Wine tasting in Cochin | lizcleere.com

Wine is expensive in Kerala, the bottles often tucked away on dusty back shelves of shops and seen only in tourist places. ?What wine do you have?? in restaurants and bars is usually answered with a shrug, or the production of a glass of local brownish port-like syrup. So it?s not every day you get an invitation to a wine tasting in Cochin.

They are ambivalent about their alcohol in Kerala. It is only available to purchase from state-run liquor stores which dole out up to a maximum of two bottles (beer, cheap rum, branded spirits) to each customer. Unless you are prepared to pay London prices in the of bars of top tourist hotels, beer and spirits may be consumed only behind blacked-out windows away from public view. Like the opium dens of history, these unprepossessing ?bars? are often mournful affairs where men (if there is a woman there, she?ll be a tourist) enjoy their drug in darkness. And yet, the large Christian section of society enjoys a drink, and most wealthy homes will have status products like Johnny Walker or Remy Martin on display. But seldom wine.

Then along comes someone like Amit Chavan from the United Spirits group. His remit? To educate India, and particularly the south, about wine. And he knows his stuff. Several years studying in England, at college then in the kitchens of British greats like Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay, have given Amit an evangelical belief in the benefits of wine. By swapping to wine from spirits, and by drinking wine with food, he claims Indians will come to embrace wine in the future. But for now, he is starting small, with just two wines from the Four Seasons stable being promoted in Kerala: Chenin Blanc and Shiraz.

The ?terroir?

He started his presentation with a map of the wine producing nations of the world. There are two clear demarcation areas: between 30? and 50? north Europe dominates the map; between 30? and 50? south New Zealand, South Africa and South America make up the rest of the big groups. The US and India were picked out in the middle section, neither situated where the ideal weather conditions are found. But both these countries contain areas which mimic the more ideal temperate zones. Around Pune, in the state of Maharashtra, where the altitude is 800m above sea-level, winters and summers are mild.

The soil differs from region to region, even within countries, from loose and pebbly to rich and moist. When a vine?s roots have burrowed their way through sand, silt, clay or other minerals, shared space with the organic matter of living and dead organisms and threaded their way through fungi and bacteria, it is unsurprising they will absorb some of the essence of these elements. The flavour and aroma of the grape will also be affected by other factors like sunlight, altitude and rainfall, and this is the ?terroir? which gives each growing district its distinct flavour.

Varieties vs varietals

Jamie tries the Shiraz

Being an enthusiastic, but not particularly well informed consumer of wine, I was surprised to learn that there are 400 grape varieties, give or take, around the world. I had thought there were fewer. In India they work with just twelve. Amit also talked about ?varietals?, which are different to varieties. A ?variety? describes a particular grape; wine made from that particular grape is a varietal (so one ?variety? can make lots of ?varietals?). Quite often different grapes are blended to make one wine (but I don?t know if these have yet another special word, ?varietettes? perhaps?)

Cork and decant or screw-cap and out the bottle?

Amit about corks vs caps (both are good, but if a wine bottle has a cork in it make sure it is stored properly, on its side at an angle, so that the cork is covered in wine ? this reduces the chance of oxidisation). And, do you decant your wine, or is it just the wine snobs who do this? Like most wine-related questions there is no easy answer. As a rule of thumb, if the wine is light, like Merlot, it is best drunk straight from the bottle (perhaps with the intermediary of a glass), whereas a fully, more matured wine does well in a decanter where the sediment can be left behind in the decanting process. For more on decanting, try this piece by the Guardian.

?It smells like wine?

Before we began what we?d all come for, Amit gave us the basic tools for learning to ?taste? wine.

Look
Describe the colour. Deep and plummy or, light and transparent?
Does it have any ?legs?? Place the glass on the table and swirl it. The wine caught on the side will slide down, showing its legs. The faster the legs appear, the lower the viscosity and the ?lighter? the wine.
Tip the glass at an angle and look at the outer rim. If it is colourless, or watery, it is fresh.

Smell
Put your nose into the glass and inhale. Is it fruity, if so what fruits spring to mind? Are there a range of smells?

Taste
Take a sip and hold it in your mouth, swirling it round your tongue so that you can taste for sweetness (tip), bitterness (back), salt and sour flavours. He didn?t mention the more recently recognised flavour of umami. I guess a umami-flavoured wine might not be great?

Then the wine caps were unscrewed (corks are a general no-no in India because too many bottles get destroyed on the shelves).

Chenin Blanc
Ignoring the white wine glasses, the waiter was drawn to the outsize red wine glasses which dominated the table ?(the waiters at the Dream Hotel need some one-to-one tuition from Amit). Jamie managed to switch our glasses just in time, avoiding any spillage and leaving the waiter wondering why we preferred the obviously inferior, small glasses. Later, Amit came to the table. He sighed.

?And that one,? he pointed at a round bowl shaped glass, the kind you see in pubs, ?is for serving orange juice, don?t know why it is even here.?

He told us he had explained to someone which glass was for red and which for white, but it looked like the message hadn?t been decanted.

I regarded the familiar yellowy-gold liquid. Chenin Blanc has never been my favourite: too much going on, too much sweet and salt. A man on the next table, when asked to describe what he smelt, said ?wine?. To me, it smelt like a desert wine, that honey-apricot smell of Muscat de Beaume de Venise, mango, a whole tropical fruit salad of flavours. I liked that smell. The taste was hurricane force, whirling in all directions. It didn?t know if it wanted to be sweet or sour. I didn?t like it. Then something strange happened. I took a mouthful of the tandoori-cooked seerfish the waiter had put onto my side plate. Sublime. The wine tasted different. Suddenly, those over-the-top flavours combined with the spices in the fish and my mouth was in heaven. I tried more wine. I liked it. More food arrived, typical spicy dishes of paneer and chicken this time. The wine tasted great and took on a whole new complexion. Next time I?m in a restaurant eating spicy food, I?ll be asking for some Chenin Blanc, please.

Shiraz
Next up was the second bottle on offer, a Shiraz. I like Shiraz. The waiter re-appeared with more glasses, this time the right shape and size. The colour was deep and purple, there was a watery rim and the swirl produced legs. I smelt? well, wine. I tried again. Then I tasted it. Did I get the pepper, smoke and leather, spices, raspberries and plum it claimed was there? Probably, but by now I was rinsing and gargling with it and no longer cared.

And what about my original question? Petite Sirah is a red herring, a different variety to Shiraz and Syrah.?The Europeans call it Syrah, everyone else calls it Shiraz. They may be made from the same grape, but I have learnt that a Syrah grown on the plains of France will have a different flavour to a Shiraz from Oz. It?s all to do with the ?terroir?, you see?

Source: http://www.lizcleere.com/2012/12/a-syrah-is-just-a-shiraz-except-when-its-a-petite-sirah/

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