Aurelio Montes & Brindo to Unveil Chile’s Priciest Wine at Orient Express Dinner

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

TAITA, Chile’s most expensive wine from the South American country’s iconic producer, Montes, will be unveiled in New Delhi at a dinner at the Orient Express on October 3, sending out the message loud and clear to the wine world that the Indian market is still not a lost cause. The dinner is being co-presented by the wine’s importer, Brindco International, and the Taj Palace, and will be attended by the Delhi Gourmet Club.

The Chilean wine company’s co-owner and chief winemaker Aurelio Montes had described Taita as a “super icon” during its release in June this year at Vinexpo Bordeaux. Priced around $300 in the U.S. market, it is one of North America’s most expensive wines. Taita, incidentally, is a word commonly used in South America to denote ‘wisdom’ or ‘father’. Its tagline, expectedly, is ‘Wisdom in Wine’ and its elegantly crafted bottle has a pewter figurine of Montes’s signature winged angel holding a goblet in one hand and a bunch of grapes in the other.

At Vinexpo, the wine world’s most prestigious trade show held alternately in Bordeaux and Hong Kong (and also in Tokyo and Beijing), Montes launched Taita’s inaugural vintage, 2007, of which all of 3,000 bottles have been produced. In the coming years, only the ones that Montes and the wine’s co-creator, Pedro Parra, consider to be exceptional, will see subsequent editions of this collector’s wine. Those attending the October 3 dinner therefore will be in a privileged minority to taste a wine that’s got rave reviews everywhere.

Montes is held in high esteem for its benchmark red wine, Montes Alpha M (Cabernet Sauvignon, 80%; Merlot, 10%; Cabernet Franc, 5%; Petit Verdot, 5%). Its wine portfolio, which was being imported into India by Mumbai-based Sonarys Co Brands, has now moved into the hands of Brindco International, India’s most successful wine import company created by its founder-CEO Aman Dhall. Taita, according to Montes, has been made primarily for the Asian market.

Reporting the wine's launch at Vinexpo, The Drinks Business (http://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2013/06/montes-releases-super-icon-wine/) had noted that the grapes for the 15.7% abv (alcohol by volume) wine are grown at a six-hectare plot within a 700-hectare farm at the Marchigue vineyards of the Colchagua Valley (Central Chile) and spends two years in 100% new French oak and a further three in barrel. (In the exceptionally high alcohol content you can see the fallout of global warming!) The grapes were dry farmed because Montes, as he explained to The Drinks Business, wanted to “touch hell” and see how far he could push things without resorting to irrigation to produce a luscious full-bodied wine. Well, it seems a full-bodied treat awaits a fortunate few on October 3.

Top Airport Retailer Opens Delhi’s Prettiest Wine Shop at DLF Emporio

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Buddy Retail, operator of Liquor World at T3 Domestic
Arrivals (above), has opened The Cellar at DLF Emporio

DELHI HAS just got it prettiest liquor shop next to the ever-popular Set’Z restaurant on the top floor of the DLF Emporio in Vasant Kunj. Named The Cellar, the shop, by thinking vertically, makes the best possible use of the sliver of space that it operates out of — and it has all the weighty wines of the world (from the portfolios of Brindco International, operated by Aman Dhall, India’s most successful wine importer, and of Moet Hennessy) as well as Diageo’s impressive single malt collection tastefully highlighted in niches on the store’s glass wall.

The Cellar comes with impressive lineage. A brand of Buddy Retail, a leader in the airport retail and food court business, The Cellar will eventually have over 300 labels of non-wine alcoholic beverages, including categories such the Peruvian pisco and Brazilian cachaca, which are hard to find in India but are getting increasingly popular among the young.

The best-known outlet of Buddy Retail is Liquor World, which you see as soon as you arrive at the Indira Gandhi International Airport’s T3 Domestic Arrivals. Incorporated in 2003, the company is the brainchild of Delhi College of Engineering-IIM (Bangalore) alumnus Amit Arora, who’s its CEO and Managing Director. Before setting up his own company, he held leadership positions in Infosys, Johnson & Johnson, GM, Reliance Retail, Merrill Lynch and Halliburton. Ankur Mahajan, Arora’s business partner, is a well-known in the automobile retail business for operating GM, Chevrolet, Hyundai and Honda dealerships across northern India.

The Cellar, which incidentally was also the name of a very popular Connaught Place discotheque in the 1970s, is Buddy Retail’s first foray outside airports, where we will see a bigger presence of it as a result of the company’s pan-India (minus Delhi) alliance with the Dublin-headquartered duty-free organisation, Aer Rianta International. Buddy Retail’s website informs us that the company plans to notch up a turnover of $120 million from this business vertical in FY2013-14. Its Liquor World franchise now operates at T3 Domestic Arrivals, T1A and T1B (Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, Mumbai), and Goa’s Dabolim Airport. The store will also open soon at two Delhi Airport Metro stations, T1C Arrivals at the IGIA and T1B Departures at the CSI Airport, Mumbai.

Buddy Retail’s other businesses in airports includes food courts and concessionaires operated in collaboration with Pizza Hut, KFC and Costa Coffee’s Indian franchisee Devyani International, the electronics and accessories store Gadget Point at T3, and the Gourmet Select retail outlet, also at T3, selling snacks, beverages and confectionary. The Cellar, though, is Buddy Retail’s prettiest store with a selection that would make any connoisseur bring out his wallet.