| Passion Drives India's Own Wine Advocate | | | | By: Sourish Bhattacharyya |  Page 1 of 3 next >> |
For a nation with a per capita consumption of a teaspoon of wine a year, we have more wine writers than wine labels.
In this crowd of pretenders, freeloaders and some serious amateurs, Aakash Singh Rathore stands apart. He’s different because he has taken the pains to study vine cultivation and wine making, even as he was reading philosophy and the law at the Michigan State University. He assisted his philosophy professor, who taught the world’s only course on the philosophy of wine, to update his acclaimed guide to the Rhone Valley, the famous French wine region.
Thereafter, he travelled across Europe, teaching during the day, writing his doctoral dissertation in Belgium, finding a soulmate while studying German at the Goethe Institute in Berlin, quaffing a different wine every evening for ten years, and travelling to wineries in the summer.
Wine, says Rathore, became a part of his growing-up experience after his father, who was a professor of psychoanalysis at Columbia University, bought a winery in Michigan that was disastrously named Strawberry Fields (their wine label had strawberries on it, which was undoubtedly an unwise marketing ploy).
“You can’t expect a professor who was then writing the Psychoanalytic Interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita to make wise investment decisions,” says Rathore of the winery that set him on the road to understanding wine.
When the US-born professor of philosophy and law arrived in India with his eclectic collection of wines – for bread, he’s preparing an ambitious inter-disciplinary course on the philosophy of law at Delhi University – and his wife, an Indian diplomat posted at the Pakistan Desk of the Ministry of External Affairs, he already had the evolved palate, cultivated eye and critical nose to be qualified to write India’s first wine guide.
He did it with the dedication with which the American lawyer-turned-wine guru, Robert Parker, put Bordeaux on the world map.
He went, uninvited and unwelcome, in a taxi from one winery to another in Nashik, Pune, Sangli and Bangalore, and even on a wild goose chase in Himachal Pradesh (and at Sula, he was told to go because he was asking too many uncomfortable questions), bought two bottles of each label (judging by his unflattering reviews, many of them weren’t worth the investment), and tasted each wine at least a couple of times to be able to form an unbiased opinion.
“Cultural prejudice, and not a geographical problem, has prevented domestic wines from taking off in India. Each time I go to an Indian restaurant and ask for an Indian wine, the waiters look embarrassed, yet they’re happy to serve foreign plonk. Our elite must start believing that India, despite being in the torrid zone, can produce great wines,” says the author of The Complete Indian Wine Guide (Roli Books, Rs 295), who sees India emerging as the No. 2 zinfandel destination after California.
Rathore’s mission was expensive, because he had no writing advance, and at times it was heart-wrenching (like when a young French wine-maker, who was terribly lonely in exile in Narayangaon, begged Rathore in French to find him a girlfriend).
Rathore was driven by the determination to be the first to write the complete story of India’s wine industry, warts and all. For inspiration, he kept turning to a book he had discovered in Budapest – it is called A Bor Metafyszika (The Philosophy of Wine).
The book’s popular Hungarian writer, Bela Hamvas, relates Hungary’s 14 wine districts to 14 types of women apparently found in the country. It was responsible for the Hungarians discovering, after the fall of socialism, that they had great wines, apart from Tokaji, the legendary dessert wine.
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