The issue with wines is that they have been around for so long that it becomes almost too hard to watch them change. The metamorphosis of wines is as slow a process as true democracy. This is not a new phenomenon in the world of gastronomy. Anything that sticks around for a considerably long period becomes so well embedded in our minds that to accept anything else is impossible. From being a fad, it becomes a tradition, an unwritten ritual with a code that conducts its application and usage.
Wines suffer similarly. Don?t believe me? Ask people if they would like ice in their wine; or a wine cocktail for that matter. Try and suggest chilling a red, or having wine out of tumblers. Chances are you will be met by a wall of staunch opposition and an obvious odour of contempt for your lack of knowledge.
But the truth is that wine culture needs to break these shackles to proliferate. Rather, we need to break these shackles that contain and constrain our mind. We need to let wine soar, and let our imagination glide alongside.
Recently, two wines did exactly that for us. My team and I religiously taste wines once a week to hone our skills and keep our palates in shape. The first set of wines came from a brand called Kimaya. Now, Kimaya is a fashion brand and even I, with my limited interest in fashion, knows that. I know they are very popular among married women and their husbands hate this man, Pradeep Hirani, for he is indirectly making them work harder at raking in the big bucks.
Pradeep knows his fashion and a venture into the world of wines seems possible. Jatin, his partner, is a savvy wine professional. Together they decided to find a drinkable set of wines from across the world and label them with the Kimaya brand. The idea was to extend the goodwill that the brand enjoys in one field to another not-entirely unrelated field. The idea was to find wines, which are of good quality and then instead of paying the winemaker for his brand to merely use his product and build the brand locally in India. And when that local brand happens to be an already known entity, the job is half done at the start itself.
Today, to be a winemaker, you don?t necessarily need to own a vineyard. Or, for that matter, the wine needn?t come from next door. Sure there is the issue of carbon footprint and all, but given the fluctuation of ingredient prices in the international wine market, sometimes it is a safer and saner idea to make wine where the market is showing an abundance of raw material. Sure Kimaya can launch an Indian wine too someday, but for now, they find it easier to source wine and bottle it at origin and have it brought here. The wines are competitively priced, having international appeal, and yet local in a certain sense.
Vin Opera is another brand that has adopted this policy and it has done a good job with it. Their Italian range recently grew to include more labels and their Lambrusco (a red fizzy sweet wine, something they were the first to introduce) remains a bestseller.
The other similar experience was trying the wines of Jordan. While in Europe last month, I saw a documentary about this one winery and a month later, here we were, tasting them right here in our tasting circle. The best yet: we didn?t even know which bottles were from Jordan as they were all covered and mixed with a lot of Californian wines.
Tasting notes aside, the wines were good?decent complexity and with great typicity?character (on the nose and on the palate) that is associated with a particular grape. That said, they had pretty unusual aromas as well, but nothing that distracted from guessing the grape. The alcohol did seem a tad high, but the complexity matched it. All in all, we were shocked to find that the wines were from a country, which we wouldn?t have even imagined to be a wine manufacturing state, let alone a good one. Once again, our traditional beliefs stood questioned and broken, unstable and rickety: no longer was wine to be considered a bastion of a secretive snobbish few.
Moldova is another region from where we have had two tastings and gradually, we have come to have a better understanding of their winemaking philosophy. Grapes that would otherwise seem normal in Europe may be replaced here with local grapes. Sometimes even international grapes take on odd smells. Some call it transformation. I prefer the term, adaptation.
But between both these recent cases we have started questioning our wine quotient and its subsequent relevance even more. Today, I, as a wine professional, can rattle off all wines to be found in the popular section of a shop in London or France, but I have little clue as to what sells well and what doesn?t in a market such as India. This is because a lot of Indians are only seeing wine for the first time. These enthusiasts are keen learners and a great help in educating others. I much prefer this crowd which, in spite of their personal ignorance, still try so very hard to experiment and learn new things. As a result, a wine that may be prejudiced against elsewhere still stands a chance here.
The only way to learn about wine is by opening a bottle and making the most of it. Inebriation has a limit; beyond that the real joy of cerebral intoxication takes over.
The writer is a sommelier