[nukkad] New York Times Article on Nashik Grape Production/Wine

["Praveen J. Gaikwad" <>]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How does one become a butterfly?" she asked pensively. "You must want 
to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar." 
- Trina Paulus, Hope for the Flowers 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------


 THIS WAS IN TODAYS NY TImes.  June 26 2003

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----

 A Winery Profits as India Adapts to New Tastes
 By JAMES BROOKE


NASIK, India - Educated in Silicon Valley but seduced by Sonoma Valley,
Rajeev Samant decided to come home to these dry hills northeast of Bombay to
try making wine in India, a nation where annual wine consumption works out
to one teaspoon per person.

 Six years after planting his first cuttings of sauvignon blanc from France
and chenin blanc from California, Mr. Samant has a big problem: "We keep
running out of wine."

 Although wine featured in the Kama Sutra, the ancient Indian erotic
classic, wine drinking has not been part of modern mainstream Hindu culture.
For one thing, India's traditionally hot and spicy foods tend to overwhelm
the subtle flavors of most wines.

 But Mr. Samant's Sula Vineyards is a runaway success, doubling its output
each year since 2000 and still not keeping up with demand.

 "Last year, our three main wines were out of the market for three months,"
Mr. Samant, a 36-year-old Stanford University engineering graduate, said at
his winery's red-roofed Mediterranean-style headquarters. Nearby, workers
labored on additions that will quadruple Sula's capacity to 159,000 gallons
a year by January.

 Sula's success speaks to two factors transforming India's economy:
globalization and the cutting of red tape. These new forces are contributing
to India's projected economic growth this year of 5 percent, a peppy rate
after years of slumber.

 With 20 million Indians studying or working overseas, this formerly
inward-looking nation is increasingly open to new ways of doing things -
though many of the old strictures still survive, including a ban on
advertising alcoholic beverages.

 Mr. Samant uses other kinds of marketing to draw attention to his wines,
including sponsoring fashion shows in Bombay, where "Bollywood," the Indian
mass-audience film industry, is based; wine tastings in Delhi, the political
center; and dot-com parties in Bangalore, the center of the rapidly
expanding technology industry.

 "We had hundreds of yuppies tasting our wine," Mr. Samant, a former
executive at the Oracle Corporation, said of the Bangalore parties. " Yahoo
and Merrill Lynch were our sponsors."

 The trend Mr. Samant is riding is a fast-growing taste for wine among
affluent young Indians. "A lot of young women, from 22 and up, are very much
into wine, something you never used to see a few years ago in this country,
which is quite socially conservative," he said. "It is more acceptable for a
woman to be seen holding a glass of white wine than a glass of whiskey or
spirits."

 Nasik is India's wine capital, and the vineyards spreading over the
red-earth hills around the town are evidence of progress in removing
official obstacles to enterprise.

 When he started, "it took us two years to get the winery license," Mr.
Samant said. "Today it takes one month."

 Four wineries have opened in Nasik in the last year, and the state
government of Maharashtra has 40 more letters of intent for winery projects.
The state's first wine festival is scheduled for August. Remarkably, all
this is taking place in a state governed by a party usually regarded as
Hindu nationalist - in other words, opposed to foreign influences.

 In the decade since Mr. Samant started experimenting here, the price of
irrigated land has risen twentyfold to one million rupees ($21,500) an acre.
With hot days, cool nights and soil that drains well, these mildly sloping
hills are producing wines with a "new world" flavor, according to Terry
Damskey, a California winemaker who is Mr. Samant's partner and adviser.

 "Raj is riding something that is going to be very successful, the way the
Californian winemakers did a generation ago," Mr. Damskey, who visits Nasik
regularly, said in a telephone interview from his home in Geyserville,
Calif.

 Analysts expect Indian wine consumption to grow 20 percent a year through
2007, echoing a trend seen among the emerging middle class in China, another
rapidly developing country without a strong wine tradition. Indian
consumption is expected to reach 550,000 cases this year, about 8 percent of
it supplied by Sula Vineyards.

 In a country with few corkscrews, much of Sula's work is educational. For
example, along with the usual suggestion that merlot be served at room
temperature, Sula's brochures add that this "refers to European climates,
not Indian!"

 "I have been to wine shops where they keep the bottle vertical, standing on
a shelf, in the sun," said Pradeep S. Pachpatil, Sula's winery manager, as
he offered two visitors a taste of Sula's sauvignon blanc.

 Last April, the Indian Express newspaper called this wine "the most refined
Indian white - dry and refreshingly crisp, with just a hint of its spicy
antecedents."

 India's winemaking boom comes during a nationwide push to adjust the
economy to the requirements of membership in the World Trade Organization,
which India joined in January 1995 with a promise to lower a number of trade
barriers gradually. For example, import duties on wine, now as high as 250
percent, are due to fall to 100 percent by 2006.

 Even with such high duties, imports account for 40 percent of the Indian
wine market, in part because vineyards like Sula struggle to keep their
wines to world standards without the benefit of a well-developed domestic
network of suppliers and support businesses.

 "Our corks come from Portugal," said Ajoy Shaw, Sula's winemaker, as he
walked past stacks of empty clear-glass bottles imported from France. "For
the sparkling wine, we order the wire holders from Spain and the gold foils
from Luxembourg."

 To prepare for more competition from imported wines, Mr. Samant has been
working to build brand awareness among India's middle and upper-middle
classes, who can afford to pay $9 to $15 for a bottle of his wine in
restaurants. Though they represent a small percentage of the national
population, he said, "1 percent of a billion is 10 million," and their
numbers are growing rapidly.

 After a favorable review last autumn in Wine Spectator, the influential
magazine, Mr. Samant shipped some Sula wine to Italy and to San Francisco.
He does not need export orders now and would have trouble filling them if he
got many, but he said that a "foreign stamp of approval" was valuable
publicity at home.

 "When you don't have a big wine culture, people are not that confident of
their instincts about wine," he said, adding that an Indian newspaper
article about Sula wine being offered in some French restaurants in San
Francisco can have a big impact.

 "Getting accepted and acclaimed in California means a lot for me," he said.
"Ultimately, for a winemaker, psychic rewards are very important. It is not
all financial."



 Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search
| Corrections | Help | Back to Top



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To join/leave, use the form at: http://www.mumbai-central.com/nukkad/#options
This list is archived at: http://www.mumbai-central.com/nukkad/archive.html