By Sourish Bhattacharyya
 |
| Susheela Raman was one of the major world music stars who performed at Sulafest 2014. India's premier gourmet music event is a model for others to follow to give the wine culture a big thrust forward. |
THERE was a time when sponsoring
wine dinners was the only option available to wine producers and importers to
make inroads into a society wedded to brown spirits. Thanks to the pioneering
efforts of people like the late Ghulam Naqshband and our own Subhash Arora,
whose Delhi Wine Club events have become launch pads for wines and restaurants
that believe in the wine culture, and some five-star hotels as well as passionate
restaurateurs such as AD Singh, Rahul Akerkar, Ritu Dalmia, Abhijit Saha and
Tarsillo Natalone, wine dinners became an essential part of the social calendar
of our big cities.
As they evolve, wine dinners have
started attracting the same crowd and most of the regulars are on the wrong
side of the age curve -- it's a market with not more than 10 to 20 years of
longevity left. Organising a wine dinner is like preaching to the converted. If
the wine market has to grow, the country's vast young population -- 70 per cent
of India is below the age of 35 -- must be introduced to the heady joys of the
wonderful world of wine. But this important market segment seems to regard
formal wine occasions to be too stuffy, too 'grey', to merit any place in its
crowded life. How does the industry win this vodka-and-white-rum-toting
generation over to its side of the circle of pleasure?
Seven years ago, Rajeev Samant of
Sula Vineyards, who's always one step ahead of the competition, hit upon a
brilliant idea. It was called Sulafest -- a weekend in February dedicated to
the pleasures of wine, food and music; "a gourmet wine festival".
There couldn't be a headier mix, and soon, all roads were leading to Nashik,
the headquarters of the country's top wine producer. And the pilgrims on this
road less travelled were precisely from the generation that considered wine to
be oh-so yesterday.
The idea wasn't entirely an
original Samant brainwave. The inspiration came from the grape-stomping dramas
that Chateau Indage would organise every year, with Mumbai's who's who in
attendance, till the company went bust. But what Samant has done is give it a
spin -- and every year, Sulafest has been growing, not only in the number and
quality of music acts it hosts, but also in the turnout and fashion statements
that the visitor flaunt. It is India's Woodstock with shades of Ascot.
I bumped into Samant at the VIP
Lounge and, after admiring his orange shorts and exchanging notes on the
political temperature in Delhi, asked him about the turnout at Sulafest 2014.
"I have stopped counting," he said with a broad grin. I could see the
sense of triumph in his looks. He deserved his moment in the sun.
For the past two years, Sulafest has
tied up with the country's leading purveyor of world music, blueFROG, which is
why homegrown artistes such as Susheela Raman, Vasuda Sharma and Avial
performed to capacity audiences along with the British psychedelic music group
Shpongle, the toast of this year's fest; the ska/reggae band from Croydon, The
Dualers; rumba-meets-raga group Gypsy All Stars; dub music and big beat band
Dub Pistols; and the Italian from London, Gaudi, who's one of the busiest solo
performers in the electronica world. And then there were pleasant surprises
such as singer-songwriter-guitarist Gowri, who held her own and kept her
audience asking for more, despite the deafening boom-boom-boom emanating from
the 'Electro Zone'.
The 'Electro Zone' was rocked by some
of the trendiest names in EDM -- the Brazilian export DJ Anna; the
multi-cultural exponent of psychedelic trance, Ma Faiza; the Russian DJs who
have a cult following in Goa, Mescaluto (Victoria) and Sashanti (Alexander
Sukhochev); and the desi boy Ankytrixx (Ankit Kocher). It was an eclectic mix
of music, which was being canned by VH1 for future broadcasts, and with Vero
Moda, the trendy international women's fashion brand, being the lead sponsor, floral
colours and youthful style were in evidence everywhere. The food was just the
kind that the young love -- from momos to shawarma, from rajma-chawal to egg/kebab rolls, washed down with Mount Gay
mojitos, or Asahi beer, or the sparkling fruit drinks from Pune-based Good
Juicery, the baby of former Cape Town resident Michelle Bauer and her food
technologist friend Julia Madlener.
There was food and drink
everywhere, but no one got drunk or misbehaved, and the hundreds of young women
could do exactly what they wanted to do, without any man paying more-than-usual
attention to even the shortest skirt. It was clean, unalloyed fun, and people
minded their own business. I wonder how many people signed up for camping at
the vineyards organised by LetsCampOut.com, which was surely a first for an
Indian "gourmet music" event.
Seeing the scores of young people
who had signed up for the winery tour and tastings, asking questions, sipping
wines and excitedly shooting selfies, Ajoy Shaw, Chief Winemaker and Vice
President, Sula Vineyards, said, "This is the market we must reach out to if
we have to grow." We were at Sula's Tasting Room, drinking Rasa 2007, a
delicately balanced Shiraz with still some years of life left.
Shaw, a Bengali who is proud to
call himself a Maharashtrian (his parents brought him to the state when he was
five months old), said at least 600 people, mostly in their late 20s and early
30s, show up every weekend at Sula for guided tours, wine tastings and gorging
on the food served at two vineyard restaurants (Soma and Little Italy). They go
back with bottles of wine and a sense of excitement about the wine culture.
They become the ambassadors of wine.
We need more clones of Sulafest
-- in Akluj, in Baramati, in Charosa, in Hampi, in the Nandi Hills -- if we
wish to create new gourmet tourist destinations and get more people hooked on
to the joys of wine. What is the point of producing increasingly better wines
if the market moves at what used to be once called the "Hindu rate of
growth"?
