Rituparna Chatterjee – Mumbai
Monsoon Winds Enterprises, organisers of the Bandra Wine Festival in Mumbai, has plans to host ‘Monsoon Winds Wine and Food Weekend’ wherein wine tasting sessions will be organised over weekends across several restaurants starting this December onwards with Pune. The event, which will be funded through internal accruals, is aimed at attracting wine enthusiasts. Elaborating on this, B Shankaranarayan, managing director, Monsoon Winds Enterprises stated, “We will start with a Pune-based restaurant called 96K serving Maratha food. We will pair wine with Maratha food and will serve small-bite foods, wherein for each we will charge Rs 20. We will also serve a selection of cheese and this will be for the wine curious. Every weekend we will organise this at new restaurants. For instance, we will conduct this in 30 restaurants simultaneously across the same neighbourhood. We will have this every month. This is my grand vision.” The company also organises the Bandra Wine Festival every year, which recently concluded its fifth edition. The festival which started in 2007 with 10 wineries and 350 visitors, presently hosts 16 wineries (Charosa, Reveilo, Oakwood, Pause, Grover Zampa, Silk Route, Chateau d’Ori, Riona, and Fusion to name a few) and has witnessed a turnout of around 2000-2500 visitors this year. The company aims to take the visitor arrivals to 5,000 next year. “We want to spread it more. If you go to Melbourne and San Diego, they will have one centralised festival along with a few running concurrently in restaurants. In the sixth edition we will have for the first time a specific time period allocated for the trade industry to taste these wines” he said.
