Meanwhile continuing the ongoing coverage of the husband. Some stirring stuff.
http://www.indianwineacademy.com/dm_2_item_2.asp
In this crowd of pretenders, freeloaders and some serious amateurs, Aakash Singh Rathore stands apart. He's different because he has taken the pains to study vine cultivation and wine making, even as he was reading philosophy and the law at the Michigan State University . He assisted his philosophy professor, who taught the world's only course on the philosophy of wine, to update his acclaimed guide to the Rhone Valley , the famous French wine region.
Thereafter, he travelled across Europe , teaching during the day, writing his doctoral dissertation in Belgium , finding a soulmate while studying German at the Goethe Institute in Berlin, quaffing a different wine every evening for ten years, and travelling to wineries in the summer.
Wine, says Rathore, became a part of his growing-up experience after his father, who was a professor of psychoanalysis at Columbia University, bought a winery in Michigan that was disastrously named Strawberry Fields (their wine label had strawberries on it, which was undoubtedly an unwise marketing ploy).
“You can't expect a professor who was then writing the Psychoanalytic Interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita to make wise investment decisions,” says Rathore of the winery that set him on the road to understanding wine.
“Cultural prejudice, and not a geographical problem, has prevented domestic wines from taking off in India . Each time I go to an Indian restaurant and ask for an Indian wine, the waiters look embarrassed, yet they're happy to serve foreign plonk. Our elite must start believing that India, despite being in the torrid zone, can produce great wines,” says the author of The Complete Indian Wine Guide (Roli Books, Rs 295), who sees India emerging as the No. 2 zinfandel destination after California . Rathore's mission was expensive, because he had no writing advance, and at times it was heart-wrenching (like when a young French wine-maker, who was terribly lonely in exile in Narayangaon, begged Rathore in French to find him a girlfriend).
It fuelled their pride in their resurgent wine industry, though not in a hyper-nationalistic and uncritical way, and helped it take on competition from the highly subsidised French and German wines. “Protectionism cannot help an infant industry,” declares Rathore. “Nationalism can. A developing country has a responsibility to itself.”
Guided with this belief, he has been able to discover gems for us – two of them, from Nashik's Sailo Wines, are hilariously named Et Tu Brutus and Mark Antony. Rathore insists that the 30,000 bottles of these two unknown and unheralded wines are sold within two months in Maharashtra , Dubai and Tokyo .
Nationalism may have propelled Rathore, but he did not lose his critical eye. During his peregrinations, he stumbled upon many stories that never get written about the Indian wine industry. Just as the wine-maker associated with a big label was informing him how he was using pinot noir (which was an impossible thing to do in our weather) for his sparkling wine, a shipment of grape concentrate landed from Australia .
When the US-born professor of philosophy and law arrived in India with his eclectic collection of wines – for bread, he's preparing an ambitious inter-disciplinary course on the philosophy of law at Delhi University – and his wife, an Indian diplomat posted at the Pakistan Desk of the Ministry of External Affairs, he already had the evolved palate, cultivated eye and critical nose to be qualified to write India's first wine guide.
