 The primary objective of the Delhi Wine Club since its inception has been to promote wine culture in India because of our passion for wine. We also visualized that benefit of club activities whether through wine dinners, tastings or training programmes might not reach people at large. Wine education is an integral and ongoing part of motivating more and more people to drink wine.
We realised that in this age of the Net, the best way to reach the GenNext was to establish an India-centric webzine through the club. This website provides a platform to disseminate useful information for wine lovers, directed at India. We are already well into fourth year of the first wine-specific webzine in India and are regularly adding more content within our financial constraint
Encouraging wine education at the grass-root level has been another initiative and a dream I had while founding the club. Students of hotel management institutes must have a spark in them for wine to help take wine drinking forward. Wine culture has taken more than a couple of strides since we formed the club. Therefore, it was a moment of pride and joy when our associate, Indian Wine Academy organised the first-ever Junior Wine Guru Contest in India at the Banarsidas Chandiwala Institute for Hotel Management and Catering Technology, Delhi where thirty five hotel management institutes within India competed aggressively for various culinary awards.
Jacob's Creek sponsored the Contest in which 22 students from all over India took part. It threw many surprises and insights into the present wine education level at such institutes, which today are the primary wine educators. The contest was won by Sumit Bahri, a student from Durgapur where wine is hardly available (incidentally, due to legal restrictions wine tasting could not be a part of the contest, though serving it certainly was). In fact none of the top contenders was from Delhi. Does it mean that smaller town students are more serious about studying wines?
Not necessarily. Many institutes don't teach wine as a serious subject or treat it only as a subject to whisk by. A lot needs to be done in these institutes if we want to see wine service keep up with the anticipated increase in consumption in the next few years.
Pronunciation of grape varietals and regions from France, Italy, Spain and Germany was found to be a weak area like anywhere else. What has pronunciation got to do with enjoying wines, you might ask? At least as much as the fact that one of the variables that helps us enjoy wine is when we know something about the grapes, the region, the chateau or the tasting cellar in which we may have tasted the wine earlier. Many wineries are thriving on agro-tourism business. Ask someone who has been to Grover's vineyards in Bangalore or has enjoyed Sula in their new modern Tasting Room at their vineyard in Nashik and he or she will proclaim them to be the best Indian wine respectively.
If you have ordered any of these European wines in a restaurant chances are that the wrong pronunciation would have been very-off-putting for someone. I do know the wine stewards (sommeliers) do snigger when they hear wrong pronunciations. In fact, I am often told by my wine drinking friends in the Americas that they avoid ordering wines which have ‘funny' pronunciations and stick to something easy to pronounce, like ‘Kendall-Jackson', Fetzer or Woodbridge fom Mondavi. When a waiter offers you a ‘mer-lot ‘ instead of a ‘mur-low' or the best wine they have is a ‘bore-dox', ‘chha-bliss', ‘Rio-jja' or a ‘chi-yeah-Nti' instead of a ‘kee-yanti' it certainly leaves a poor ‘before-taste' in you mouth and you wonder if they are storing their wines properly or if the wine would be corked or if the restaurant is serious about its wines..
It will be well worth your time to get the basic pronunciation right. The students and others in food and wine service industry certainly need to have a working knowledge. There are many sites on the web that have put up pronunciation. While we are working on the home-grown version, you may want to check out www.wine.about.com or directly by clicking
http://wine.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.stratsplace.com/winepronon%5Fdict.html&nl=1
For the list of winners and the photo gallery visit http://www.indianwineacademy.com/Honours_List.asp
Subhash Arora |
