Put enough nationalities into one city and eventually someone is going to ask where the good wine is.

In Dubai, the answer turned out to be: increasingly, everywhere.

Culture here is not necessarily inherited. It is assembled. In real time, by people carrying their own tastes, habits and expectations with them.

Wine followed the same route.

It came through the hotels and restaurants, through importers and distributors, through chefs and sommeliers, through residents who knew what they liked, and others who were curious enough to find out.

Dubai's greatest advantage was never its soil.

It was its position.

The city sits at the centre of an extraordinary web of international aviation, trade and hospitality. Wines that might once have required considerable effort to reach a distant market can arrive here with remarkable efficiency. Burgundy, Barossa, Marlborough, Tuscany, Napa, Rioja, Lebanon and just about everywhere else with a decent bottle to sell are now part of the conversation.

Dubai didn't just import wine. It imported the people who knew what to do with it.

Sommeliers, restaurateurs, distributors, importers and wine professionals arrived and brought their knowledge with them. Hotels built cellars. Restaurants built lists. Retailers built portfolios. Consumers became curious.

The infrastructure followed the appetite.

And this is where Dubai's lack of wine heritage is useful.

Elsewhere, you inherit the rules along with the bottles. Spend years learning which appellation supposedly pairs better with a dish, which vintage to respect, and precisely how solemnly you are expected to discuss forest floors.

Dubai had none of that.

You simply started drinking wine. And then, if you became interested, you started learning about it.

That changes the game.

Dubai's wine drinkers haven't had to inherit a wine culture before participating in one. They can approach wine through curiosity rather than obligation. They can attend a masterclass, discover a grape they like, build a cellar, ask a sommelier an embarrassingly basic question, or spend far too much on a bottle they have absolutely no business buying.

I have done some of these things myself.

Of course, all this exists within a carefully regulated framework. Wine is available, but not in a manner suggesting that hospitality has somehow been mistaken for a licence to forget one's table manners.

And that is perhaps the point. Dubai has managed to create a space for wine without pretending to be Bordeaux, Burgundy or Napa Valley.

Because it doesn't need to.

Today, wine is part of the city's hospitality culture. A visitor can arrive from anywhere, and find serious wine in serious restaurants. A resident can discover a new producer from South Africa, attend a tasting with a winemaker from Italy, or order a bottle from somewhere they had never previously heard of.

The remarkable thing is not that Dubai sells wine.

The remarkable thing is that it has created a wine culture without the usual paraphernalia.

Just people, bottles, logistics, hospitality, curiosity, and a rather spectacular airport.

Dubai, like Mumbai, isn't simply a city where wine happens to be available but a wine destination in its own right.

Not because it inherited a wine culture.

Because it built one.

Wine should be enjoyed. Drink responsibly.

Disclaimer: All links provided in this column are based on my own research and are not paid or sponsored.

© 2026 Shishir V. Baxi. All rights reserved. Reproduction or redistribution without permission is prohibited.