Get Wine Wise

Alesso Secci the co-founder of Fratelli wines gives an insight into wines, Indian grapes and vineries for the wine lovers, to learn and appreciate the fine art of wine drinking.

For a lay man how would you present the process of making a wine?
Basically to make wine is to grow grapes. You have to find the right land and soil with a suitable climate to grow the grapes. We have created our own unique wine region in India at Akluj. Most of the wine producers in Maharashtra are in Nasik. We are instead 300kms south-east of Mumbai on the Deccan Plateau. This is a totally different climate and soil condition.

Nasik is organic soil while Akluj is a mineral rich soil. This distinct soil composition gives the same grape grown in the two regions different tastes. Secondly, there are forces of nature. Men, knowledge and technology can only help to enhance the grapes natural taste. Wine grapes are the most delicate of all the agricultural products.

You have to fight against diseases, pests, draught and many different aspects that vary and influence the quality of grapes and wine for the better or worse With wines there is a vintage i.e. the year in which the grapes were harvested and the manufacturing date when the wine was bottled. If you consider whiskey, then it has 8 or 12 years etc associated with it, which refers to the number of years it was in caskets to get aged. Whiskey is distillation of cereals while wine is made from grapes.

Is the aging process for wine same from that of Whiskey?
The aging process in whiskey is different from that of wine. The alcohol when it is made is completely transparent. The colour that we see in whiskey is acquired from the smoked barrel in which they are aged. That is the reason we see different shades of brown, the longer a whiskey stays in the barrel the darker it gets.

Wine, in particular, red wine gets better when aged but it has to be made purposefully with the intent to age it. Different techniques are employed for a wine that is to be aged than ones that don’t need to be aged. A wine needs to be stronger if it is to be aged - as - over the period of aging the wine mellows down.

So wine isn’t always aged?
Aging is only limited to Red wine, not for white wine. In a country like India, which is quite young to wine drinking where the weather is relatively hot and the food is spicy, it is preferable to have wine that is easy to drink and for immediate consumption. A first wine drinker wouldn’t like to a very complicated strong red wine. Instead a lighter white wine is easier to appreciate.

What are the different types of wines?
Red wine is the predominant one. In India wine consumption is split into 60-40 red to white wine. For a formal dinner you begin with a sparkling wine which is white then you move to a chardonnay and then you move to the red. In the intermediate you can do a Rosé.

This is if you pour wine at a dinner. If you are by yourself, you can have anything you like. White wine is generally linked with your mood, or weather or the kind of food you have. Peak season for sparkling wine is summer while white wine is for winter.

Is there a particular wine pairing with the course of the meal?
Now with the wine in a glass service spreading across the world, one can pair different wines with different courses in the meal. If there are enough people you could do different bottles of wine.

20 years ago there was rigidity in the pairings of white or red. There was no pairing of red wine with fish. Now a days this rigidity is gone. In general heavy red wines don’t go well with fish but some elegant, mellow, light red wines go very well with salmon and prawns.

By Shirish Amirineni