Turning Point Wines Get A Capital Welcome as Delhi Gourmet Club Serves Paradise on a Plate

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

IT WAS only appropriate that the wines being showcased at the Delhi Gourmet Club's 68th event are called Turning Point. DGC's first-ever al fresco wazwan lunch on Saturday, January 25, was indeed a turning point for the club, which is now, despite being a 'Secret Group', a 5,000-strong Facebook community.

Delhi Gourmet Club's founder-member Rocky
Mohan (left) with Shafi Waza, one of the four
brothers who are carrying forward the great
gastronomical legacy of Khan Abdul Ahad
Waza. Picture: Shalini Chauhan

It was the first time that the club had invited a well-known catering company, none other than the inimitable Ahad Sons, which is carrying forward the legacy of Khan Abdul Ahad Waza, to present a traditional 16-course wazwan lunch. A celebratory wazwan meal can accommodate up to 32 courses, but the club's three founder-members (Rocky 'Mr Old Monk' Mohan, Atul 'The Guru of Sikandalous Cuisine' Sikand and yours truly) decided that 16 would be more than enough! And believe me, they were.

Of course, with Rocky, whose book Wazwan: Traditional Kashmiri Cuisine is the most insightful on the subject, to guide us, with the suave Shafi Waza, the third of the four brothers who are now the custodians of Ahad Waza's legacy, personally supervising the proceedings, and with Mohit 'Chowder Singh' Balachandran orchestrating the service with club member Nikhil Alung, we could expect the lunch to be a memorable affair, even though the weather wasn't.

Turning Point wines, which have just been launched
in Delhi and Gurgaon, share the limelight with
the invincible Old Monk, Ketel One and Bacardi.
Picture: Ajay Gautam

It was a cold and gloomy day (we joked that we had brought Srinagar's weather to Delhi), and the ever-hospitable Rocky, at whose sprawling Vasant Kunj farmhouse the lunch had been laid out, was worried that the chairs would be wet. The weather made no difference to the elevated spirits on the ground, for there was enough warmth to be had from the wood fires, the lavish spread of delectable wazwan dishes, and Turning Point wines, which have just been launched in Delhi and Gurgaon after a fairly good run in Mumbai and Pune.

Turning Point is the brainchild of Ashwin Deo, whom many of you'll remember as the man who steered Moet Hennessy India very successfully in the company's early days. A product of Nashik's wine lands, Turning Point is India's first wine label that addresses young people, the  country's largest population segment that hasn't evinced much interest in wine.

I suspect it is because wine has been presented in a manner that it comes across as some 'serious' drink that only 'connoisseurs' can appreciate. The truth is, wine, like any other alcoholic beverage, is meant to be savoured in the company of friends, with good food to accompany it, and not intellectualised upon. Turning Point wines draw you in with their bottle design -- it's sassy, youthful, vibrant. You just have to keep a bottle on your table to get people talking about the wine. It's a great ice-breaker.

But Turning Point wines have more to offer than their sleek bottles and meaningful conversations. The wines are made from grapes sourced with great care from contract farmers in Nashik, and matured and bottled at Ravi and Kailash Gurnani's York winery with expert advice from the roving biochemist-turned-oenologist from Bordeaux, Marc Dworkin. I had the Turning Point Rosé, made from Zinfandel grapes, and I was surprised by its lively freshness. It was not overly sweet; instead, it balanced crisp acidity with a hint of fruitiness.

I thought I would stick with the Rosé, but I changed my mind after I had the Cabernet Shiraz. It was young, flavourful and delicately balanced. The vines from where the grapes are sourced for the Turning Point Cabernet Shiraz are 10-15 years old, yet there's no rawness in the wine, which made it a perfect match for the food that was served piping hot from silver containers by by Shafi's men, all clad in white kurta, pyjama and skull cap.

And what a feast it was, from the nadru (lotus stem) fritters and mutton lahabi kebabs circulated as appetisers during the meet-and-greet hour, to the pounded mutton kofta with an apricot at the centre, the ruwangan chaman (my most favourite paneer dish), the unbeatable Hind roghan josh and its polar opposite, the aab gosht (mutton cooked in a milk curry), the unputdownable haak (Kashmiri spinach) and monje (turnips), the spongy gushtaba bearing the unmistakable Ahad Waza stamp, and the sooji halwa, phirni and kahwa (Kashmiri tea) at the end. It was a meal I won't forget in a long time.

For DGC, it was without doubt a landmark event -- a brilliant showcase of a regional cuisine rooted in tradition and a new wine label that has set out to re-write the old, cobwebbed rules of wine drinking.

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.