Dr Vino's wine blog

George Bush will take a 13 hour plane trip to New Delhi today to spend three days in the world’s largest democracy. If the Teetotaler-in-Chief stopped to look at the Indian wine industry, what would he find?

Most importantly, that the industry has friends in high places. The Minister of Agriculture, Sharad Pawar (photo right), is a grape grower who even has a the Sharad seedless grape named after him. He is a champion of the view that wine is a drink of moderation and recently tried to get wine classified as food and be as easy to sell as soft drinks. His efforts were rebuffed. However, his home state of Maharashtra has doubled tariffs on imported wine (states with the ability to add tariffs!), making local grape sources more attractive and more difficult for wineries to pass off Chilean wine as their own.

Viv Menon recently won a Geoffrey Roberts Award to travel to India to examine the wine industry. In his comments on jancisrobinson.com, Menon calls Grover‘s wines “quite incredible.” Michel Rolland is a consultant. Indage has opened a wine bar on the premises with no beer or spirits available and she is surprised to find some people there have traveled over an hour for a glass of wine. He describes Sula as “the slickest of all in terms of marketing” and that they have good viticultural practices to boot. The most promising sign for consumers he writes is that the Oberoi hotel in New Delhi now has an enoteca.

While wine gets frequent mention in the Bible promoters of wine in India can find support even in the Bhagwat Gita: “Yea! those who learn The threefold Vedas, who drink the Soma-wine, Purge sins, pay sacrifice — from Me they earn Passage to Swarga.”

tags: wine | India | Indian wine | Sharad Pawar

The influence of the vineyard’s growing climate, a perennial issue in winemaking, has become a hot topic recently. In July, winemakers and association leaders from both sides of the Atlantic met in Napa to sign the “Napa declaration” on protecting place names. Next March, the first ever conference on terroir will occur at UC Davis.

Between now and the UC Davis conference, I will run a periodic series of contributions on the subject of terroir. First up is importer Terry Theise. Rather than simply printing a listing of his excellent wines imported from Germany and Austria and micro-champagnes from France, Theise publishes a thick catalogue including several essays. By special arrangement, I reproduce here his essay on a sense of place from his 2005 Austrian catalogue. His web site sums up his world view: “…[Theise] has no reservations about conveying his thoughts and feelings on wine, life, sex, philosophy and general cosmology. In Terry’s world, it’s all inter-related.”

Why does place-specificity matter?

By Terry Theise

Once upon a time I sat on a panel discussing spirit-of-place, and a Native American woman to my left said something that lodged on my heart and has not moved since.

The salmon do not only return to the stream, she said, in order to spawn; they also return in order to respond to the prayers and hopes of the people who love them.

I thought that remark was innocuous enough, so I was taken aback when someone responded it was “pretentious New Age bullshit” (or words to that effect). I recognize there are sensibilities other than mine, more linear, more prosaic. Yet with all respect, most thoughts along the “mystical” continuum are reducible to linear equations if one wishes to frame them thus. Continue…

It was 25 degrees (-6C) in Mendoza on the morning that I reached Susana Balbo by phone last week. Nestled in the foothills of the Andes, the vineyard was dotted with workers pruning the vines down to stumps she said. But the winery itself was in its annual hibernation as the grapes were harvested two months ago and the wines were quietly fermenting.

Although she and her husband, Pedro Marchevsky, started making their own wines in 1999, it wasn’t until 2001 that their striking winery, Dominio del Plata, which Susana designed, opened for making her three lines of wines. The wines include Malbec, Argentina’s signature grape, as well as more unusual offerings including Syrah-Bonarda, a rosé from Malbec, and the white Torrontés. They range from about $10 to $35 retail in the US and can be found in 17 countries.

Export markets have been essential for Susana since the concept stage of the winery. Her first winery, a short-lived venture in the early nineties, targeted the large domestic market in Argentina. Since then, exporting has become not only easier but essential. For example, when the Argentine peso collapsed in 2002 losing 75 percent of its value against the dollar, wineries with strong exports profiles actually saw their sales rise in peso terms (see my backgrounder).

A graduate in enology in 1981, Susana honed her winemaking skills during nine years in the Cafayate province. She returned to Mendoza in 1990 and refined her export skills as export manager during the mid-to-late nineties at Catena, one of the locomotives of the Argentine wine industry. She also designed the new Catena winery, a useful base for later designing her own. And she also met her husband there, since Pedro was the long-time vineyard manager at Catena, and the two were married in 1995. But they both left Catena to pursue their own winery together.

Susana is careful to draw on her experience at Catena but not the contacts that she made there. Her American exporter, Vine Connections, is a different importer than Catena’s American importer, an important point for Susana. She also maintains different importers in Europe than Catena. “All professionals want their own boats, to be their own captain,” she says.
The popularity of the wines abroad is having ramifications at home. In one way, Susana is starting to see more demand from the domestic market. As Argentines travel abroad again now that the economy is on a firmer footing, they are seeing her wines overseas and then come home and look for them. Further, foreign consumers are increasingly traveling to Argentina and the winery gets many calls for visits, but can hardly accommodate any of them. That’s something that Susana would like to work on more in the next year.

She also aims to do more experimentation in the vineyard. The 25 acres of vines are managed according to sustainable agriculture practices. But the real wild card in grape growing in Mendoza is the risk of hail storms that can erupt without warning just before harvest time, pound the plump grapes, and leave the vineyard owner with no crop. Thus Susana is trying strategic placements of nets of various colors and densities.

The winery is a family affair with Susana making the wines, while Pedro and his son manage the vineyards. Pedro’s daughter-in-law is an artist and designs all the labels. Susana’s son is currently a student at the University of California at Davis, the premier school for winemaking and viticulture in the US. One of the wines is called “Crios,” which means offspring and the label depicts two small hands in a big one symbolizing Susana and her two (now grown) children.

Susana is headed to Davis to visit her son and then take some time relaxing on the beach in northern Brazil. We’ll check in with her American importer next month. Over the coming year, I’ll talk with Susana more about the making and selling of wine and hopefully meet up with her in Argentina or America to see her doing one of the two.

www.dominiodelplata.com.ar

Wow, the idea of an endless harvest would really revolutionize the wine industry. Now to just try something besides Muscat! Story from India news

The area [Cumbum] is a major centre for grapes production with 4000 small farmers producing over 90,000 tonnes of Muscat grapes, locally known as “paneer dhrakshai”, and about 10,000 tonnes of Thomson seedless grapes.

The unique feature of the grapes grown here is that they are harvested throughout the year, as compared to other areas where the grapes growing season ends with the summers.

The numbers of those preferring “ABC” (Anything But Chardonnay) white wine have been rising. As a result some American wineries have thankfully toned down the oak influence. The fewer “Home Depot” wines out there, in my view, the better (not that Home Depot would ever sell a wood as good as oak but you catch my drift.)

As evidence of the trend, an American manufacturer oak barrels used in wine production is selling part of their US holdings to focus on French oak production. Given that those will cost more to sell in the US, this is a bold move from a business perspective.

Wine enthusiasts can rejoice since French oak provides a more subtle oak influence. That’s good news for those who enjoy a glass of wine that doesn’t overwhelm the food.