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A Christmas toast to the original Bengaluru wine
On Christmas Eve, churches will celebrate Midnight Mass, while the history of wine in India and Grover Zampa's impact on winemaking unfolds.
Tomorrow, on Christmas Eve, the faithful will gather in churches across the city, as they do each year, for Midnight Mass. They will joyfully welcome the Christ Child and receive Communion – consecrated bread and wine – and partake of it, following His injunction to ‘eat my flesh and drink my blood’.
With Communion being such a core Christian ritual, it is no wonder that both yeast- leavened bread (‘double roti’) and wine came to India, officially at least, with the Portuguese, at the fag end of the 15th century.
Unofficially, wine was known in the subcontinent for millennia; it was Persian traders who, in 2000 BCE, first introduced us to their ancient grape-based ambrosia. Two thousand years later, the Indian medical text, Charaka Samhita, listed 84 varieties of madhya, an umbrella term for fermented alcoholic beverages that included sura (grain wines) and draaksha (grape wine). Despite those promising beginnings,however, and notwithstanding a resurgence during the 18th and 19th centuries under the Portuguese and British, wine has had a bit of a rocky journey in India. There were long periods when it disappeared from dinner tables and taverns, either because of prevailing cultural mores (Islamic prohibitions during the Mughal period), governmental and social disapproval of alcohol (the decades before and after Indian independence) or, in the early 20th century, courtesy the phylloxera louse, which decimated the grape crop, and as a consequence, the flourishing wine industry.
Among the varieties of grape that remained unaffected by the deadly phylloxera was one native to our city – the beloved, soft-skinned, sweet-sour Bangalore Blue, which has flourished in the Nandi Valley for over 150 years, seducing us in the signature grape juice that inaugurates an iconic MTR thali or in a fortified local wine, homemade or otherwise. Naturally, the Valley was one of the places that Lahore-born Bombay businessman Kanwal Kishore Grover made a beeline for in 1980, when he became consumed with the idea of producing a world-class wine in India.
In 1945, only 21, English Literature graduate Kanwal Grover founded the Hindustan Export & Import Corporation Pvt Ltd, which imported high-precision industrial machinery for the space and defence sectors, mainly from France. During his visits there over the years, Grover developed a sophisticated palate, both for French cooking and fine wines, but it wasn’t until he was close to 60 that he began to dream seriously of making an Indian wine. Years before, on a visit to Bouzy, a picturesque village in the Champagne region of France, Grover had met and befriended George Vesselle, technical director of vineyards at the legendary GH Mumm champagne house; it was to Vesselle that he now turned for advice.
His interest piqued, Vesselle came to India in 1982 to help Grover identify a site which offered the right climate, rainfall and soil for growing wine grape varietals. The real work – sending soil samples back to France for analysis, and planting no less than 33 different grape varieties to see how they fared – began after Vesselle and Grover had travelled extensively across Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka to shortlist potential sites. In 1986, Vesselle gave his verdict – nine wine grape varieties were best suited for the Indian climate, and the best place to grow them was the Nandi Valley. In 1988, 40 acres of land at the foot of the Nandi Hills were planted with grapes; in 1992, the first vintage was released, and Grover Vineyards (now Grover Zampa) was born, kicking off India’s wine revolution.
33 years later, Grover Zampa continues to be one of the country’s top winemakers, responsible in large part for turning Karnataka into India’s second-largest wine producing state. When you’re tucking into Christmas lunch this year, be sure to raise a glass of Bengaluru’s finest to Kanwal Grover.
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)
