A Passage to India from Sula Vineyards
What wine do you serve with Indian food? My answer is usually beer, but if pressed I go with an dry Riesling or a spicy Gewurztraminer. Now there’s another option: Indian wine.
harvests grapes from several hundred acres in the mountainous of India. The wine is made in neighboring Nashik and exported to the US, Europe and Asia, although the focusis domestic, where the home-grown wine market is expected to explode with the rising Indian middle class. With no regional style of its own yet, Sula’s wines are unabashedly .
I picked up a bottle of their 2003 Sauvignon Blanc ($14) on a whim, with few expectations. In the glass it’s strikingly pale, almost colorless, and on first taste didn’t display any of the characteristics I was expecting from Sauvignon. High acidity and noticable spiciness make it a good food wine, although it didn’t quite stand up to the shrimp curry I’d paired with it. Refreshing and light-bodied, it would be a perfect summer picnic wine, and might complement southeast Asian fare better than thick Indian curries. The price is a little high for the quality — eight to ten dollars would be about right — but that may change as more Indian wines enter the market.
Photo by Liza Daly
