Jodhpur is an unlikely venue for wine tasting: a quaint 450-year old city tucked away in western Rajasthan, the city is a delightful (if littered) throwback to the past, dominated as it is by the brooding presence of Mehrangarh Fort and the scalloped ice-cream cake spread of the Umaid Bhavan Palace.
Yet wines are reaching even this corner of India. I’m told that Jaipur gets the bulk (60 per cent) of tourist traffic into Rajasthan, followed by Udaipur (30 per cent), leaving precious little for Jodhpur. Still, the old city is classic Indyaa, complete with winding gullies, wandering cows, palaces & havelies galore, and colourful street markets — a delight when the weather is good (now only three months in the year), a trial the rest of the time.
I was lucky enough to connect with the Mayo network there — in Rajasthan, every second owner of a heritage hotel or Haveli is from that institution. The guys I met were hospitable, smart, well-travelled, and hard-drinking — not surprisingly, a goodly number of them knew their Sauvignons from their Semillons. I think the lead provided by HH Jodhpur Gaj Singh (affectionately called ‘Bapji’) has played no small part in sculpting this profile — part of the Umaid Bhavan has been a Taj Palace Hotel for many years, and he himself as chairman of the Heritage Hotels Association has helped catalyse the transformation of many old properties.
One such gem is the Raas Haveli, a 200-year-old property in the heart of the old city, formerly dilapidated, now converted into a world-class boutique hotel by owners Nikhilesh and Dushyant Singh. They were expanding their beverage portfolio to include imported wines, I had a bagful of wines, and a private party provided the perfect opportunity to taste the latter.
‘Tasting’ is, per se, a misnomer: certainly, nobody did any spitting, and the eight bottles on hand disappeared early in the evening — after which the party carried on till the wee hours of the next morning. What was interesting was that about a quarter of the men (and all the ladies) drank wine out of choice — that’s a huge change from just a few years back, when in such a setting spirits (Ok, Scotch) were the drink of choice, and of course no wines were available.
Now that the ‘recession has receded’, the hospitality industry in Rajasthan is expecting a good ‘season’, and people are stocking up on whatever may help provide a better experience to their guests — including wines, both domestic and imported. Rajasthan is an interesting market for wines, not the least because there’s a latent demand here that could well explode if a variety of decent wines were available locally.
Wines I’ve been drinking: Of the wines tasted in Jodhpur, two stand out: the Saint Clair Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2008 from New Zealand, a 91-point wine with balanced crispness and an aroma of guavas and green fruits; and the Brancaia Tre Rosso Toscano 2006, an 89-point ‘baby super Tuscan’ that opened up so amazingly after 24 hours that it was drinking as well as its bigger (and much more expensive) brothers.
I’m hoping that both are picked up by some of the properties in Jodhpur, so the next time you visit…
Khamagani, Hukum.
Alok Chandra is a Bangalore-based wine consultant
