Wine heiress

Anoothi Vishal meets Gaia Gaja of the Italian superbrand and finds that there's more to her than an unusual name and a wine named after her.

The world of luxury wines is like that of luxury cars in more ways than one. Besides the fact that both are controlled by small, exclusive “clubs” if you like — in a single conversation it would be quite possible to name all the brands dominating either — these are also worlds ruled by men. Powerful men. Which is why Gaia Gaja (the first and the last names are both pronounced the same way and are, in fact, the same... but more on that later) is such an exception.

 

Waiting for Gaia to appear in a private dining room at the Oberoi, New Delhi, I find myself suddenly thinking of Paris Hilton. Excess can be so entertaining and I am, after all, supposed to be meeting a legit European heiress: Gaia is the fifth generation of the Piedmontese winemaking legend. Her father, the charismatic Angelo Gaja has been called one of the “greatest” Italians of all times — obviously presupposing that wine does confer greatness.

And the family surname, also on labels of bottles, is one that evokes instant awe in the world of luxury wine where just about 30 labels count. Gaja, after all, has survived as a family business in the face of relentless buying out of European wine businesses by Japanese tycoons and banks (“I am really afraid of banks,” Gaia tells me in the course of this meeting) and the like in the last few decades.

At 29, Gaia is pretty and fashionable but when I do meet her, she comes across not so much as a label-dripping stereotype but a hard-working executive kept on her toes by impossible schedules, more given to talking about her life in her native village — not quite in the fast lane.

On the table are our glasses of wine (Gaja, what else?): the Rossh-Bass, a Chardonnay named after Gaia’s younger sister, Rossana. As she relaxes with the wine, Gaia unselfconsciously puts the cold glass against her cheek. She’s been on her feet with just three hours of sleep, she tells me — this visit to India, after all, is a working one for the global marketing head for the superbrand (who happens to be also a travel enthusiast).

But the wine has been pressed to her cheek not merely to seek familiar comfort but more as a habit to warm the wine. She instructs me to do similarly. “Let it stand a bit,” she tells me. The Chardonnay has been served very cold indeed and obviously benefits from being thus warmed. “If you have to serve wine that’s not very good, serve it very cold since then you wouldn’t be able to taste anything,” Gaia points out.

Barbaresco, of course, is a wine that you can never dream of meting out such treatment to. But while the world knows it as a classic from the Gaja stable and Gaia herself is very proud of it, Barbaresco is also the family’s village where Gaia grew up. “As a child, I would spend all my time in the winery. There were always so many people around and I loved to help during harvesting,” she says.

And, she says, she was made to taste wine as a very young child. “I liked sweeter drinks then,” she confesses, “Parents shouldn’t be afraid that if their children have a sip of wine at a young age, it’ll corrupt them. Children don’t like wine,” she laughs.

Gaia is obviously being groomed by her father to take over the business eventually. When I ask her about the fact that it is unusual to have a woman in the wine biz, she shows me a picture of her great grandmother Clothide Rey, her ideal. “She came down as a bride to Barbaresco from northern Italy where they knew nothing about wine,” Gaia says giggling at the rather stern portrait. “This was the best smile anyone could get from her.”

In the late 19th century, Rey became the driver of Gaja wine’s growth. As such she inspires Gaia. But there is also another reason for the close affinity. The two women have their names on a single label — Gaia & Rey was named as such by Angelo Gaja in 1979, Gaia’s year of birth. The wine was Italy’s first Chardonnay, and the first Italian white to be aged in oak.

With a wine named after her, the work is obviously more than a business for Gaia. “For me, this is not merely about making more money. It is a matter of family pride,” she says seriously. Which is why despite pressures to increase production, Gaia is quite in agreement with her father’s way of doing things — decreased yield, increased quality.

One reason for Gaja’s exclusivity is, after all, that all their wine comes from family-owned vineyards only and they abstain from production in years of bad vintage; which is why you will not find wine from their stable in years such as 2002, 1992, 1984 and so forth.

In India, of course, we hope to see a little more of the label. This is a relatively new market for the company and a small one yet at just over 5,000 cases a year, but one that is increasingly assuming greater importance. “I would like to, eventually, sell more here, selling a little less in a market like the US,” she says. The US market is the biggest but India is not doing too badly either considering that the company now exports to us almost half of what it does to China, more established and bigger.

Business over, I finally ask Gaia what I have been meaning to all this while: about her rather unusual name. She is well prepared for a question that she has undoubtedly answered all her life. Her first name suggests both happiness and mother earth “appropriate for wine”. Gaja, the family name, also means the same but is spelt differently showing a Spanish root that was retained all through the Mussolini years despite attempts to purge “foreign” nomenclature.

So why did her father name her after the family brand? And Gaia laughs, “He must have been drunk,” she says. “Or”, it could be that “like Indian fathers, Italian fathers are very possessive and he must have thought that if the daughter got married, there was no way she could shake off the family name!” With Gaia being groomed to take over the family business, there is no question of her either forsaking the name or the tradition.