BIZ BUZZ: Beer Cafe Dispenses 1.5m Pints of the Brew; Aims for 33 Outlets by 2014-End

Founder-CEO Rahul Singh, a former textile engineer and avid single malt collector, says his dream is to make his brand the "Starbucks of beer"

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

CAFE Coffee Day and Starbucks are two names you'll hear quite often in the course of a conversation with Rahul Singh, Founder-CEO, Beer Cafe. "Do you know how many CCDs are there in Connaught Place?" he asks, and answers his own question: "19." And when he's asked what his vision for his chain of beer cafes is, he says, "I want to be the Starbucks of beer." Clearly, he's thinking big for a vertical he has created -- and grown successfully in just two years.

A section of the 150-seater Beer Cafe Biggie,
which opened at D-Block, Connaught Place,
on Saturday, February 16. The outlet has
16 double-deck chillers that can cool 3,200
bottles of the 54 beers on its menu at one time. 

It was the inaugural night of Beer Cafe Biggie and we were having a conversation on the terrace of the restaurant at D-Block, Connaught Place, a couple of shops away from the iconic Embassy restaurant. The steady breeze had a sharp nip and Connaught Place, brightly lit like a bride on her wedding night, was teeming with young people. It was as if the entire city had descended upon the Grande Dame of New Delhi. Singh, a textile engineer by training with bright eyes, bald pate and ready smile, looked at the scene below with a evident sense of satisfaction. He had chosen his location well -- and though it is the second in Connaught Place, after the one at Atmaram House, formerly known as Scindia House, he's confident that its 150 seats will draw a steady stream of diners.

By the end of this year, Singh says, he hopes to have 33 Beer Cafe outlets (he already has 17) across the country -- 15 in Delhi/Gurgaon, five in Punjab, 10 in Mumbai/Goa, and three in Pune. These will include three Biggie outlets, all at iconic addresses -- Fort in Mumbai (Singh doesn't fail to mention how Starbucks opened its Indian account at Fort) and Bangalore's Indiranagar 100 Feet Road, where he has located a heritage bungalow for the third Biggie.

At his present level of outlets, he serves on average 2,000-3,000 guests per month, or about half-a-million in a year, each of whom drinks three pints, which means Beer Cafe dispenses 1.5 million pints in a year. Unsurprisingly, Singh is the man whom every international beer brand first approaches before setting up shop in India--the opening of Biggie, in fact, also marked the launch of the Irish beer Carling, a lager brewed with Canadian two-row barley, and Magners, a vat-matured cider made with juices of 17 varieties of apple.

That's a big leap forward for a man who was a textile engineer for different companies for 15 years before he decided to pursue his passion for food and beverage (he's an avid single malt collector with 188 labels, and counting, in his bar) and turn entrepreneur. Singh's first venture was Golfworx, the country's first golf lounge with a six-hole indoor mini course, pro shop, cigar lounge, bar and restaurant in Gurgaon.

Funding this rapid expansion, which has left his former business partner and beer industry veteran Pradeep Gidwani's The Pint Room way behind, is the investment fund, Mayfield India Advisors, led by serial entrepreneur Navin Chadda. Mayfield's current investments include more than 20 companies, including BharatMatrimony and the fashion house Genesis Colors. Beer Cafe is the fund's first foray into food and beverage.

About the Connaught Place location of the first Biggie, Singh said it was an unoccupied apartment (CP was designed to have shops at the ground level and flats on the first floor) belonging to a Kolkata-based company that had gone bust a long time ago. The family of the late building contractor and philanthropist Atma Ram Chadha, which owns the entire block and is embroiled in deathless rent litigation with its old tenants, got back the place after fighting a long-drawn-out case that went up to the Supreme Court. The place, as a result, was unoccupied for 30 years and nearly collapsed on itself when construction work started for Biggie. It is now supported by 32 tonnes of steel!

The exposed bricks of Biggie, Singh says with evident pride, are 92 years old, because the building had been completed in 1932. The ceilings are 20 feet high, so when you climb up the stairs to reach Biggie, you actually cover four storeys of a more recent building. And it has a real fireplace, which I didn't notice at the start because of the two long-legged hostesses, who were dispensing Jagermeister shots with remarkable alacrity, sitting in front of it.

Biggie's 16 double-deck chillers, which reach up to the ceiling level, can chill at any given time up to 3,200 bottles of the 54 beer brands in its stock. To justify its name, Biggie offers 500ml pours and platters big enough to be shared with friends. It has no bouncers and it accepts no reservations. And then it has a Pour Your Own Beer (PYOB) system developed by the US-based DraftServe Technologies. The self-service system at present dispenses eight beers; within a month the number will go up to 10.

Guests buy RFID cards and get to taste the beers on offer and pour the one they like best (and as no service is involved, they pay no service charge!). The man behind this innovative system, Jose Hervis, was present at the opening party and he talked about how he developed the idea at his own restaurants in 2007 before he found takers across the United States and the rest of the world, when he launched DraftServe in 2011.

Singh is not too happy about the food being served at Beer Cafe outlets. "We have to make it better," he says, adding that he plan to have a "less is more" menu with 20 items his kitchen is best at making. It is his vision to "fill up the big gap between coffee places and nightlcubs", to scale up and become "a large, fast profitable alcobev group -- the Starbucks of beer." At the rate at which he's growing, he'll be there faster than we think.

The Jams of Nostradamus and Other Sugar Secrets in Mauritius

This article appeared in Mail Today on February 17, 2014.
To check out the original, click on http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=1622014.
Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers.

Link to my previous Mauritius story:
http://indianrestaurantspy.blogspot.in/2013/12/mauritius-diary-rhythms-of-creole-music.html

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

HAD Michel de Nostradame, who attained eternal fame as the seer Nostradamus, not written down his prophecies, generations would have remembered him as a pioneering confectioner. For, it was he who explained to the world, in his lesser-known work, Traite des Confitures (Treaty of Jams), how sugar can be used to preserve fruits, thus giving birth in 1555 to the business of making jams, jellies and marmalades. Nostradamus was an apothecary (or pharmacist) and in those days, candy used to be made by people who dispensed medicines.

New Grove is a delicious rum, best drunk with
just ice, produced at the first sugar factory of
Mauritius. At l'Aventure du Sucre, you could
pick up bottles of the cognac-like rum made
from first-crush sugarcane juice, known
locally as fangourin. 

For a lifelong collector of useless information, this was my a-ha moment at L'Aventure du Sucre -- the famed sugar museum, and high point of my visit to Mauritius. The Indian Ocean nation, which exists in our imagination as a green ideal with sun-kissed white beaches and aquamarine seas, has beauties tucked away everywhere. And these may not always be of the kind gifted by a bounteous nature. L'Aventure du Sucre is one among them.

At first sight, it may appear like any other reconstituted sugar factory -- Mauritius had 259 of them in 1858, but today, just five produce more sugar than all of them combined -- till you notice the 35m chimney towering over it like some phallic ode. Look around, and treat your eyes to a vast expanse of dense greenery and sugarcane plantations, swaying in the gentle breeze, overseen by a wind-sculpted hill in the distant horizon that stands wrapped in a quilt of flitting grey clouds like a forlorn sentinel on a sleepless vigil since the Jurassic Age.

You're in Pamplemousses, one of the oldest and greenest districts of the island, not very far from the Port Louis, the national capital, and named after the tree that bears a fruit that looks and tastes uncannily like grapefruit. I owed this bit of general knowledge to the glass of pamplemousses juice that I had at breakfast. I had loved the symphony of fruit and acid, sweet and sour -- it was a like a concert by nature to liven up jaded palates.

Pamplemousses is famous the world over for the Sir Seewoosagar Ramgoolam Botanical Garden, the oldest in the Southern Hemisphere, and best known for its humongous Queen Victoria water lilies. Not being botanically inclined, I did not visit the 37-hectare park -- just as well, because there was so much to learn about Mauritius and the sugar economy at the sugar museum.

The museum's marketing manager is a young Mauritian of Indian origin, who, like his other compatriots, spoke in Creole and English, listened only to Bollywood music, and had a foggy idea of India, created in his mind by the playlist of the FM station he heard on his way to and back from work, and yet he nurtured the dream of visiting the country of his forefathers. "Aap Bharat ko mera salaam dena," he said with a natural-born exuberance and not because of what he had learnt from the correspondence classes in marketing management that he took from an Australian university. Back home, the line may have sounded corny, but when you hear it in rain-washed Pamplemousses, you feel your eyes turning moist and you hear the rustle of the Tricolour flying in full mast.

The Dutch introduced sugarcane in Mauritius, the French and the Brits exploited its commercial possibilities, and Indian indentured labourers slaved away in the plantations on five-year contracts. The men were paid five rupees a month and the women, four, and of this paltry sum, one rupee would be held back, ostensibly to pay for their return journey. They were lured by the promise of finding gold in the isle, but instead of digging for gold, they worked as coolies in sugar plantations.

The first Indians officially arrived on November 2, 1834, at the Immigration Depot, or Aapravasi Ghat, a UNESCO World Heritage Site tucked away in one corner of the chic Caudan Waterfront in Port Louis. Eventually, 450,000 of them arrived till 1923, the year when indentured labour was abolished, and once the five years of their contracts got over, they and their descendents chose to stay on to build a multi-ethnic society where four distinct communities -- Indian, Chinese, African and French -- stay in complete harmony with each other. Sugar today contributes to a third of the export earnings of the country and is grown on 80 per cent of the arable land. I looked at the man taking me around with renewed respect. His ancestors, and those of other young people like him I had got to meet during my stay, had built a thriving sugarcane economy literally in the middle of nowhere.

One sugarcane, the marketing manager said, has a life span of eight years, and each time it is cut, it produces 20 litres of juice, which in turn converts into two kilos of sugar. The bagasse left behind in the crushing process provide green fuel for gas-based turbines producing electricity, the waste is turned into fertiliser, the molasses are processed to make industrial rum and methanol, and the leaves are dried to produce the ubiquitous decorative roofing material that you'll find across the island.

The first-crush sugarcane juice, fangourin, also goes into the making of Mauritian agricultural rum (rhum agricole) -- and the museum's shop has one of the finest, New Grove, a heady liquor bursting with floral aromas and tropical fruit notes, all jasmine, lychee and honey, made at the island's first sugar mill and rum factory. It also has a selection of 12 kinds of sugar, so I had to find out the difference between the demerara and the muscovado, which were among the six at my hotel's breakfast buffet. I learnt that both are brown sugar, or raw sugar crystals, with different levels of molasses content and different production processes -- in the case of demerara (best for coffee), the raw molasses crystals are dried in a centrifuge, but the muscovado (perfect for baking) is dried in natural heat, sometimes in the sun.

Did someone say Mauritius is only about the sun, sea and sand? Add a fourth 's' -- sugarcane -- and you'll see another side of the emerald isle.

Big O Gastronomy: Masumi Sake and Jason Oh's Six-Course Dinner at Akira Back

A shorter version of this article appeared this morning in Fortune Cookie, my fortnightly column for Mail Today. Click on http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=1322014 and go to Page 17 to read the original.

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Masumi's Keith Norum (third from left) with
Ankur Chawla, author and beverage director of
JW Marriott, New Delhi Aerocity, and the
Akira Back chefs, Kurt Nyren and Jason Oh

KEITH NORUM has the looks of a liberal arts professor and a CV that says he read English Literature at UCLA and then relocated to an Alpine village named Suwa in the Nagano prefecture of Japan. That was 20 years ago, when he was hired as a cross-cultural management trainer by the world's largest maker of computer printers, Seiko Epson Corporation. Why, then, was the Californian at Akira Back, the New Delhi Aerocity JW Marriott's trending Japanese restaurant, holding forth on the virtues of Masumi?

Masumi is one of Japan's top sake brands -- two gold medals separate it from the No. 1, Urakasumi, in the annals of Japan's century-old annual sake awards -- and it has been brewed at the same kura by Suwa's Miyasaka family since 1662. Masumi means 'truth' and there's a story behind the name. The Miyasakas have been traditionally supplying sake to Suwa's historic Shinto shrine, which has the 1,200-year-old bronze 'Mirror of Truth', the source of the brew's name. The Shinto regard sake and salt as the two purifying elements in this imperfect world. Well, as they say with apologies to the Latin masters, 'in sake veritas' ('in sake there is the truth')!

Norum's relationship with Masumi started when the company's president, Naotaka Miyasaka, who represents his family's 23rd generation, returned home after completing his higher studies in America. He needed to keep in touch with English, and Suwa is a small place, so it was easy for him to find Norum. The two became good friends and eventually Miyasaka hired Norum to head his overseas operations.

Life may present unexpected twists, but little has changed in the art of making sake. It is brewed only in the three months between December and February, because the temperature in these months is just right for sake production, and each stage is carefully calibrated. Water and rice, Norum explained, are the two critical elements -- sake is 80 per cent water and 16 per cent alcohol extracted from milled rice.

The water, drawn from mountain springs, must have a low calcium content, because it slows down the metabolism of yeast, giving it longer life and the ability to extend the fermentation period. Extended fermentation (six weeks in the case of Masumi) produces alcohol with a complex structure and superior aroma profile.

Norum was sharing his wealth of knowledge with me over a most spectacular dinner prepared by Jason Oh. Like his boss Akira Back, Jason is a Korean-American, but he grew up in New York, not Denver, and has taken to Delhi like a fish to water. We started with yellowtail jalapeno with yuzu (citrus) soy -- hot and tart in equal measure -- which Norum paired with the fresh and elegant Sanka ('mountain flower'), which, surprisingly, has a seductive floral bouquet and tropical fruit aromas. The JW Marriot's F&B Director, Tarun Bhatia, said it tasted like green ber, which made me crave for some of this elusive fruit. This is ber season, isn't it?

Next on the menu was an Akria Back classic, hot oil-seared salmon with mixed peppers, lotus chips (I could have these forever!) and yuzu sauce, which paired very well with the more austere and dry Karakuchi Kippon. "It is as dry as we go," Norum said about the sake, adding that it is made at Fujimi kura, which was built in the 1980s atop a mountain overlooking Suwa. Fujimi's water source, interestingly, remains a mystery.

Rice used to produce Masumi's sake is sourced only from two places -- Nagano and Hyogo, which is also famous for the marbled beef of Kobe. Sourcing is important because sake rice is expensive and sake rice is special because its high protein content is uniformly concentrated in the outer layers.

It is the extent to which the rice is milled (to remove the proteins) that determines a sake's place in the caste system -- 60-70 per cent is good enough for the standard or futushu sake; 50-60 per cent for the premium or ginjo range; and 40-50 per cent for the super premium or daiginjo variant. Brewing sake is perfect science and the fate of the brew hangs in balance every day it is in production. Once milled, sake rice is soaked exactly for 8:30 to 9:45 minutes -- it can't be a second more or less, which is why the sake master times every operation with a stop watch!

As I understood the intricacies of the production process, Jason produced a delectable melange of sous vide tenderloin with wasabi soy sauce, mushrooms, potato puree and blanched asparagus, dressed in the Korean sweet and spicy cho jang sauce. To go with it, Norum produced the much-acclaimed Tokusen, which he said was a honjozo, that is, a sake with a little bit of neutral alcohol added before the rice mash is filtered. Well, that's another sub-category of sake. Whether it's ginjo or futushu, your sake has to be either a honjozo or a junmai (no alcohol added during production). Tokusen can also be served warm, which made me ask about the protocol to be followed with warm sake. Norum said drinking warm sake was like washing a plate with an oil stain with hot water. Reserve the pleasure for oily preparations such as tempura.

I digested all this information with the sake-steamed flounder (thank God for another fish being added to Delhi's limited repertoire!) served with baby bok choy, nori seaweed and black bean yuzu sauce. The Kippuku Kinju ('Golden Happiness'), a junmai ginjo, served with it was deliciously fruity and full-bodied with a clean finish that made me sit back for a moment and savour the sensation. I had more of it as we went through the chef's selection of sushi and rolls, and the dessert selection -- the chef's take on the Snickers bar and coconut sorbet .

Masumi produces two million bottles of sake in a year, down from 2.5 million six or seven years ago, because the consumption of table sake has been dropping steadily as people trade up to the premium and super-premium categories. But it is table sake that gets brewed first because sake rice is expensive and only best is kept for the upper-end brews. Unsurprisingly, Masumi consumes substantial quantities of rice. A kilo of the finest, after all, goes into the making of each bottle of its sake.

Sulafest Has Shown the Way for Others to Follow and Harvest the Gains

This article first appeared on Indian Wine Academy's website (www.indianwineacademy.com) on Feb. 11. Reprinted with permission. Click on http://www.indianwineacademy.com/item_4_589.aspx to see it in the original format.

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"?

Kunal Kapur Launches His Must-Have Cookbook For 'A Chef in Every Home' At Diya

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

WHEN Kunal Kapur was a kitchen trainee under the redoubtable Chef Arvind Saraswat at the Taj Palace, New Delhi, he had the most unnerving experience on the day each member of his batch was to present a three-course meal for evaluation by their guru. An eager-beaver, who made a mark on his first day at IHM-Chandigarh by being the only student to be able to identify the spices that are common to every kitchen, Kunal was the first to present his three-course meal, starting with a dahi ka shorba, to Chef Saraswat. He was expecting to earn brownie points for being the first, but he, for reasons that he could not fathom, only managed to send the master chef into paroxysms of anger.

The MasterChef India co-host and Executive Sous
Chef of The Leela Gurgaon, Kunal Kapur, with his
identically dressed son, Ranbir, at the launch of
his book, A Cook in Every Home (Random
House India). Image by Marryam Reshii

Chef Saraswat cried out in rage and flung the bowl of soup at Kunal. "It barely missed my head," Kunal recalled with his characteristic shy smile, and then he revealed why he had incurred the chef's wrath. He had served soup without a spoon! With the industry's expectations from chefs changing over the years, and with chefs no longer expected to be faceless masters of the back-end, it was important for one who aspired for a place in the kitchens of Taj hotels to get his basics right. Chef Saraswat was conveying this message to Kunal -- albeit in a way that unnerved the rookie to the point of making him want to cry.

Now famous as the co-host of MasterChef India and executive sous chef of The Leela Gurgaon, Kunal shared this blast from his past, even as he cooked the most aromatic prawn moilee, at the launch of his truly family cookbook, A Chef in Every Home (Random House India), at Diya, the Progressive Indian restaurant at his hotel. The choice of venue was appropriate, for Kunal earned his spurs at Diya, as the famous restaurant critic and Editor of the Times Food Guide, Marryam Reshii, reminded us. Kunal joined the restaurant after a stint at Made in India, Radisson Blu Hotel Noida, where he met his other mentor -- Arun Tyagi, who was then executive chef. Tyagi brought out the best in Kunal -- unlike Saraswat, he focused on his acolyte's strengths, not his weaknesses.

"He has a way with the imagination," Marryam said in her introductory remarks. She was right on target. Kunal's debut cookbook, which took him more than a year to complete (and which I have reviewed earlier), makes it abundantly clear that he not only has imagination, but also the ability to feel his audience's pulse. Unlike Chef Saraswat, who propagated lighter but difficult fruit-based sauces in The Gourmet Indian Cookbook, without paying the least attention to the lifestyles and needs of his audience, Kunal shares recipes that can easily be replicated by the home cook, especially a working mother, and her weekend 'chef'-husband.

At the launch, Kunal made bruschetta, prawn moilee and baked yoghurt, even as we talked about the state of hospitality education in the country, and Kunal's son Ranbir (his wife's called Ekta, which makes them quite a Bollywood Kapur khandaan!), sitting on an inverted pot like his father on the cover of the cookbook, kept ordering him to not stop stirring the moilee. Kunal's boss, The Leela Gurgaon's General Manager Michel Koopman, said he had been to a dozen hotel management colleges across the country and was shocked to find that their textbooks were at least 20 years behind the times. Reshii, at this point, remarked how the hotel management students were still being taught how to make cona coffee.

Koopman said F&B was becoming a key distinguishing factor in hotels, so culinary education should be in sync with the changing times. "A room is a room, is a room, is a room -- and is a room," he said to emphasise his point. Well, Koopman should know -- The Leela Gurgaon's earnings from F&B have touched Rs 88 crore, with Rs 46 crore coming from banquets. With the hotel notching up a revenue of Rs 220 crore, F&B accounts for a healthy 40 per cent of the pie. Of course, Koopman couldn't help saying how wherever he goes, people ask him whether he's from Kunal Kapur's hotel! Being as F&B proud as he is, Koopman just loves it.

A journalist asked Kunal whether the stardom that chefs seem to enjoy today has made any real difference to the attitude of people towards the hospitality industry. Not much has changed, Kunal admitted, and he was supported by the other panelist, the scriptwriter of the Vidya Balan-starrer Kahaani, novelist and OCLD graduate, Advaita Kala. Kunal recalled how the doctor parents of a young man, who were fans of MasterChef India, came to him with the request to dissuade their son from joining a hotel management institute. He refused to accede to their wish. "I couldn't be expected to dissuade someone from joining my own profession," Kunal said proudly, but he admitted that popular attitudes are still stacked up against the profession. Star chefs, by becoming role model for the young and ambitious, should be able to change all that. I hope and pray they succeed!

Groupon India CEO Bets Big on F&B and Sees Internet on Mobile as the Top Story of 2014

Ankur Warikoo shares the spectacular success story of Group India, which in three years has extended to 12 cities, signed up 6,500-plus unique merchants (including 56 per cent repeats), and almost every major hotel and restaurant in the country

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

WHEN Groupon India teamed up with Delhi Gourmet Club last year to launch Delhicious Week, the challenge to Citibank's three-city Restaurant Week India, which is entering its fourth year this March, few gave it much of a chance. It was a one-city affair and five restaurants signed up for it. By the end of Delhicious Week, the turnout, as well as the exposure they got on the Delhi Gourmet Club's Facebook community page, took the participating restaurants by surprise. Instantly, the word spread in the industry that Delhicious Week was here to stay -- and grow into serious competition for Restaurant Week India.

Sure enough, Delhicious Week returned this year with a bigger footprint. Eleven restaurants, an equal mix of five-star and stand-alone addresses, signed up. Between February 1 and February 6, the Delhicious Week days, more than twice the number of diners, compared with the turnout for the inaugural round of the event last year, showed up at the participating restaurants. The restaurants had been hand-picked by the Delhi Gourmet Club because of their reputation, and each offered a three-course special menu plus signature soft beverage at prices starting from Rs 999, depending on the meal time and day of the week.

For Ankur Warikoo, the Asia-Pacific Head of Groupon, the deal-of-the-day Chicago-based website that has grown into a $1.84 billion business globally in six years, ideas such as Delhicious Week keep powering his e-commerce company's growing business presence in the Indian market. They create excitement for his customers, who are looking for deals that are more than just discounts.

Ankur Warikoo has established
Groupon India as a significant
player in the country's growing
e-commerce economy. Here
he explains why the website
is continually gaining traction.

In the case of the Delhicious Week, the difference was the menu that each restaurant especially offered to the guests who arrived with Groupon coupons. One of the participating restaurants, K3 at the JW Marriott, New Delhi Aerocity, even went to the extent of offering its entire buffet at the steeply discounted price of a Delhicious Week coupon. Of course, Groupon India's biggest gamble was to sell a kilo of onions for Rs 9, which was a tenth of the market price, at the peak of the controversy over the skyrocketing price of the tuber. Within 44 minutes, 3,000 kilos were sold, and the by the time the deal was closed, more than 8,000 kilos had flown off Groupon's virtual shelves. Ideas such as these drive Groupon's business.

Warikoo, who's also the CEO (or "chief customer care executive") of Groupon India,  calls the website's model "the last mile of advertising". Groupon not only allows a business to showcase itself, but also goes a step further by converting the intent to buy created by the advert into an actual purchase. In doing so, Groupon has created a new e-commerce category of buying local services online. And as its name suggests (it is a portmanteau of the words "group coupon"), the website leverages the concept of "group buying" to drive new customers to businesses at a fraction of the cost of conventional advertising, even as it gives its online users a platform for securing discounts on items as varied as restaurant meals and spa outings.

"We only run limited-period promotions so as not to make any brand appear cheap," says Warikoo, who's an alumnus of Hindu College, Michigan State University (East Lansing) and the Indian School of Business (Hyderabad). What Groupon does, explains Warikoo, is get each participating business a minimum number of customers and the discount it offers is actually "the cost of acquiring new customers". There are no charges upfront, so the business pays "only when the money is in".

Unsurprisingly, Groupon India, which has expanded to 12 cities, has signed up 6,500-plus "unique merchants" across the country and 56 per cent of them are repeats. "All premium five-star hotels, barring those of the ITC, have worked with us or continue to do so," Warikoo adds triumphantly. The demographic behind Groupon India's success is the 25-38 age group, which, Warikoo says, is more likely to eat out or hang out at malls with friends. That may explain why 48 per cent of Groupon India's revenues come from food and beverage, and another 30 per cent from the wellness segment.

Groupon customers, says Warikoo, who's the only Kashmiri Pandit I know who's a vegetarian, scout for the most valuable experiences from the best brands. So, when the site offered the Nirula's classic, Hot Chocolate Fudge, for Rs 79, instead of its regular price of Rs 120, as many as 6,000 got sold in a week. And when the chholey-bhature of Kanha Sweets of Jaipur was made available for Rs 19, instead of Rs 49, the clicks on the 'Buy' button wouldn't stop -- 500 portions got sold in just two hours. So, how is Groupon India different from, say, a Snapdeal? Snapdeal, Warikoo says, pointing to a critical differentiator, is about products; Groupon is about services.

2014, according to Warikoo, will see internet on mobile becoming the game changer by enabling a website like Groupon to serve customers real-time. Sixteen per cent of all Groupon India transactions, in fact, are already taking place on this route. Warikoo expects this business segment to grow. "With 80 million units, India is the world's third largest smartphone market," he points out. "And by adding 8 million units each month, India looks set to overtake the US market, which has 140 million smartphones."

Groupon's India story started with the acquisition of a Kolkata-based deals website called Sosasta.com in April 2011. The name didn't convey the right value proposition, so the site was re-launched as Crazeal.com in October 2011, before legal issues led to it being re-christened Groupon India. It's been less than three years and the numbers look good for Warikoo and his team. And he's not exaggerating when he says, "The Groupon India story looks very positive."

TWO LESSER-KNOWN FACTOIDS ABOUT ANKUR WARIKOO

* Before taking charge of scripting Groupon's India story in 2011, Warikoo joined two other Indian School of Business graduates to launch a website incubation company called Accentium ("the word means nothing!" he says). They were running six websites, including the phenomenally successful SecondShaadi.com and Gaadi.com, the car purchase and sale site, which the company sold to Ibibo.

* Warikoo and his team work out of an three-storied, open-plan office in Saket, and when they go to Goa for their annual get-together, even the janitors and parking attendants aren't left behind. Who each of them gets to share a room with is decided by a draw of lots. Last year, Warikoo had the parking attendant as his roommate. Here's a real aam aadmi CEO, who lives by the principles he espouses.

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.

Wholesome Dinner But Frugal Breakfast for High-Protein, Low-Carb Tiger Woods

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

A dapper Anil Chadha, General
Manager, ITC Maurya (in striped
suit), leads Tiger Woods into
ITC Maurya, where the world
champion checked in for his
first-ever visit to India   

DELHI has a new caste system. And the social divide this time round is between the select few who have partied with Tiger Woods, mostly friends of the Munjals of Hero MotoCorp (who reportedly paid a seven-figure dollar sum for the world champion's first-ever visit to India), and the rest who haven't.

I belong to the deprived majority, but I can share with you what I have learnt from the ITC Maurya about the golfer's meals at the five-star hotel where he checked in at the Grand Presidential Floor for his brief stay.

Tiger Woods, whose pleasant disposition and easy accessibility won him many admirers among the hotel staff, follows a high protein, low carb diet. For breakfast, he had oatmeal with hot milk and egg white scramble with whole wheat toast. Here's a man who clearly doesn't believe in having breakfast like a king.

The night before, Woods was more indulgent. His dinner consisted of silken chicken veloute (one of the five mother sauces of French cuisine, veloute, derived from the French word for 'velvet', is made with chicken stock thickened with butter and flour), slow-roasted duck tossed with organic rucola (salad rocket) and Nagpur orange segments, napped in green apple dressing, classic tenderloin burger, and dark chocolate hazelnut savarin (a rich yeast cake baked in a ring mould and soaked in rum or kirsch syrup) paired with almond praline ice-cream. Now, that's what I call a meal fit for a world champ!

When Woods arrived, he was welcomed with an organic sugar-free chocolate cake with roasted hazelnuts. On it were inscribed William Blake's 'Tiger, tiger, burning bright...' lines, which, I am sure, Woods must be knowing well enough to recite backwards! So much for poetic originality, but ITC Maurya will have something to dine out on for months to come.

Dining With Miguel Torres, Rock Star of Spain's Wine World, Under A Banyan Tree at Sevilla

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

IT IS not every day that you get to sit next to a wine legend at a fabulous dinner in one of the finest restaurants of Delhi on an evening blessed by the weather gods. I am talking about Miguel Torres, the Decanter Man of the Year 2002 who re-wrote the rules of Spain's wine industry in his youth and now presides over land holdings stretching across 2,400 hectares in three continents and an annual turnover of 235 million euros (Rs 1,995 crore). The setting was Sevilla at The Claridges New Delhi, which is not only the best-looking venue to go out for dinner on a balmy night, but also the restaurant with the best Mediterranean menu in the city.

Miguel Torres, Decanter Man of
the Year 2002, is one of Spain's
most celebrated wine moguls.
Image: Courtesy of
Tulleeho.com 

The Torres wine evening on February 6, sponsored by Prestige Wines and Spirits, was made magical by Executive Chef Neeraj Tyagi and his younger colleague Rajiv Sinha, who presides over the restaurant's al fresco kitchen dominated by its prized possession -- a gleaming Josper oven that turns grimy as the evening progresses because it is kept very busy. Tyagi recently toured Britain and worked with some of the finest restaurants there to hone his skills, and these were on full display as the evening progressed.

The appetisers -- patatas bravas, dates wrapped with ham and a 'deconstructed' Spanish tortilla (the thick potato omelette) served innovatively in martini glasses -- set the mood for the evening. I got a chance to catch up with Atul Lall, who has taken over as the Area Vice-President of The Claridges after a fairly busy stint at Fairmont Jaipur -- his left foot was in a cast, but he looked every inch a Jodhpuri royal. I also got to chat with the director of Prestige Wines & Spirits, Sumit Sehgal (I learnt later that the Gautam Thapar company is in talks to add an Indian wine to its portfolio), the hotel's sprightly F&B Manager, Tarun Seth, and the young sommelier and wine educator, Gagan Sharma (I wonder if his bald pate, which matches that of his multi-talented boss, Magandeep Singh, is a mandatory requirement for employment at Wi-Not Beverage Solutions!). Gently flowing conversation, tasty finger food washed down by a Vina Esmeralda (the delicate and delightfully fragrant white wine from the Upper Penedes produced from Mosacatel de Alejandría and Gewürztraminer), followed by the refreshingly fruity and slightly sweet De Casta Rosado (grape varieties: Garnacha Tinta and Cariñena).

The gathering was eclectic. It included a host of Supreme Court lawyers led by the bon vivant and senior Supreme Court advocate, Parag Tripathi. The Spanish Ambassador, Gustavo Aristegui, a remarkable career diplomat who has also spent 16 years in public life (including 12 as MP), shared the head table with Torres, as did Delhi Wine Club President Subhash Arora, who reminded us in an informative speech that our distinguished visitor owned as many hectares as are under wine grape cultivation in India, and Reva Singh, Editor of Sommelier India: The Wine Magazine, who had met Torres late last year at the Wine Vision conference in London, where she was the speaker from India along with Sula Vineyards Founder-CEO Rajeev Samant.

Sommelier and wine educator Gagan Sharma
(extreme left) with the team that ensured we
got our wines on time and at the right
temperature. Image: Arun Varma

The service was initially slow, which gave us time to digest the corporate film screened at the start of the dinner and listen privately to the views of Torres on doing business with China. The conversation gathered momentum. The Spanish ambassador reminded us that his country has four restaurants ranked among the World Top Ten and that San Sebastian has more Michelin-starred restaurants per square mile than the whole of northern Europe. And then, Tyagi and Sinha rolled in their treats -- and what treats they were for the senses!

In between courses, the ambassador talked about China and India, about political will and economic development, about how he was able to juggle political and diplomatic careers without losing his seniority in service, about the long history of the Spanish ambassador's residence on Prithviraj Road, and about his embassy being among Spain's ten largest in the world. And when, in his concluding speech, he said he had already presided over five Torres dinners in two year and would like to do so 22 more times, if given a chance, he was speaking for all of us.

Here's the menu (with my comments) of the wine dinner, which we had under an ancient banyan tree, our conversations rudely interrupted at intervals by Ferraris screeching across the neighbouring road:

FIRST COURSE

Potato gnocchi stuffed with sobrassada (paprika-spiked sausage from the Balearic Islands), shaved Périgord black truffles (from France), sage butter and Parmigiano Reggiano crumble

My Take: Absolutely brilliant; this is what gastronomy is all about.

Or: Goat’s cheese gnocchi with sage butter, shaved black truffles and Parmigiano Reggiano crumble (I didn't go for this option)

Miguel Torres Milmanda 2011

Tasting Notes: Named after a historic castle at the Milmanda estate in the Conca de Barbera region, this brilliantly golden yellow single-estate Chardonnay has an intense, complex aroma with notes of fruit, citrus and peach compote, over a fine background of vanilla, and is big on the palate.

SECOND COURSE

Pan-roasted duck breast on compressed winter berry reduction  (I opted for the next)

Or: Mini phyllo-wrapped forest mushroom with romesco sauce (a nut-and-red pepper-based sauce from Tarragona, Catalunya)

My Take: It was a heaven-made marriage of forest mushroom and romesco sauce and the combination matched beautifully with the hearty red wine served with it.

Torres Mas La Plana 2009

Tasting Notes: This Cabernet Sauvignon from Penedes attained international stardom in 1979, when its 1970 vintage trumped a host of French greats, including Chateau Lafite. Its distinguishing characteristic is its intense aroma, great body and breadth on the palate, and juicy tannins that become balanced and elegant as the wine ages.

THIRD COURSE

Char-grilled Angus with spiced potato puree, grilled string beans, and roasted forest mushroom béarnaise sauce

Or: Majorcan pistachio-crusted, pan-seared Chilean Sea Bass with fennel air, chorizo and potato ragu

My Take: I chose the Chilean sea bass over the rest and regretted the decision only because it did not match with the wine. By itself, the dish was a triumph of simplicity over form, but maybe the buttery fish would have done better with a chorizo crust and not pistachio.

Or: Sous vide rack of lamb, black olive puree and pear glaze

Or: Saffron pancakes and ratatouille, mozzarella-filled eggplant timbale with goat’s cheese fondue

Miguel Torres Grans Muralles 2006

TASTING NOTES: A seductive combination of Garnacha and the lesser-known Mazuelo, Monastrell, Garró and Samsó grapes. Intense deep red with a purplish sheen, the wine has an aroma of exotic and profound complexity, incredibly rich body and structure, hints of spices (pepper and clove), shrubs (thyme) and ripe red berries (cranberry and redcurrant) over a background of smoke, vanilla and incense. The dense but sweet tannins open up and leave a lingering aftertaste that produces instant happiness.

DEGUSTATION OF CHOCOLATE

Bavarian citrus chocolate, five-spiced chocolate sauce, white chocolate and vanilla bean jelly, single- origin chocolate bar and raspberry sorbet on chocolate soil

Torres Floralis

TASTING NOTES: Made from the Moscatel grapes celebrated by Greeks and Roman epicures, the intensely aromatic dessert wine first tantalises the nose with its floral perfumes (rose, geranium and lemon verbena) and then flirts with the palate with its voluptuous mouth feel and delicate sensuality.

TEA/COFFEE

Torres Jaime I

TASTING NOTES: Served in a wavy bottle designed by the renowned Japanese architect Hiroya Tanaka, the brandy is drawn from the oldest soleras that started off as distilled Parellada wine, enriched by the best that are at least 30 years old, with a small amount of the 1972 eau de vie of Folle Blanche lees, the rarest of grapes used to make the highest-quality pot still brandies, added for intensity of aromas. Jaime I is deep, rich and dark amber brandy characterised by a concentrated complex bouquet, with marked overtones of coconut, dried fruits and spices. Round and lush, complex and majestic, it has a lingering finish that you'd want to sip gently as you absorb the grandness of the meal that you've just had.

DINING OUT: Bread & More Returns With Much More Pizzazz

QUICK BYTES

WHAT: Bread & More

WHERE: N-17, N-Block Market, Greater Kailash-I

WHEN: 9:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. (weekdays); 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. (weekends)

DIAL: +91 29246301

AVG. BILL STARTS AT: Rs 200 + VAT

STAR RATING: ****1/2

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

The Raspberry Melange is a star attraction at the
new and much-improved Bread & More, which
also has some genuinely artisan breads on its
menu and Delhi-NCR's best macarons. L'Opera
now has serious, decently priced competition.  

WHEN Pishori Lal Lamba and his brother-in-law, Iqbal Ghai, opened Kwality at the Regal Building in Connaught Place in 1940, the only items on their menu were ice-cream produced from a hand-cranked machine and milk shakes. The world was at war and India had been sucked into it. The contours of the conflict changed once the United States pitched in its lot with the Allies after Japanese kamikaze pilots bombed Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941. It also turned around the fortunes of Kwality.

American GIs arrived in thousands to defend India against a feared Japanese invasion and a large contingent of them were stationed in New Delhi, at barracks in Connaught Place. They just loved Kwality's vanilla ice-cream and one of the soldiers, a big fan of Lamba and Ghai, taught the brothers-in-law how to make sundaes. Soon, Kwality started serving cold coffee and sandwiches, and the patrons of the Regal theatre next door stopped by before each show.

The story came back to me as I was being taken round Bread & More by Divij Lamba, Pishori Lal's Yale- and Cornell-educated grandson who worked at Hillary Clinton's Senate office before joining his family's restaurant empire. The ice-cream, milk shakes and sundaes have made way for breads and croissants, confections, sandwiches, and single-origin coffees, whose nutty fragrance welcomes guests as they enter the store. Bread & More has been around since 1998, but its look and menu has just undergone a delicious makeover steered by Sahil Mehta, the first Indian to be certified by the prestigious Lenotre baking school  on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, and Umesh Sharma, the Kwality Group's bakery chef. The aromas, flirting with our nostrils and doing a little tango with the senses, revved up my appetite with their promise of good food. L'Opera now has serious competition -- both in quality and in prices.

The Lambas and their bakery team operating out of the Bread & More central commissary in Okhla Phase-II have gone to lengths to ensure authenticity with quality. The starter culture for their peasant bread, for instance, is from Paris, and  it is 75-80 years old. Not a drop of water goes into their focaccia; it's olive oil all the way, just as it would have been in Italy. The hard-crust artisan breads are baked in a stone oven with a mechanism for steam injection. It is this investment that has ensured that these breads are delightfully soft inside.

Even the quantities of yeast used is less -- 16 gm to a kilo of flour, compared with 30 per cent in most commercial breads -- because even though the dough may take a longer time to rise, it has a more delicate flavour and aroma. The simple pleasures of life, as they say, requires little ornamentation. And of course, the butter used is French because it is more malleable and spreads more easily.

The menu has 13 varieties of bread, including whole wheat and oat breads for diabetics, and four kinds of croissants (each uniformly crusty outside and melt-in-the-mouth inside), and it has the old favourites (nachos, sausage rolls and Black Forest), and you can also pick up a spicy chicken galette (the pancake-like bread from Brittany is a new addition to the city's culinary repertoire). For breakfast, you can have ham and soft fried egg on brioche with piping hot single-origin coffee. You may find the seating a little awkward because of space constraints, but it is best to have the croissants and sandwiches at the store. Go there on a weekend morning, or when 6 p.m. hunger pangs get the better of you.

Among all these temptations, and the procession of truffles and pralines and gateaux, the macarons, based on the recipe of the redoubtable Pierre Herme, are Delhi-NCR's best. They start with an almost imperceptible crunch and then just dissolve in the mouth releasing a bouquet of sensations. After you've had the salty caramel macarons, you'll keep wanting more.

Remy Sula's 100% Indian Grape Spirit Brandy Ready for Release; Awaits Remy Cointreau's Green Signal

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

INDIA'S first brandy made 100 per cent with grape spirit is ready for release. It is the baby of Remy Sula, a joint venture between the Paris-based ninth largest spirits company in the world, Remy Cointreau, and Nashik's Sula Vineyards, the producer of India's largest selling wines, which is led by the Standford-trained engineer and wine pioneer Rajeev Samant.

Remy Cointreau, headed by industry veteran Rukn Luthra in India, is famous for its cognac Remy Martin (and the ultra-exclusive Louis XIII) as well as the champagnes Piper-Heidsieck and Charles Heidsieck, the mid-market brandies St Remy and Metaxa, and the triple sec, Cointreau. The brandy, whose grapes are being sourced locally, is being produced at Century Wines, Baramati, under Remy Sula's supervision.

Sources close to the development say the brandy will be released only after Remy Cointreau's experts give its their thumb. The other whisper is that the company is lobbying for an excise duty reduction on grape spirit in view of the high cost of production.

The next time you visit Sula Vineyards, you may
be able to ask for a snifter of brandy -- made
100 per cent with Indian grape spirit. Image:
Courtesy of Virgin Atlantic blog

In India, brandies made by multiple local players have a minuscule quantity of grape spirit; the basic ingredient is extra neutral alcohol (ENA) produced out of molasses, which, in fact, is at the core of most Indian-manufactured spirits, starting with whisky. Media reports peg the price of ENA at Rs 20 per litre; that of grape spirit is Rs 400 per litre. It's seriously expensive to produce brandy with grape spirit, which is why the Remy Sula product may be deserving of excise duty exemption.

The Remy Sula partnership was first off the ground when the Government of Maharashtra allowed the production of grape spirit some time back to insulate farmers from the economic setback they suffer in the years when they have excess production. Wine grapes have no other use. The demand for grape spirit therefore may provide farmers an incentive to step up their production levels.

The launch of Remy Sula's first Indian grape spirit-based brandy will mark the entry of yet another important international player in the domestic wine and spirits market. Seagram India, the local arm of the French alcobev multinational, Pernod Ricard, set the ball rolling with its Nine Hills wines made in Nashik, and Moet Hennessy India most recently launched its Indian sparkling wine, Chandon, in Mumbai and Delhi to lend some sparkle to the jaded market.

Brandy, incidentally, is big business in the south, which consumed 99 per cent (Tamil Nadu alone cornered 60 per cent) of the 45-plus million, nine-litre cases of the drink released into the market in 2012. That's a substantially bigger market than wine. Remy Sula, it's apparent, wishes to gain the first-mover advantage with an Indian brandy that is produced just the way it is supposed to be. The move will give the alcobev industry an additional push to achieve higher production levels and penetrate the domestic market deeper than ever.

At India's Woodstock, A Soul-Stirring Offering of Food, Wine and Music

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

SULAFEST, without doubt, is India's Woodstock. A celebration of youth power. A showcase of good wine, food and pop fashion. A music programme packed with the best of electronica and world music. A crowd that deserves to be held up as a model of self-discipline.

When the late lamented Chateau Indage pioneered grape stomping as a marketing gimmick to glam up the wine business, wine snobs would turn their noses up and just about tolerate the publicity that the Chateau got as a result of it. No one then could imagine that the tradition would get a life of its own and grow into a cultural festival under the leadership of Rajeev Samant of Sula Wines, the Chateau's challenger and nemesis.

Sula put Nashik on the world wine map after Samant, with help from his Californian winemaker, Kerry Damsky, changed the face of a district that was previously famous for having Asia's largest wholesale onion market. Today, Sula has 238 contract farmers, supervised by a team viticulturists, growing 17 varieties of wine grapes, some of which, such as Pinot Noir (at a place named Sangvi near Pune), were considered impossible to sustain in India. In the same way, Sulafest has ensured the district's place on the tourist map -- it's a pity that the event lasts just for two days.

When you have a 20-artiste lineup with Dub Pistols, The Dualists, Vasuda Sharma, Susheela Raman and DJ Anna leading the pack, you know Sulafest 2014 is a "gourmet music festival" not to be taken lightly. There's food for every taste bud -- from shawarma and kaukswe at the Food Court next to the Main Stage to piping hot and deliciously juicy kathi rolls at the Electrozone, which has a very different vibe and music that just sucks you in. It grows on you, especially after you've had a blueFROG bottle filled up with a heady vodka and watermelon juice combo (Rs 800). You can also have a Mount Gay rum mojito (highly recommended at Rs 300), or a shot of Grant's, or an Asahi beer, or any Sula wine that catches your fancy. If you wish to take some home, my good friend, Rinku Madan, who's presiding over the Club Sula stall, will take your order and have your choice shipped to your home.

Now in its seventh year, Sulafest has put Nashik
on the world tourism map and become
India's No. 1 gourmet music festival.
Image: Courtesy of blueFrog

Or you can grab a preservatives-free, sparkling fruit juice (Rs 100) -- apple, pink guava or passionfruit, take your pick -- from Pune's Good Juicery, which was launched last year by a South African resident of the city, Michelle Bauer, and her food technologist friend Julia Madlener. I was talking to Michelle's friend, a New Zealander named Brendan (not McCullum!), and he said the company insists on sourcing its fruits from India (each can of Good has 40 per cent fruit juice). Passionfruit is an exception, naturally, but Brendan surprised me by saying that the company has zeroed in on a vendor in Kerala. Imagine having passionfruit from Kerala! It reminded me of what celebrity chef Vikas Khanna said to me some time back: "There's nothing that isn't grown or eaten in India." Of course, he wasn't talking about fruits, but octopus cooked Keralan style!

I was lucky to catch up with Ajoy Shaw, Sula's talented and forever happy winemaker. He treated me to a Rasa 2007, a 100 per cent Shiraz, which still has maintained its ruby red hue bordering on purple, its luscious tannins slithering down my thirsty throat. Sula is re-launching Rasa 2007 as a Collector's Edition wine. Shaw said it was a pity Sula couldn't hold back stocks of its top-end wines -- my favourite, Dindori Reserve Shiraz, being one of them -- for later release. The demand for Sula wines invariably shoots ahead of the supply.

I asked Shaw about his preparations for the tough-as-nails Master of Wine examination. He said he wakes up sometimes at 3:30 in the morning to prepare for it, because he has full-time job to do. The process is expensive. It requires extensive wine tasting opportunities, which are not easy to come by in India, unlike, say, in London, where you have such events every week. And there's a lot of emphasis put on your English writing skills, which a biochemist such as Shaw may at times find challenging. I had heard the same story from Sonal Holland of ITC at the Chandon launch in Mumbai. But something tells me, both will eventually become India's first Masters of Wine.

Sulafest is not only about food, wine and music. It's also about conversations and memories that remain with you for a long time after the curtains have come down on the event.