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Wines are gradually becoming less the buzzword and more the daily ration. There was a time when dropping the word wine was like announcing your son’s singledom on an island full of desperate moms with unmarried daughters.

Today the scene is a lot calmer. Think of the same island above but with some of the girls not really caring for the boys, preferring instead to sit and comb each other’s tresses, like on one of those mystical siren islands. Okay, fantasy moment passed; back to wines.

I was recently part of a wine event in the capital which brought in several Italian winemakers and allowed the trade to interact with them, taste their wines and learn about them first hand. It
was heartening to see a good turnout — both with exhibitors and visitors — and the recession seemed to be finally, receding.

Hoteliers too came along for a serious tete-a-tete with these wine makers. Italian wines have been fairly strong on the scene for some time now and this is largely due to two simple reasons: Italian winemakers are aggressive about the Indian market and leave no stone unturned in making their presence felt and their wines tasted. Second, the number of Italian restaurants cannabis-ing (mushrooming is boring) on the eatery scene is making Italian wines more accessible. A sub-point here would be that Italian cuisine affords a large vegetarian fare and that in India is important when deciding a place to dine with the family.

But wine remains expensive mainly due to the inexplicable amount of taxation they are subjected to. If I could capture the look of disbelief on the faces of all the people who came to the show, tasted the wines and stood stunned by just how affordable these great wines really were, I’d easily have enough footage to cut for a film.

On the whole we saw a good turnout. The dinners were packed and teeming, the tastings buzzing and the overall feel, professional yet fun. Nobody complained about pairing possibilities, wine temperatures or glassware.

They all were there to learn and not schmooze and hence I labelled it a trade event instead of a page 3 gala. So why didn’t this delicious event come to Mumbai? Because, between the customs and the excise while trying to request exemptions from certain state laws, I had a harrowing experience the first time.

No one cared about wines or winemakers, all they wished was to impress upon me how what I was doing was illegal and impossible and unhelpful to anybody in the long run. Funny then how their notion changed when I made the event ‘helpful’ for them, if you know what I mean.

Meanwhile, Delhi too has turned for the worse. A legal system that keeps getting more complicated and provides less clarity to the citizens combined with more loopholes for the officials to exploit the situation in their favour is not a conducive environment to promote or encourage business. How I wish some ‘act of god’ would wipe our offices clean of corruption and help us start anew.

Forget wines or winemakers, the entire country stands to gain from it.