FORTUNE COOKIE: Sula Vineyards to Serve a Slice of Goa at its Destination Winery

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

I FIRST went to Nashik, India's wine country, about a decade ago and spent a couple of nights at what was then Sula Vineyards founder-CEO Rajeev Samant's home in the winery he had launched with the promise to put what he described as "our own Napa Valley" on the world wine map.

Goa's most famous shack restaurant, La Plage

(above), opens this Sunday in a gaily colourful

setting at Sula Vineyards, Nashik, giving wine

tourism in India a fashionable new direction

It was in the middle of a blazing summer, but as soon as the evening would set in, a rejuvenating cool breeze swept the leaves off the courtyard and brought the mercury down by a good number of notches. That was the signal for the cook to bring out my favourite Dindori Shiraz, a hearty red that turned out to be a match made in heaven for his Kolhapuri chicken. I used to wonder then if Nashik's newbie wineries such as Sula would be able to capitalise on their location in the lap of nine lone hills of the Sahyadris and make wine tourism a viable business vertical in what was till then an industrial town whose only other claim to fame was (and will forever be) its proximity to Shirdi, hometown of the original Sai Baba.

A decade later, Samant, a Stanford graduate who did a stint at Oracle, has not only made Sula the country's top wine brand straddling 70 per cent of the market, but also turned Nashik into a premier wine tourism destination. His old house has made way for a boutique hotel and last year, Sula's vineyards drew over 170,000 visitors from all over the world. It was a model that Vijay Mallya's Four Seasons wines sought to replicate in a picture-perfect Italian villa at Baramati (Sharad Pawar's bastion in the backyard of Pune) till the company's financial troubles got the better of the project. Fratelli, a successful new wine player, has also been doing something similar, though on a more modest scale, at its state-of-the-art winery in Akluj, the old cotton trade outpost in Maharashtra's Solapur district.

Sula, however, continues to be the leader in this new business, and now, by teaming up with a Goan institution, the celebrated French restaurant La Plage, it has taken wine tourism to a serious new level. For Samant, getting La Plage (whose restaurant at Sula Vineyards, which opens on Sunday, July 6, is called Soleil) to Nashik was "a big thing personally" because, as he explained to me, his second home, which is in Goa, is just behind the restaurant on Ashwem Beach in Morjim.

Imagine savouring a glass of Sula's
award-winning Shiraz, Rasa, even as you
soak in the verdant scenery of vineyards
in the shadow of the Sahyadri hills!

La Plage, which literally means 'the beach', is a stylish shack restaurant, which was launched in 2002 as a humble six-table establishment serving breakfast and lunch. Its founding trio -- Morgan Rainforth, a Welsh-French national who had studied cookery in Provence and had had enough of working with temperamental French chefs; his girlfriend Florence Tarbouriech, whom he met in Barcelona; and her long-time friend Serge Lozano -- fell in love with Goa on a backpacking visit and decided to stay on by doing what they knew best: running a restaurant. It turned out to be a gastronomic coup and very soon, celebrities from Amitabh Bachchan to Jeremy Irons and Kate Moss joined La Plage's growing fan following, savouring the French fare that Rainforth dished up with remarkable consistency.

International acclaim has been pouring in on Rainforth and his mates, like Goa's monsoon showers, and though the thatch-roofed restaurant, guarded by palms bent by centuries of sea breeze, stays shut from April to November, its loyalists show up without fail as soon as it opens for its unbeatable chicken liver pate with onion jam and the Thali au Chocolat. Well-known for being a ceaseless innovator, Rainforest surprises his guests with the tasteful simplicity of dishes such as fillets of tuna, served rare and encrusted with sesame seeds, and drizzled with a sweet-tangy soy sauce; or calamari stuffed with ratatouille; or the sardine filets with wasabi cream. Just the kind of food that'll make you yearn for a bottle of wine.

SWISS SCOOPS WARM UP ICE-CREAM MARKET

Movenpick has arrived in Delhi
with new global flavours such as
the popular crème brûlée (above)

AT RS 175 A SCOOP, Mövenpick is the second international premium ice-cream brand to enter Delhi (at the Select Citywalk, Saket) after Haagen Dasz, which despite its "Danish-sounding" name (a tribute to the treatment of Jews in Denmark during World War II) was born in Bronx, New York. Mövenpick is Swiss, the brainchild of a restaurateur named Ueli Prager, who opened his first outlet in Zurich in 1948, and the name he gave it is now famous as the ice-cream brand.

The restaurant became famous for the unusual ice-cream flavours on its menu, and as its outlets opened across Switzerland, the brand Mövenpick was born, but only after its takeover by Nestle in 2003 did it spread internationally.

 Boston University MBA Tarun Sikka
is the premium ice-cream brand's
national franchisee

Mövenpick first arrived in India in 2008, but the going wasn't good and its operations were wound down. With a young franchisee, Boston University MBA Tarun Sikka, driving it now, the ice-cream brand entered the country from Chennai and Delhi is its second pit stop. Bangalore and Mumbai are the cities next on its growth trajectory, and Sikka is confident, "without being over-ambitious", that he'll be able to cater to the niche market that Movenpick serves. "Do you know Movenpick is the top-selling ice-cream brand in Bangladesh?" Sikka declares triumphantly, adding that it's already on the menu of 30 hotels across India, including the Taj in Delhi and Grand Hyatt in Mumbai.

What I find refreshing about Mövenpick ice-creams is their unusual range of flavours -- crème brûlée is my personal favourite and I believe its masala chai variant is an international fast mover. The ice-creams are without artificial preservatives or flavourings, yet they are produced in such a way that their shelf life is 18 months; the sorbets hold good for a year. Each season, Mövenpick releases two sets of ice-cream: 16 flavours are fixed and another seven or eight are from its 'experimental' range, but what sets each one of them apart is the flavour intensity provided by the six or seven layers of the base ingredient in each scoop. There's a reason why good taste comes at a price.

NO CELEBRATION FOR OLD MONK AS IT FUMBLES IN YOUNG MARKET

ONE of the most anticipated rankings in the business of beverages is the global wine and spirits consultancy IWSR's Real 100 List, which stacks up local brews that are more powerful than most international best-sellers.

The old market leader has been left way behind
by United Spirits Limited's Celebration rum,
the world's No. 9 alcoholic beverage

This year's Top Ten List has two pieces of news relevant to our market. One is that Officer's Choice, which grew by nearly 5.5 million nine-litre cases in 2013, surpassing McDowell's No. 1, is officially the world's largest-selling whisky at 24.16 million cases. Across beverage categories, the two are at Nos. 5 and 6, compared with Johnnie Walker's No. 8 (19.28 million cases).

The second news, and this is a shocker, is that Mohan Meakin's Old Monk, for long the country's top-selling  Indian Made Foreign Liquor brand and the world No. 2 rum after Bacardi, has officially been relegated into a far corner by another United Spirits Limited (USL) heavy-hitter, Celebration, which reached 18.9 million cases (and the No. 9 position) in 2013. For those of us who've lost our alcoholic virginity with Old Monk, it's sad to see its sorry decline because of bad marketing and lousy distribution. Mohan Meakin's geriatric leadership doesn't seem to realise that nostalgia alone doesn't get the cash registers ringing.

KOREA'S JINRO SOJU IS THE WORLD'S NO. 1 ALCOBEV

WHAT makes Jinro special? For starters, it is the world's most consumed alcoholic beverage brand, it is produced in South Korea, and it sold 65.66 million nine-litre cases in 2013, according the global wine and spirits consultancy IWSR's authoritative Real 100 List. Jinro has been in the business of making soju, the Korean cousin of vodka, since 1924 and it was acquired by Hite, the manufacturer of Korea's largest-selling beer, in 2008. What's interesting about Jinro is that its label tells you whether it's being served to you at the right temperature. Each bottle comes with a temperature-sensitive paper tab in the shape of a frog, the company's label. It is white when the bottle is warm, but turns blue when it is cold and drinkable. Cool, isn't it?

This column first appeared in the Mail Today edition dated July 3, 2014.

Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers

Meditating Over A Bottle of Santo From Fratelli's Kapil Sekhri

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

I WAS pleasantly surprised to receive a wooden box from Fratelli Wines with a personal note from Kapil Sekhri, one of the six brothers behind the Akluj (Solapur)-based company, whom I had met most recently at the Panjim restaurant, Mum's Kitchen.

I am sure many others in the city must have got this gift. Still, I felt a strange sense of entitlement when I held Bottle No. 83 (out of a limited edition of 1,000) of Santo, Fratelli's dessert wine developed by Piero Masi, the acclaimed Tuscan winemaker. Masi is famous in his home country for ensuring, as winemaker, the celebrated Chianti Classico Casa Sola's rock-solid reputation. His own Fattoria dell’Agenda (100 per cent Cabernet Sauvignon) made history twice -- in 2004 and 2006 -- for selling out even before it was bottled.

Fratelli has produced just 1,000 numbered bottles
of Santo. Four kilos of Chenin Blanc grapes have
gone into each bottle of the flavourful dessert wine.

The creation of such an accomplished winemaker deserved my time and attention. I decided to taste it at once and write about it.

Santo pays homage to Vin Santo, the famous Tuscan dessert wine (the 'meditation wine') made in Chianti with the local white grapes, Trebbiano and Malvasia. It is Fratelli's first release in a 500-ml bottle, which is not very common in the wine world. It's a late harvest Chenin Blanc (like its forerunners from Sula, Reveilo and Big Banyan), which means the grapes that go into making it -- four kilos are said to have gone into my bottle -- are left on the vines for two months after the harvest season so that they shrivel and become almost like sugar-laden sultanas bursting with flavour.

These grapes are selected from plots that are not much exposed to the sun and have high humidity levels, which allow a slow yet intense process of concentration of flavours in the grapes, apart from much-needed acidity to balance the natural sweetness of Chenin Blanc. And as the wine ages for 24 months in French oak barrels, it develops the nutty and honey notes that I savoured as took my first sip. Santo acid levels effectively balances its sweetness, making it just perfect to be drunk by itself, or with cheese, or with western desserts (panna cotta is the first dessert that comes to my mind). The intense sweetness of Indian desserts rules them out for sweet wines of any kind.
Dessert wines, we are told by wine business insiders, don't have much of a market in India. With yet another addition to dessert wines from India, they may not gain volumes dramatically, but secure enough new ground to establish their niche in the wine universe.

GOOD TIMES FOR BUBBLY: Moments After Chandon Launch, Fratelli Formally Announces Rollout of Gran Cuvée Brut

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

The entry of the Fratelli Gran Cuvee Brut
Sparkling will make the bubbly market
that much more exciting

JUST AS I’d finished updating my post on the Chandon launch — my effusiveness, by the way, got me a mild rap from an active member of the Indian Wine Academy, a Facebook forum I greatly respect — I got a press release in my inbox announcing the launch of Fratelli’s bubbly, a methode traditionelle sparkling wine with 100 per cent Chenin Blanc.

The ambitiously named Gran Cuvée Brut has been developed by Fratelli Wines at Akluj, the old cotton trade centre of Maharashtra’s Sholapur district, which is now famous for the Indo-Italian joint wine venture. And the winemaker is the celebrated Piero Masi, about whom I had written about some time back in my report on Fratelli Sangiovese Blanc, which I found to be a creditable addition to the company’s wine portfolio. It’s a drinkable aperitif wine — just the kind you’d serve on a Saturday night at a small party.

I hope to taste very soon the Gran Cuvée Brut (Mumbai, Rs 995; Delhi, Rs 1,050), but when I was talking about it with Moet Hennessy’s Regional Managing Director (Asia Pacific), Mark Bedingham, he said the entry of more quality bubbly into the presently limited market would also make the category grow. I agree. With Sula, Grover Zampa, Moet Hennessy India and Fratelli, all quality players, ready to give each other a run for the money, the net gainer will be the consumer. I only wish, though, the Gran Cuvée Brut proudly announced itself as a ‘Product of India’ or ‘Product of Akluj’ in the same way as Chandon does.

What interests me about Gran Cuvée Brut is that it is a single-varietal sparkling wine. Champagne houses normally use three varietals (Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier), unless they are making blanc de blancs exclusively from Chardonnay, to balance out the shortcomings of a particular grape in a particular year. As the popular saying goes (which I got know thanks to Bedingham), “In diversity there’s consistency.”

I will now quote extensively from the Fratelli media release to give you an idea of the production process — it’s the same that is employed to make champagne in France.

“After the primary fermentation,” says the media release, “the blend is bottled with yeast and a small quantity of sugar for a second fermentation at the Fratelli winery in Akluj. During the secondary fermentation, the bottles are stored horizontally, maintained at 10 degrees C constantly so that once the second fermentation is over, lees will mature and add complexity to the wine, both on the nose and the palate with bready notes.

“The bottles are then taken through a process known as ‘riddling’ where they are shelved in special racks, called pupitres, which hold the bottles at a 45-degree angle, with the crown pointing downwards. Using Italian machinery, once a day, the bottles are given a slight shake and turned, once to the right, then left, and then dropped back into the pupitres, with the angle gradually increased. The drop back into the rack gives a slight push, so that the sediments settle towards the neck of the bottle. In seven days, the position of the bottle is straight down, with the lees settled in the neck. This process of removing the lees is called disgorging.

“As the sugar added previously is consumed in the second fermentation process, the next stage is adding another small quantity of sugar to the blend. Piero Masi says, ‘We add a mixture of the base wine and sucrose called liqueur d’expédition to the blend. This is not to make the wine sweet, but to balance the high acidity of the blend. As the name suggests, the wine we have created at Fratelli is called Brut, meaning dry and having very less quantity of sugar’.”

And here are the tasting notes and food pairing suggestions from Fratelli Wines.

Tasting Notes: The Fratelli Gran Cuvee Brut, like good champagne, has typical bready yeast notes on the nose. The wine has a delicate and creamy texture with persistent bubbles and a touch of citrus on the palate, coupled with the typical Fratelli Chenin Blanc minerality. It also has a nice persistence in the mouth, as well as the glass.

Grape: The Chenin Blanc expresses typical mineral notes and acidity, perfectly balanced, making this Indian sparkling wine a surprisingly elegant experience.

Food Pairing: Excellent with sushi, prawns, oysters, duck spring rolls, smoked salmon, liver pate and creamy chicken dishes.

Serving Temperature:  3 to 7 degrees C

Fratelli Releases Rarest of Rare White Wine to Test Its Creative Quotient

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

THE WORDS ‘Sangiovese Bianco’ made me sit up and read the media release from Fratelli, a homegrown company with Italian ties and a wine portfolio that has found a growing band of loyal followers.

‘Sangiovese Bianco’, clearly, is an oxymoron. The name Sangiovese, which is used to describe the Italian workhorse grapes of a deep purple hue that are used to make Brunello di Montalcino, Super Tuscans and even the delicious dessert wine Vin Santo, is derived from the Latin root words sanguis and Jovis, which when combined mean ‘the blood of Jove’, the king of gods (or the Roman Indra). The name obviously has something to do with the colour of the deep red wine with hints of purple.

Now, isn’t making a white Sangiovese a waste of the grapes that go into it? The question comes immediately to one’s mind, especially after tasting the Sette 2010, an opulent blend of Sangiovese and Cabernet Sauvignon, which has all the hallmarks of the genius of Piero Masi, Tuscany’s master winemaker. But when you know the wine is from Fratelli, with Masi’s stamp on it, you have to sit up and take notice.

Masi, after all, has 40 years of winemaking experience behind him and he has brought them bear on the 60,000 Sangiovese vines that are being nurtured in Fratelli’s vineyards at Akluj in Maharashtra’s Solapur district, 170km south of the prosperous western city of Pune. And Fratelli (www.fratelliwines.in) has successfully powered the Indian equivalent of the Cal-Ital movement, which is what Californian winemakers, many of whom are of Italian ancestry, flagged off when they started to experiment with Italian grape varieties, starting with Sangiovese.

All grape juice is white. It’s extended contact with grape skins that imparts colour to red wine; when this contact is controlled, the result is a rose or a blush wine. To produce Sangiovese Bianco, according to the Fratelli media release, an innovation has been put in place to rule out any contact between the juice and grape skins. The MRP for the wine is Rs 695 in Maharashtra and Rs 850 in Delhi.

Masi, unsurprisingly, is ecstatic. “Typically grown on sandy and rocky soils, the Sangiovese grapes are strategically planted to avoid overexposure to the sun,” he is quoted as saying in the media release. “Such practice imparts delicate yet refined aromas of coconut and bougainvilleas. On the palate, hints of vanilla and violets along with a light body characterise this rare white wine. Fratelli has truly created an exceptional wine.”

The tasting notes convey a similar upbeat sentiment. “Floral and apple notes,” the tasting notes read. “It’s acidic and fresh but has a smooth and creamy body. In the summer, it will taste great with grilled fish, seafood, chicken and greens or pasta salads. In the winter, it will taste amazing with a mixed green salad of romaine, arugula, herbs and gorgonzola cheese, as well as grilled fish, seafood and chicken.”

You need to be brave to produce a rarest of rare white wine. Fratelli has shown it has got that something that you must have to take the market by storm.