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.

Fratelli’s Sette VII Only Silver Lining for India at Decanter Asian Wine Awards 2013

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Steven Spurrier (above) and Jeannie
Cho Lee, Asia's first Master of Wine,
co-charied the Decanter Asian Wine
Awards 2013 panel of 44 experts  

IT HAPPENS to the best of Indian restaurants — they never make it to any respectable rank on any global ‘best list’. Indian wines, too, seem to be suffering from a similar crisis of acceptance.

Indian wines — 16 of them — cut a sorry figure at the Decanter Asian Wine Awards (DAWA) 2013, whose results were officially released in Hong Kong on October 23. In a competition where a Japanese entry, Grace Winery’s 2012 Gris de Koshu, won a gold medal and regional trophy for its white wine made 100 per cent with Japan’s signature Koshu grapes,  the Indians landed with one silver, nine bronze and four ‘commended’ medals.

The country’s pride was somewhat salvaged by Sette VII, the brilliant Sangiovese-Cabernet Sauvignon blend developed by the celebrated Italian winemaker, Piero Masi, at the Fratelli winery at Akluj in Maharashtra’s Solapur district. Last year, when the first DAWA was held in Hong Kong, the Sauvignon Blanc 2012 of Sula Vineyards returned home with a silver.

To console themselves, Indian winemakers can draw solace from the performance of their Chinese counterparts, though on an Olympic-style medals tally China would rank higher than India because of its two silvers. Of the 36 Chinese entries, only one-half got a medal — two got silver, five bronzes and 11 ‘commended’ medals.

If this seems to you to be somewhat like India’s performance in the Olympics, rest assured you are not over-reacting. For starters, at DAWA, unlike in the Olympics, just about every competitor gets a medal. This year, 44 experts from across the world, including Indian Wine Academy President Subhash Arora, judged more than 2,300 entries and gave away prizes to 2,023 of them (it seems like the tally of votes that used to be cast in elections in the old Soviet Union — 99.99 per cent for the ruling dictator, making you wonder what happened to the remaining 0.01 per cent!). Of the 2,023 award winners, 39 got a regional trophy, 45 gold medals, 369 silvers, 985 bronzes and 585 ‘commended’ medals.

As you can deduce from these numbers, getting a bronze or a ‘commended’ medal is not the same as practising rocket science. A major source of revenue of competitions such as DAWA 2013 is the amount each participating winery pays for each wine entered in the competition. It is therefore in the best interests of the organisers to send all but a very few of the entries — these must be really undrinkable wines — back home with a medal, which explains the deluge of metal in the wine competition.

Co-chaired by Jeannie Cho Lee, the first Asian Master of Wine and a contributing editor to Decanter, the English-speaking world’s most authoritative wine magazine published from London and circulated in 92 countries, and Steven Spurrier, Chairman, Decanter World Wine Awards, and the magazine’s consultant editor, judging took place in Hong Kong on 16-19 September 2013. Sarah Kemp, Publishing Director, Decanter, said in a media release, “All wines were tasted blind and judged by a panel of Asia’s finest palates, and only those which represent outstanding quality are endorsed with a Decanter Asia Wine Award medal.” The Decanter World Wine Awards, incidentally, are the most prestigious in their category.

The competition leader, without doubt, was Australia, which participated with 614 entries and scooped up 18 gold medals and 11 regional trophies. Australia had done well in the Decanter World Wine Awards as well. In Europe, Italy’s Veneto area bagged four regional trophies and four gold medals from 84 entries. The surprise of the event was, to quote Decanter.com, a “revitalized” Languedoc-Roussillon (France), which went home with two regional trophies from 59 entries, compared with just one from 88 entries for Bordeaux.

“In today’s wine world, particularly in Asia, nothing, not even historical reputations, can be taken for granted,” noted Spurrier, writing on DAWA 2013 in his column for the Decanter magazine’s upcoming December issue. The task for Indian winemakers is a little more difficult. They have to build their reputation before they can stake claim to history.

To know more about DAWA 2013, go to:

http://www.decanter.com/news/wine-news/584469/dawa-2013-results-japan-claims-first-decanter-regional-trophy and http://dawa.decanterchina.com/en/2013/

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.