Curries, chutneys, lentils, rice: these foods spring to mind at the thought of India. But Indian wine seems an oxymoron, like Chinese lasagna or German teriyaki.
Indians traditionally favor whiskey and beer, sipping barely a teaspoon of wine per capita per year. A massive market of 800 million potential wine drinkers has long gone untapped.
That is beginning to change, however, in part through the efforts of Rajeev Samant, a Stanford-trained engineer who aims to become to India what Robert Mondavi, ’36, was to California—a vintner, indeed, but also a mentor and industry advocate. Samant’s whites, rosés and now reds, produced not far from his native Mumbai (Bombay), are making a splash among the hip urban crowds of the subcontinent and drawing praise in other countries as well. With each successive year, sales have doubled, says Samant, ’89, MS ’90. His Sula Vineyards, now preparing for its sixth vintage, expects to sell more than 40,000 cases and to turn a profit for the second season in a row.
“Sula Vineyards is proving that success can be achieved against even the heftiest of odds.... [Samant] has created some of India’s first truly international-class wines,” said Wine Spectator two years ago in its first-ever feature on an Indian winery.
Indians are becoming curious about wine as millions of affluent young people return from working or studying overseas, bringing Western tastes with them. “Wine is the new buzzword of high society,” India’s newsmagazine The Week reported last January in a story titled “Gourmet’s Goblet.” Samant has accelerated the trend by getting his wines into fashionable restaurants and hotel bars, and has helped mitigate the snob factor by pricing them at under $15 a bottle. He has educated staff on how to serve various wines, organized wine-oriented happy hours for young professionals, and demystified it all on a website (sulawines.com) covering basics like “How do I open a bottle of wine?”
Samant, who hardly knew a corkscrew from a church key when he left Mumbai for the Farm, developed his appreciation for wine while at Stanford. But the economics major with a master’s in industrial engineering had no plan to settle in the countryside of his homeland and grow grapes. He followed the lure of Silicon Valley in the early 1990s, landing a job as one of Oracle’s youngest financial managers, then quickly became restless and left to travel through Mexico and Thailand. In 1992, Samant’s restlessness coincided with India’s decision to ease trade barriers with the rest of the world. “I was gripped by the excitement of those changes and wanted to go back to my country to help create job opportunities there,” he says.
One day in mid-1993, Samant’s father took him on a tour of the family’s ancestral lands near the town of Nasik, 120 miles northeast of Mumbai. The elder Samant planned to sell the 30-acre property. “It was so beautiful, with gently rolling hills, a large lake and rich clay soil,” Samant recalls. “I told him, ‘Wait—don’t sell it. I’d like to do something there.’ ”
Over the next four years, Samant became something of a gentleman farmer, cultivating first mangoes and Thompson seedless grapes, long grown in the region for export. Then the idea came to him: if table grapes would grow there, why not grapes for fine wine?
Samant did some research and confirmed that the hot, dry days and cold nights of fall and winter in Nasik (altitude 2,000 feet) resembled the summer growing conditions of California’s Sonoma Valley. He decided the time and conditions were right to create not only a vineyard but also a winery—something few Indians had done before him.
But Samant knew nothing about the wine business. So he flew back to Northern California, looking to team up with an expert. Through a string of connections, he was introduced to Kerry Damskey, a Sonoma-based consultant who had overseen winery startups and designed wine-production systems for 25 years. Damskey recalls his initial skepticism: “When the idea of producing wine in India was first proposed to me, I thought, ‘Huh?’” He changed his mind, however, when he visited Nasik and saw the potential of the region.
Damskey and Samant decided to produce India’s first homegrown sauvignon blancs and chenin blancs—fresh, fruity and slightly spicy whites that would complement Indian food—and to cultivate the grapes from October through January. Summer is the grape-growing season in most parts of the world, “but our summer is monsoon season,” explains Samant. “In the late fall and winter, the climate becomes quite Mediterranean. We knew this would yield grapes that would produce the flavor of wine typical of Northern California, rather than the more tropical-fruit flavors that you would expect from an area like ours.”
Samant hired one of Mumbai’s premier architects to build the winery on the premises. The result, according to the Wine Spectator, is “a showcase facility that can hold its own aesthetically and viticulturally with those of California.” And he was determined to produce a world-class product, whether or not the Indian palate was ready to discern the difference. “Raj knew that for the company to really make a name for itself [in India], its wines had to be accepted internationally,” says Damskey. “It was a wise strategy.”
Today, Sula can barely keep up with the demand for its three main wines: the sauvignon blanc (“floral, crisp and dry with a hint of green peppers and a touch of spice at the finish,” according to indianwine.com), chenin blanc (“light, fresh and fruity”) and champagne-style brut (“a creamy yet light nectar that goes down like a dream”). More recently, it has developed a white zinfandel and a cabernet sauvignon.
Overall, India’s wine consumption is still minuscule at about 400,000 cases annually (roughly the output of a medium-sized California winery), but analysts report a strong growth rate of about 25 percent a year. And although drinking wine with meals has not yet caught on among India’s middle class, it has become de rigueur among the urban rich. Most fancy restaurants in India now carry Sula wines. “Even if we reached only the most wealthy 1 percent of the Indian population, that would still be 10 million people,” observes Samant, who has been busy promoting winery tours and tastings in India and beyond. The day after his interview with STANFORD, he was set to fly to Paris for a tasting of Sula wines at Lavinia, the city’s premier wine store, which now carries the label.
Indeed, the fledgling winemaker has formed a wine board to encourage other Indians to make quality wine and display their prowess to the rest of the world. “Raj has taken a mentoring position in India,” says Damskey, “much as Robert Mondavi did in the California wine industry.” Explains Samant, “We’re going to need a group of good producers if India is going to be a contender in the world market. We have to do it together.”
Samant has done more than create a pioneering winery; he has helped to cultivate a new industry in his country. There were only perhaps three wineries in India before he got started, none of which made locally grown New World wines. Now there are at least 10, and Samant thinks 30 or more will spring up in the next two years. “We’ve shown the way,” he says.
Marguerite Rigoglioso is a writer in Northern California.
