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India: wine

Winemaker to the maharajas

Richard Orange

Wednesday, 5th December 2007

Richard Orange meets Rajeev Samant, an entrepreneur whose products please the palates of new-rich India

It’s not often your host has passed up dinner with Mick Jagger and the Maharaja of Jodhpur to take you to his country house for the weekend. But that’s what Rajeev Samant, the pioneer of India’s wine craze, lets slip as we begin the long drive north from Mumbai to his Sula vineyard.

Samant has come a long way since he drove a battered old Fiat up this road in the early 1990s to become a farmer on a patch of his father’s land — a gigantic risk for a young man who’d just chucked in a lucrative job in California’s Silicon Valley. ‘Every day I thank my lucky stars,’ he says. ‘I mean, I live this rock-star lifestyle.’ With his shaved scalp, goatee and ear-ring, Samant has used his playboy image to market Sula wines since they were launched in 1999. Château Indage in nearby Pune and Grover Vineyards in Bangalore began producing a decade earlier, but it was Sula’s efforts to make wine the drink of India’s aspirational classes that sparked today’s boom.

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