How About Some Wine?

A few weeks ago, my colleague Pravin Palande suggested that we should go to the Sula Festival in Nashik. If I remember right, he promised there will be a lot of wine and we will have a great time. I mean not just the two of us. That didn’t sound right, did it? Well, we had female company. Sula didn’t really connect at first go. Frankly, I am not a wine person. Other than the fact that wine is red or white in colour, I don’t know anything. I think I drink wine like beer. Gulp…gulp…gulp. You get the picture, right. But I agreed because I wanted to have ‘a great time.’

So we drove down to Sula last Saturday. Did you know that Mumbai to Nashik is a great drive? It is. Driving in Nashik though is crazy. They seem to have dug up the whole city for some infrastructure-related reasons. After many potholes, diversions and lots of dust, we reached Sula.

My first reaction; it seemed like we were at a fashion parade of sorts. I can’t really remember the last time I have seen so many people at one place in summer dresses and shorts. (And that's just the ladies.) And the whole place seemed like one huge bar: right from the tasting room to the narrow paths to the small shops selling Sula memorabilia at exorbitant prices to the food stalls and the amphitheatre. All I could see was people, wine bottles, plastic cups with wine in them, plastic cups with beer in them and cigarettes.

Let me say that people were just having a nice time. Drinking wine and champagne and smoking funny-smelling cigarettes. It helped that there was good music too.

Oh yes. The 'good time' part.

Well, I decided to drink. Wine, naturally, since we were at a wine festival. On the first floor of the tasting room (which is in the building which houses the Sula office), we bought a wine based purely on its colour. I think it was pink and called blush. That bottle was soon over. I don’t think any of us had any clue of what the hell we were drinking. We just said ‘good.’

And then Pravin bumped into a certain acquaintance at Sula who insisted we take a tour of the place. The tour gave us an idea about what really goes into the making of wine. This included details like grape harvesting, alcohol content, and the colour of a wine, among many, many other things. We saw the massive oak barrels where the temperature is controlled and wine is aged artificially. The manager who did this hard work of explaining the entire process has spent the last 11 years of his life working at Sula wines.

He also mentioned that a vineyard has lots of rose bushes at the end of the rows of grape vines. Not because they are pretty, but because rose bushes are susceptible to the same diseases that grape vines are. What's more, the rose plants get the disease earlier, which allows the vineyard guys to take preventative action to save the grapes. 

He told us a quite a lot about the simple process of making wine. I do remember a few things though. First, men should have two glasses of wine a day and women only one. I asked him why. I think he smiled but didn’t say anything. Second, there is no such thing as good or bad wine. Wine is an acquired taste and it depends on whether the person likes it sweet or not. Third, Europeans like dry wine or simply a wine which is not sweet.

The manager inspired us so much that we decided to apply these theory lessons. I.e., (a) buy more wine and (b) drink it.

Our first purchase was for Rs. 750. of course you don’t care about the price but it's my duty as a reporter. Dindori. Red. I was made to understand by our smart female company that this was a dry wine. I rolled it on my tongue and let it go down my throat. I remember thinking that compared to blush, Dindori was strong. I drank quite a bit of it. I like strong. Dindori isn’t sweet. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a sign of good or bad wine. I am okay with sweet. You can see I was confused.

In the meantime, the ladies in our company decided that we had had enough of red wine. They wanted to try white. So off they went and came back with Mosaic white wine. Everybody loved it. And let me echo the word that came up most in our attempts to describe the wine to each other: refreshing. It was refreshing on the tongue and in the back of the throat. Good wine.

By this time Pravin, who is usually a staunch whiskey man, was so much in love with wine (as were all of us, to be honest) that we ordered another.

What did we order next? It was a Mosaic red wine. Did I mention two glasses of wine somewhere before? Yes I certainly did. Frankly, I don’t remember how the Mosaic tasted. I do remember the beer gulp feeling though. I think I had a great learning experience. I want more wine.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.