 "Kapil Grover & Karishma Grover")
As I arrive at Kapil Grover's apartment in Malabar Hill, Grover informs me that a minority investor in his wine company, Grover Zampa, who is visiting from Singapore, is dropping by. Grover's daughter, Karishma, who joined the company after a degree in viticulture from the University of California at Davis, hands me a glass of Viognier as I sit down. The investor and Karishma will be doing a tasting of a new Shiraz before lunch. I am on holiday, so I don't have to worry about going back to work, but I am concerned that an interview with three people will spiral out of control.
The other guest, Ravi Viswanathan, runs a private equity fund in Singapore and is the largest private investor in wine in India; he also owns a large stake in Sula Vineyards. The soft-spoken Viswanathan hardly speaks at all for the first half of lunch.
The real problem turns out to be that Grover, 58, is one of those born raconteurs who races from one story to the next at dizzying speed. The conversation jumps from an Austrian, a prospective investor, who travels so much he has no home at all to a circuitous story about the renowned international wine consultant, Michel Rolland, who has worked with the company for two decades. Rolland was responsible for the early recognition of the company's La Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz blend, which was named the Best New World wine by the leading trade publication, Decanter, back in 2005. "He's very charming," Grover says of Rolland. "He has this fabulous party during Vinexpo (organised by the Bordeaux commerce association)." At one of Rolland's parties, Grover recounts, he was introduced to a woman vineyard owner who "met her husband when she popped out of his 50th birthday cake." The woman told him she rode her horse every day to inspect her grapevines, plant by plant. "I said, 'Madam, you have given me the best tip of my life.'"
On his return to India, Grover spoke to the supervisor on his vineyards. "Manjunath, you can ride a donkey but you must visit every plant." He is joking, of course, as Grover's vineyards are large. "We have 400 acres around Bangalore."
Grover is India's oldest wine company but merged with Vallee de Vin a couple of years ago to form a stronger entity, Grover Zampa. Producing 100,000 cases of wine a year, it is still much smaller than Sula, which produces 650,000 cases. A Frenchman from Rolland's team, Mathias Pellisard, who works six months a year in India with Grover, along with Sumedh Singh Mandla, CEO of the company, and Karishma have ramped up quality and the results are showing.
The oddities of alcohol retailing in India and high excise and complex labelling requirements coupled with the difficulties of transporting wine in the summer months make the business of selling wine difficult. "Some states require labels saying 'Not for sale in Punjab' or Haryana, another requires a red line in the label," says Grover, grimacing. Karishma says the company now has more than 200 labels for just 12 varieties of wine.
Then there is the snobbish Indian attitude towards local wine. It is dismissed by people even as they drink cheap European or Chilean wines instead that would cost just a few euros overseas but have been heftily marked up by the retailer or restaurant owner, abetted by India's prohibitive duties. Inevitably, Grover warms to this theme of Indian wines being far better than their reputation.
It is time for a tasting of the Shiraz that has been barrel fermented in old barrels, explains Karishma. Viswanathan, who once bought a bottle of champagne that had been recovered from a shipwreck and was more than 150 years old for euro 30,000 as an anniversary gift, has reserved two barrels of the new Shiraz. "We really liked the result," Karishma says. I am anything but a wine expert but the Shiraz wins me over with its mature taste for a New World wine. Will they sell it? "We don't know," says Karishma. In 2008, she joined the company on her way from university in California to a holiday in that heaven for wine producers, New Zealand. It was supposed to be an internship, but "I haven't stopped working since," the 30-year-old says with a laugh.
As we go into the dining room for lunch, Grover decides I should take in the view from the balcony first. There is a running track and tennis court in a beautifully maintained public park below and beyond that the Arabian Sea. I ask Viswanathan, who grew up in France, why Indian wine suffers from a stigma in Delhi and Mumbai. He says he sees the same phenomenon at the high-end restaurant he owns in Singapore where Western expats happily quaff wines from India. "Indians are much more complicated," says Viswanathan who is organising the ultimate test - a blind tasting in January. "I am sure Indian wines will do very well," he says.
Lunch consists of a bhuna mutton that is a family recipe Grover's mother had to bribe her in-laws' cook for, local prawns done Maharashtrian style and crisp bhindi accompanied by Bombay pao. I try to keep up with Grover's Rushdie-esque ability to tell connected and utterly unconnected stories. This time we bounce from how Vijay Amritraj came to endorse the company's wines to Grover's schooldays in Rajasthan. Unusually, the idea came from Amritraj himself, who suggested to Grover that he could be a brand ambassador. "I said, 'We aren't Rolex or Mastercard.'" Vijay's endorsement fee "is linked to sales, (so this) is very sweet of him."
I am a tennis fanatic, I say, but I wouldn't buy wine just because Amritraj endorsed it. The launch of the Vijay Amritraj collection during Wimbledon this summer has convinced Grover otherwise; he believes Amritraj still has a fan following in the US, the UK and Singapore. The conversation veers off to a boozy evening with the Bangalore Wine Club that ended, if I got this right, with everyone singing. Grover was about to sing Frank Sinatra's "My Way" but realised he had forgotten the words. "And, you can't sing," interjects Karishma.
They are both running late for a meeting but Grover is on a roll. Amritraj had told Grover about visiting Las Vegas with Sinatra. When Amritraj lost $168 at the tables, the money was returned to him. "Mr Sinatra never loses in Las Vegas," he was told. I cynically wonder whether this story finally confirms the persistent rumours that the late Sinatra had connections to the Mafia.
But, there is more to come. The elderly Sinatra went on stage and actually forgot the words to his personal anthem; the adoring Vegas crowd sang "My Way" back to him. I am not sure what to believe by this point, but the story made me smile for days afterward.
