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

TASTING NOTES: India Gets First Sparkling Wines with French Pedigree from Moet Hennessy

Moet Hennessy's Regional Managing
Director Mark Bedingham with a bottle
of the Chandon Brut at the launch of
the sparkler at the Four Seasons
Mumbai on October 20.

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

I HAVE just come back to my 18th-floor room at the Four Seasons Mumbai from a sneak preview tasting of the Chandon Brut and Rose, Moet Hennessy India’s debut methode traditionelle sparkling wines from Nashik, convinced that the country has a future as a serious producer of bubbles made with wine grapes and not Thompson seedless.

The Brut (Maharashtra MRP: Rs 1,200) arrived with a rush of playful little bubbles — the first visible sign of a good sparkling wine — and it effortlessly balanced crispy acidity with citrusy notes, without really letting its 10gm/litre residual sugar (high by French standards) over-express itself. So, if you’re looking for a Prosecco equivalent, this is not the one. The residual sugar (a result, predictably, of the 84 per cent presence of Chenin Blanc, which is not one of the grapes you’d associate with a methode traditionelle sparkling wine) was present in the background, but only to soften the acid attack. And just in case you’ve been wondering about it, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are the other two grape varieties that have contributed the remaining 16 per cent of wholesome sparkler that lasts longs on the palate.

The balance was stunning and I felt honoured to be drinking the sparkler with its maker, Kelly Healy, a New Zealander who has been making sparkling wine for the past 17 years. It is just the kind of bubbly I would serve friends before a lazy, conversation-laden Sunday lunch, where I would order in Mini Mughal’s smoky, juicy butter chicken, and open the Rose (Maharashtra MRP: Rs 1,400) when people settle down to eat.

This is the first genuine Rose sparkling wine I have had in India — its competitors, I am afraid, taste like turpentine. It seamlessly marries the fruitiness of Shiraz with the structure of Pinot Noir to titillate your palate and draw out best feelings. This is just the sparkling wine you’d have with wholesome (but not chilli hot) rarha mutton or even the kosha mangsho of the Bengalis. Dal Makhni and Shahi Paneer are the vegetarian dishes that I can see getting along famously with the bubbly.

As we tasting the sparklers, I asked Mark Bedingham, Regional Managing Director, Moet & Hennessy Asia-Pacific about the difference Chandon will make to the wine drinking culture in the country. For those who can’t afford the price points of champagne, Bedingham said, Chandon offers “affordable luxury”. He said the sparklers had been made to “reach out to a whole bunch of new customers”, especially “the rising young professional class”.

Its custodians expect it to open up the market, at present very limited for sparkling wine, which have a 3-5 per cent market share in the country — naturally, because champagne has never been seriously appreciated; it has either been flaunted or reserved for consumption on festive occasions. “Emerging lifestyles in India are sympathetic to the consumption of sparkling wines,” Bedingham said.

The Chandon Brut is 84 per cent Chenin Blanc and
8 per cent each of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. The
Rose is 90 per cent Shiraz and 10 per cent Pinot Noir,
which has become Nashik's varietal to look out for. 

The Chandon sparkling wines are now being produced and bottled at the Nashik-based York Winery, but Moet Hennessy India is all set to open its own winery at Dindori, a taluka with perfect soil for wine grapes that was first put on the country’s wine map by Rajeev Samant, the man behind the humongous success of Sula Vineyards. “We are here to be the pioneers for the highest quality of Indian wines,” Bedingham assured me as I couldn’t stop admiring the Rose. The tasting session convinced me that he wasn’t overstating his company’s case.

A SPARKLING NIGHT: The Chandon sparklers were launched on October 19 at a glittering party with the chatterati in full attendance, who, in true Mumbai style, sashayed in only after midnight. From the glamorous writer Shobhaa De, who looked younger than her daughter, to industrialist Gautam Singhania and actor Arjun Rampal, the city’s A-List partied hard till the wee hours to the heart-pumping music of the deejay, who had been flown in for the day from Paris.

The wine world was there too — from Rajeev Samant, who was a force to reckon with on the dance floor, and Ashwin Deo, a former managing director of Moet Hennessy India who has now his own wine label, Turning Point, to Sonal Holland of ITC Hotels, who, I learnt, is one of four Indians to get the WSET-IV certificate, which is quite a creditable achievement, to Indian Wine Academy President Subhash Arora, Sommelier India founder-editor Reva Singh, Business Standard columnist Alok Chandra, and celebrated wine trainer and writer Magandeep Singh.

I was most happy to meet Ian Morden, the estate director of Cloudy Bay, a jewel in the Moet Hennessy crown. A South African whose warmth is so natural and welcoming, Morden was the one who was given the charge of initiating the Chandon project five years ago. He still remembers how his first port of call was Sula, where Samant floored him with his hospitality. Maybe that gave Moet Hennessy the confidence to launch Chandon.