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.
Some of the world’s biggest drinks companies, including Diageo and Pernod Ricard, are rushing to set up wineries to capture a market that is growing at 30 per cent a year. Bollywood’s leading ladies can now be seen clutching glasses of wine on and off screen. For the new professional classes of Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi, fresh from business trips to Europe and the US, wine is a major status symbol. And Samant’s enterprise grows apace. ‘We’re planting 500 acres a year,’ he says. ‘There are very few wineries in the world that are planting that kind of number.’
The vineyard amid the Nashik hills is breathtaking. The vines, hoisted high above the ground to keep them cool in the baking summer, stretch down towards shimmering Lake Gangapur.
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