|  Vijay
Kumar Ahuja, a maker of printing materials, said he
was drawn to wine when a friend, who happened to be
sitting across the table this evening, served it at
his daughter's wedding eight years ago. The following
year, Ahuja served wine at his own sons' weddings. More
recently, he took a chance and presented a bottle of
Barolo to a high-value business client. Two days later,
Ahuja got a call from the man's wife, thanking him.
Ahuja took that as a sign of changing times. In certain
circles, he concluded, good wine makes a difference.
Before he would never have considered serving or giving
anything but whiskey.
"What whiskey are you serving, that's what mattered,"
Ahuja recalled.
Said his friend across the table, Rakesh Bagai, a fellow
dealer in printing materials: "If you serve wine
at a business dinner you feel you rate, you're different
from the others. Very few do it."
"A certain set," a woman named Bindu Talwar
piped in from the next chair, as she dug into her lamb.
"The well-heeled, the well-traveled."
She said the cabernet was too warm for her liking.
Room temperature, she said, doesn't mean room temperature
in Delhi in the monsoon season.
Indian wine suffers from the same problem as, say,
and Indian tomatoes. Stores and warehouses are rarely
refrigerated. Entire shelves of wine easily oxidize.
Across the room, Sourish Bhattacharyya, a magazine
writer, recalled when journalist parties in Delhi were
famous for serving Indian-made Old Monk rum.
"Now it's all these lovely wines," he said.
If you talk about Bordeaux they know where it is."
No matter the buzz about wine, Indian taste buds are
notoriously hard to change, and Subhash Arora, the founder
of the wine club, said he had given up trying to convert
the "hard-core whiskey drinker."
"At the end of the day," he said, regretfully,
"they want the 'nasha' " - Hindi for "intoxication."
Read the complete report on the emerging Indian
wine scene by Somini Sengupta who was present at the
107th wine dinner of the Delhi Wine Club on July 29th-
exactly five years after the first club dinner was held,
on:
Complete article at http://www.iht.com
The Article has been published in The New York
Times and the International Heral Tribune inth 12th
August edition.
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