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Journalism of Courage
Rajeev Samant developed a taste for wine during his years in California,first as a Stanford student and then as an engineer at Oracle in Silicon Valley. So when he returned to his familys picturesque farm northeast of Mumbai,he decided to try growing table grapes. The grapevines flourished. Samant brought in some ringers from Napa and imported Indias first sauvignon blanc and zinfandel grapes,and Sula Vineyards was born. He corked his first bottle in 2000. Now he produces 18 different varieties.
Samant is just the kind of upstart winemaker the old guard from Bordeaux and St-Émilion loves to hate. Maurice Large,former president of the Beaujolais producers association,once denounced people like him as philistines with a taste for alcoholic fruit drink.
Its not hard to imagine what the old-time winemakers in France and Italy must think. As they see it,the old New World producersAustralia,the United States,South America,and South Africahave been hard enough to stomach. Thanks to them,European vineyards now account for less than half the worlds grape production. But India? Morocco? Bali? Its just too much for the traditionalists. Très mal,sniffs Large,who accuses the New World dilettantes of treating wine like Coca-Cola.
The elite winemakers have always pinned their high-quality product on heritage,the tradition of growing,culling,and fermenting grapes,handed down from generation to generation. They also like to boast of terroirliterally,the land,but which has come to mean a mystical combination of soil,sun,weather,cultural identity,and legacyand their prices.
Lately,scientists have learned that the land itself is only part of the riddle of producing quality wines. According to economists Victor Ginsburgh and Olivier Gergaud,who compared data across 100 vineyards,natural endowments are overrated. What produces the finest wines are what winemakers put into it. Technology is the new terroir.
Rosemount,of Australia,is tinkering with sugar levels to ensure that its wines do not vary from harvest to harvest. Chilean vineyards are fine-tuning their harvests with portable spectrometry,using a kind of ray gun that zaps vineyards with near-infrared beams to reveal the exact state of the grapes on the vine instead of hauling them into the laboratory.
Indeed,in the past decade or so,the emerging wine industry has gone from a joke to a niche market to a global industry. Tourists can visit wineries from Patagonia to Prague. And with global warming threatening to shift the range of grape growing,its impossible to predict where the next hot spot will be. Consider São Joaquim,which for years has been Brazils monument to winter. Now São Joaquim is banking on wine. Two major vineyards have opened recently,inspired by the rich soil and crisp mountain air and its as good a place as any to sit with a glass of New World cuvée and savour the changing geography of wine.
