By Hector Choksi
Few years ago if you have asked an urban Indian restaurant diner as to what Sommelier meant, he would have suggested citizens of Somalia. But today the picture is changing and many know that dictionary defines a sommelier as (sawm-uhl-yeah):
French for wine specialist who orders and maintains the wines in the restaurant and has knowledge about wine and food pairings.
Within the last ten years nearly a half a dozen Indian sommeliers have entered the arena and 26-year-old Kavita Faiella is one of the 65 master sommeliers in the world.
A sommelier, a hitherto unknown professional in India, is going to play a huge role in the wine industry in the coming years. He /she typically wear many hats. Wine tasting is one aspect of their job. If in hospitality segment, a sommelier is in charge of training the staff, preparing a wine list for the restaurants, looking into the logistics involved in getting the right wine at the right time to the hotel and interacting with the guests. For example the Taj Intercontinental at Mumbai has a wine list of over 700 labels from all over the world.
Magandeep Singh, India's best-known sommelier is a Page Three face, a suave columnist and a must-have name at all leading hotels. “Certain wines are good in a certain region with a certain cuisine, and it’s my job to help restaurants and hotels realise that,” says Magandeep. Considering that the per capita consumption of wine in India is just four milliliters per year (barely a teaspoon) as compared to 40 litres in France, being a sommelier is still a niche profession. But there's a reason for Magan and his ilk to toast the future. The Indian middle class is taking to wine like never before. The Indian wine industry produced 7 million litres in 2009 and wants to make it 60 million litres in 2020. With 500 wine industry professionals, 5500 registered wine lovers and 12 sommeliers it is trying to nudge out beer and whisky, which are the major liquors for Indians eating out. Yes, the domestic wine industry is growing at an annual rate of 25 per cent, compared to a measly 2-3 per cent at the beginning of this decade. Cheers to that!
A new hospitality service lets you host wine parties at home, with a sommelier in attendance. Ready yourself to be taught the correct etiquette for ordering wine, as in the Michelin star restaurants of Europe. “The server presents the wine bottle and announces it, asks you to verify the temperature, and then proceeds to open the bottle, ideally at the table. He will then offer the cork for sniffing. Not much can be told there, but if the wine has really gone dank, the cork will smell pretty awful. Otherwise you can squeeze the cork and check its elasticity; a ‘spongy’ cork is a healthy sign, a dry brittle cork indicates either bad quality of cork used by the winemaker, or, in the case of an expensive wine, bad storage conditions. However with the new plastic corks and screw cap bottles, don’t expect any of the above. Then, a tasting portion is offered. If one feels that the wine is not fine, the best way to indicate the same is something along the lines of “I think the wine is a little off. What do you think?”
The experimenting of Indian food with wine has brought forth many experts. One connoisseur states “Red wine with spicy chicken is absolutely perfect. Wait a minute…Red wine with white meat? Sacrilegious. Enter wisdom. “It’s the sauce that makes red acceptable.” Previous rigid rules of white wine only with white meats are now gratefully relaxed.”
According to another Indian sommelier Raj Mehta, “Well, that evening, we knocked down two popular notions: that our cuisine is uniformly spicy hot; and that wines (or atleast white wines) don’t sit well with the food we like to eat. The test was to match a Kakori Kebab or a Murgh Kali Mirch (both of which rate very highly on the spicy scale) with an Orvieto or a Chardonmay,”
It was during an Indian sojourn, that Jancis Robinson, among the world’s 200 masters on wine, experimented with, “high spiced local dishes and Indian wine”. Two conclusions came up in her feature on Indian wines in the Financial Times London. “Indians,” she squares up, “tend to be far too damning of their own wines, and there is no reason why wine should not be drunk with the local food served in India…”
And, homebred winemakers and connoisseurs, are all for desi delicacies and wine. Sanjay Menon of Sula Wines has long been trying to break the inhibition of pairing Indian food with wine. But he feels that for more meaningful pairings to happen, top Indian chefs will have to keep wine in their mind whilst creating their preparations.
In Bombay Master Indian ChefJiggs Kalra trained Moet and Chandon champagne expert Benont Gouez, to match his wines with Indian food. “It is a myth that vegetarian food does not go with wine. If you can have crepes Florentine with Sauvignon Blanc why not with palak paneer?” asks Jiggs.
Michael Rolland, world renowned oenologist and wine consultant to nine countries, states “I have had at least 150 great Indian meals and enjoyed wine with each, every time. Your job is not to taste and take notes, but to enjoy…” “And in France,” points out Kapil Grover of the Bangalore-based Grover Vineyards, “At all the Indian restaurants, the French opt for our white wines with lightly done food, and with tandoori masalas they prefer the reds.”
In Indian restaurants outside India, efforts are on to make the curry-diners to take to wine with it. In London this innovation began with Master Chef Rohit Khattar and sommelier Charles Metcalf at their restaurant Chor Bizarre, with a Wine and Dine experiment. Metcalfe concentrated on spices used in a particular preparation and tried to match the flavour with a wine which made one savour the dish better. Like the tamarind and yoghurt in aloo ki tikki make it “high in natural acidity”, which he found goes well with a dry German style Riesling. So he suggested that it should be taken with sips of Riesling. It will also naturally match with the sweetness of the chutneys. Likewise he has matched chicken tikka or pakoras of spinach or aubergine or potato and onion with a Chardonnay. The salmon tikka is “sublime” with a white wine because of black cumin, garlic and lemon used in its preparation. The lamb sheekh kabab, another popular dish, is best with Chablis and so is paneer tikka which vegetarians love. Metcalfe says that a white burgundy ‘provocatively’ matches not with the meat, but the herbs and cinnamon in the kebabs.
He has also recommendations for chicken and mutton/lamb curries. Even for plain and simple dal, the thick black lentil one, which are so popular in north India. The curries go well with a Riesling in the case of chicken and Cabernet wines accompanies well the lamb curry. More recently Chef Vineet Bhatia of Zaika- the first Michelin star-rated Indian restaurant in London- appointed a sommelier to pair a 400 bottle selection to go with his fare
Does champagne go with Indian food? Moet et Chandon aficionados certainly think so. Ideally, one must not have very spicy food or food with very strong taste and flavour with champagne as it kills its inherent bouquet. But most Indian food has as much of spices and flavour as most western ‘junk food’. So, it does not make too much of difference, as only mildly rich food can help carry off a mildly rich drink as champagne.
Maharaja Features
