Producing a good wine is simple: just put good wine grapes and a good winemaker together and voila! That’s the theory. In practice it’s a little more complicated — at least in India. For one, few vineyards here produce good wine grapes and those that do rarely have enough to spare for you and me. For another, while in France or Italy you almost can’t throw a stone without hitting a winemaker, in India they are much rarer and generally have to be imported.
Wine grapes are different from table grapes in that they have a different sugar-acid balance and have seeds (“pips”), unlike most table grapes. They are also grown in dedicated vineyards — if a winery does not lift, the grapes would have to be thrown away. Lastly, Indian wine grapes are unique as they are harvested pre-summer, unlike everywhere else in the northern hemisphere where grapes are harvested pre-winter. That makes our wine grapes different — not better or worse, just different — to those grown in more temperate climes.
Eighty per cent of the quality of a wine depends upon grapes — you can make bad wine from good grapes, but there’s no way anyone can make good wine from bad grapes. The winemaker adds that critical 20 per cent, combining science with art to produce paradise or plonk.
Our harvest timing (February-April) ensures that most ‘flying winemakers’ gracing our shores come from Europe as they are free at that time, whereas winemakers from Australia, South Africa or South America have their domestic clients to look after. A flying winemaker can be expensive, costing anything from Rs 30 lakh per year upwards (including travel and accommod-ation), so best to train-up a resident chappie for day-to-day work.
Setting up a vineyard is the stuff of dreams and wealthy people — anyone who has been to one overseas (or our own Sula et al) sees an ocean of tranquility and timeliness. Actually starting a vineyard takes time and money: you first need to be able to buy agricultural land (the downfall of many a poor boy), and then spend at least three years and about Rs 3.5 lakh/acre in development costs before getting the first viable crop. The grape harvest increases from about 1.5 tonnes/acre to 4 TPA by year 5, which is also when one starts getting good grapes.
Then there's the winery where grapes are crushed and the juice vinified into wine. The chemistry of the process is simple: sugar ferments (with yeast as a catalyst) into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The higher the sugar in the juice, the higher the alcohol in the wine — with global warming and high alcohol-tolerant yeast strains, wines of 14%+ are increasingly common. A winery’s capacity is measured by its fermentation tanks: a tonne of grapes gives about 675 litres (900 bottles) of wine, so for a 10-acre vineyard producing 4 MT/acre you would need a winery capacity of about 30 KL (kilo litres). Capital costs for such a winery can vary from Rs 75 lakh to Rs 2 crore, depending upon the building design, the plant and machinery selected (imported or domestic) and non-productive areas (office, tasting room, visitor centre) designed.
One producer which incorporates ‘best practices’ in vineyard and winery is Fratelli Wines whose vineyards and winery were set up five years back on a greenfield site at Akluj, some 150 km from Pune. Its Fratelli Sauvignon Blanc 2011 (Rs 595 in Maharashtra) has a classic grassy and citrus/ melon aroma, with balanced high acidity and a crisp finish that will ensure longevity and gladden the hearts of connoisseurs all over. A distinct improvement on its first vintage, and definitely worth a try.
The writer is a Bangalore-based wine consultant
