Caught in traffic in the choked arteries of Mumbai, you never think that you are going to be able to make it. But once you crawl out of traffic and start cutting through the Western Ghats, the mountain ranges in India’s west that also bring down the monsoons middle of the year, it is an altered universe. As the land curves up and then plunges down into a valley, you are liberated. Four hours on the road and you’ve zipped into India’s Napa Valley—Nashik.
Thousands of years ago, during the Vedic times, the area was known in the epic, Ramayana, as a holy site. Fringed by the river Godavari, this became the abode of the gods and a site where Ram, one of Hinduism’s most popular deities, is supposed to have performed the last rites of his father King Dashratha. Today, while there are still many who would come looking for their bit of nirvana in the temples, commerce of a new India has completely changed the dynamics of the region. Nashik today is the wine capital of India.
Like any other industry, the wine industry in India has been considerably hit. Not enough people in the metros seem to be drinking wine, still one of the most expensive beverages around because of the heavy taxes it attracts, because of a dip in consumer sentiment and spend as also the fact that the industry in India is still a fledgling, the preserve of the elite few. Women like me, for instance, who enjoy their glass of wine are in a minority in India, often frowned upon in a puritanical middle-class society and targeted by any one who wants to usurp notions of Indian and Hindu culture. As for the men—they’d all rather drink up some ‘manly” whisky—even if it is, in fact, nothing better than refined rum made from molasses as most Indian “scotch” is. Finally, unlike in Europe and America, where people drink their wine with food, in India no such concept has ever existed traditionally. The only beverage typically drunk with food has been H20 or buttermilk!
But regardless of these limitations of culture, habit and policy, wine as a category has been growing at a stupendous enough rate of 25 per cent per annum in the last few years. And regardless of the current slowdown the number of wineries per se have only been increasing. The last two years have seen a number of heavyweight corporate houses getting into the business seriously—Diageo and United Breweries being just two. On the other hand, what I find fascinating are the people behind India’s attempt at wine, some of it fairly good quality as well, whatever other people may have to say.
Rajeev Samant of Sula—he named the company after his mother Sulabha after he returned from studying in California to his home-town Nashik and started planting wine grapes there—is the poster boy of Indian wine industry. And indeed his marketing genius has meant that Sula has become exceeding popular not just in India but all restaurants serving Indian food abroad as well. When I had met him last year, while writing an article for my paper Business Standard, Samant had reminisenced how an American girlfriend had actually taught him to appreciate wine. That led him to experiment with his own vineyard and winery in Nashik and there has been no looking back for him or Indian wine ever since.
But now there are some other individual entrepreneurs as well. Chateau D’Ori, despite its French sounding name, is very much a Nashik product, and a good one at that. Its wine won a second prize at the India Wine Challenge conducted by Robert Joseph late last year. And the winery is owned by a technocrat-turned winemaker, Ranjit Dhuru. Similarly, there is Abhijeet Kabit whose wines sell under the brand name Reveilo. I recently had chance to sample some, only in its second year, and came back impressed. Kabir chucked up a corporate career some years ago to follow his wine dream after he decided to “do something on his own” and use up some family-owned land in the region. His wife, an MBA at marketing, joined him and is responsible for the marketing of his wines.
If you are visiting Mumbai, be sure to take a day trip to Nashik and see some of these beautiful estates. But the prettiest one by far for puposes of wine tourism is Kavita Chougule’s Tiger Hill. A boutique winery, this also has a small hotel with vinotherapy massages, in picturesque settings. Kavita, who belongs to a royal family, is a Mumbai socialite married into a wine family—the Chougules run India’s biggest wine company Champagne Indage. Nevertheless, here’s to boutique wineries in India and a true passion for wine.
