Garage wine

Just what is a “boutique winery”? The label evolved from the term “les garagiste” — literally “the garage (wine makers)”. It was coined in the 1970s by Belgians Marcel and Gerard Thienpont, who purchased land in Bordeaux and established Chateau Le Pin — their wines are now selling at anything between $200 and $2,500 per bottle!

The movement gathered pace in Bordeaux and the Napa Valley in the 1990s: a small (around 60,000 bottles) winery making very high-quality wines, catering to a limited clientele, by winemakers who often disregard the rules set for the terroir. That American wine critic Robert Parker frequently gave top marks (95-100 points) to wines from such wineries only adds to their reputation and prices.

There’s this vivid image in my mind following a recent visit to the Priorat wine region of southern Spain: a young chap (not more than 27 or 28 years old), making only 20,000 bottles of high-quality wines in true artesian fashion. The entire winery is on the ground floor of this old building in the small village of Porerra, near Barcelona — an area of not more than 2,000 sq ft. He’s personally involved in every step of the wine making, from harvesting the grapes to making the wine to marketing the stuff. The wines (only reds) are intense and complex — reflecting, perhaps, the terroir where the grapes have been grown, and also the personality of the winemaker.

Seems an ideal model for India — I know of several people owning 10 or 20 acres who would love to start a boutique winery. Two factors are required to stimulate the emergence of such wineries:

Wine entrepreneurs should be hands-on people, with both the capital to invest as well as the know-how to grow good grapes and/or make really good wine. Of course, if you are outsourcing the grapes, then one has to work with the grape farmers to get the very best quality possible — which will not happen in a day, or even a year.

Wine marketing needs to become simpler and cheaper. Consumers for top-end wines are scattered in the metros and state capitals, but reaching them is impossibly costly.

Since alcoholic beverages are a state subject, each state has its own rules and regulations, and duties and taxes — it’s like operating in 28 different countries, and it’s easier to export than market wines within the country.

There’s hope, though: a whole new generation of Indians is interning with wineries as far-flung as New Zealand and California, and surely in five or 10 years’ time some will come home to start making wine. Perhaps by then new terroirs would have been discovered or developed (why not the Kullu valley, or the highlands of Kerala?). And perhaps by then the National Grape Board would have raised some of the inter-state barriers to wine marketing.

We’ll drink to that day. Cheers!

(al.chandra@gmail.com)