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FINE WINE

Bootlegging basics

At a party the other day, I was struck by the quality of the wine. The hosts had procured some bottles of some entirely agreeable Saint Emilion. Bone-dry and held together by a strong backbone of tannins, it had all the characteristics of a typical Bordeaux — serious and focussed, spartan in that severe manner, almost as if it would be aghast at the very thought of being regarded as approachable and easygoing.

“Where did you get it?” I asked. “Oh, just our regular bootlegger,” came the reply.

I was surprised by the answer, having drunk more indifferent bootlegged wine than I care to remember. Nowadays, everyone seems to have a bootlegger who procures wine. (Perhaps, it is the same bootleggers who provided them hard liquor earlier and have widened their operations.)

You buy bootlegged wine in India at your own jeopardy. I can’t remember the number of times I have been invited to people’s homes and served foreign wine with the inevitable but unpersuasive assurance, “It’s from my bootlegger. He’s very reliable.” More often than not, the wine is staggeringly bad, so awful in fact that it leaves me wondering whether it will make passable vinegar.

I recall a bottle of Veuve Clicqout procured from one such worthy being popped with much fanfare at an occasion. It was totally flat — a bottle of sweetened still water, no more. On many other occasions, I would have readily traded my glass for an unextraordinary but comforting and familiar one of Sula or Grover.

The preference for bootlegged plonk over middling but quaffable Indian wines stems from the desi craze for things foreign. The line of reasoning possibly goes like this: “If I serve only premium scotch to my guests, shouldn’t I also dish up foreign wine?”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way. A whiskey is a whiskey is a whiskey. Wines are a different animal altogether. Quality can vary from the sublime to the ridiculous, bottles need to be properly stored, vintages matter, and the risks of cheating the customer are enormous in what is a largely uninformed market.

We are still a nascent wine culture and the market will have to mature a great deal before Indians stop displaying and serving cheap foreign plonk sourced from bootleggers as it were something to be proud about.

Alas. It isn’t often that bootleggers turn up the something as good as the lean, racy and elegant Merlot that I referred to at the beginning of this piece.

Disclaimer: Many of the emails this column receives are about where to source wine. And so I hasten to add that I do not know or have the numbers of any bootleggers.

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