Column

Of late I have taken upon myself the burden of pioneering the crusade against c&@p — to separate the riff from the raff so to say. I am tired of seeing bad things make it good. I am tired of people asking me my opinion on things best left unsaid. I am tired of having to drink wine that doesn’t deserve to be drunk.

The Americans are the kings of marketing: they have even found ways of disposing their garage sale junk to us naive people and not only do we pay top dollar for it, we hang it as decorations. Look at some of the restaurants around you! The same applies to wines. In the absence of decently priced stuff we have to contend with really average quaffing wine; the kind I may drink if dying of thirst while risking the chance that sipping such stuff could kill me in the first place!

Big brands — Gallo, Jacob’s Creek, B&G, Castel, Fortant — all make really average stuff. Forget us mortals, they wines couldn’t inspire a good word out of Shakespeare if they tried. So unimaginative and dull are they. Then we try to enjoy them with our lovely local cuisines and conclude that our dishes just don’t go with wine.

Indian cuisine is so intricate that a slight deviation can make a drastic difference. Hotels are forever trying new concepts and recipes and innovative designs to make it even more appealing. Yet, when we marry it with wines we choose to go with more rudimentary stuff. Our reasoning: the spice would kill the wine anyway. How about if I argued that rubbishy wine would murder all the nuances that the dish had to offer?

And I will personally take down anybody who maintains that Indian wines go better with Indian food. Indian wines are basically plonk; I am not generalising, I am merely summing up. They are chemical cocktails with all sorts of additions — sugar, acidity, tannins — and are far from the natural beverage that wine is supposed to be; the one that is healthy for us. And they are expensive as hell.

A Sula is not a bad wine if sold at Rs200; anything above that is not worth its contents. Indage would have an even lower value-for-money ratio. Grover’s is more often than not inconsistent, something that plagues them perpetually. There are newcomers but it will be a while before they make a significant impact. And I hope that for their own good they won’t serve up wines with prices pegged to the crude oil market.

In the meantime, wines like Jacob’s Creek will do brisk business. They may not be great but they are consistent and cheap — plonky but a decent sip; nothing that we couldn’t do without in the long run. As clients it is our duty to make our choices and voices heard. Remember folks, even the hoteliers, importers and winemakers of our country India aren’t half as educated on the subject of wines as their counterparts in the West and yet they think that the Indian consumer will buy anything they sell. It is they who are the susceptible lambs of the industry, who fall prey to many a marketing gimmick and end up stocking the wines that we eventually have to silently suffer.

As part of my crusade I call upon all of you to not encourage or endure such silent torture. Please fill up the comment cards and please don’t hold back the comments on the level of wines stocked, or the lack of it.
The writer is a sommelier