It's new wine in a new bottle. Tropical Indian fruits such as the jamun, pomegranate and karonda have rarely gone beyond the dining table or pickle jars but now, these could be the toast for wine connoisseurs across the world. A Pune-based brewery is experimenting with wild fruits to produce desi wines that could be a curious export in the world market.These tropical fruits have been avoided so far due to their almost negligible shelf life; almost 80 per cent of their yield goes untapped. Swirl Winerieya hopes to cash in on this exotic factor. The firm has been researching on the fruits for the past three years and has now commercially produced 3,000 litres of wild fruit wines from its winery at Narhe near Pune.“We realised that people abroad are attracted to tropical fruits and find them exotic due to their distinctive taste,” says Swirl Winerieya CEO Sachiien Patil. “At the same time, we have been ignoring fruit like jamun and karonda as they have a shelf life of just one day and are not economically attractive to farmers. So, we decided to utilise these fruits to create something of value that can find a bigger market." As part of the research, Patil went about identifying different areas in Maharashtra that were ideal producers of “crushing-grade” fruit, in terms of taste and colour. Through local vendors, he was able to procure 5,000 kilos of jamun, 200 kilos of karonda and 500 kilos of pomegranate. “We identified belts along the Konkan for jamun and took along a refrigerated van that promptly transported the fresh harvest. But processing fruits like jamun was difficult as they have low juice content and big seeds, and hence, have to be manually crushed,” he says. Which is why, at prices ranging from Rs 200 to 500 a bottle, these wines are costlier than local grape makes.Taste apart, what’s making these wines tick is their medicinal properties. Since the fruits are harvested from naturally growing trees that are free of pesticides and insecticides, the wines are completely organic. Another company, Bangalore-based Advaith Bio-tech, has also launched its range of “bio-liquors” that are claimed to be healthier as they incorporate ayurvedic extracts made from aloe vera and ashwagandha among others.“We have already received an Indian patent for the products and have so far exported 10,000 boxes to the US, with plans to export to the UAE soon,” said a company official.The Indian Council of Agricultural Research has also taken up a project which envisages the critical evaluation of such fruits and fine tuning of their propagation techniques.
