In vine company

In his book The Silverado Squatters, Robert Louis Stevenson likens vine-planting to the beginning of mining for precious metals. The winegrower also prospects, he writes. “One corner of land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another. Those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry.” Stevenson is, of course, writing about California. But he could just as well be talking about India — another emerging winegrower’s destination.

Yet this wasn’t apparent to anyone in 1971 in Guntur. Having grown up there, I knew nothing of wine till I had my first sip at the age of 17. The local bishop gave me some to taste, and that’s when my love affair with wine began. Coming from a background in Chemistry, I decided I had to try my hand at making it. It wasn’t long before I had a room full of demijohns, with quietly fermenting wine. These first attempts at winemaking certainly weren’t ‘bottled poetry’; but after a fair share of botched trials, I did come up with something drinkable. Yet it wasn’t anything like the wines I had tasted from vineyards abroad.

At this point, my passion for wine had to take a backseat because I started my pharmaceutical company, Granules India. But I never gave up my dream of starting a winery.

In 2007, my wife Uma and I found a tiny vineyard nestled amongst the rocky terrain in Hampi Hills, just 70km from the World Heritage Site. The region is part of the Deccan Plateau, at an average altitude of about 500m, watered by the Tungabhadra river, which originates in the Western Ghats 500km away and drains into the Tungabhadra reservoir nearby. One look and we knew we had found the place for our vineyard. We bought it, and after many long hours of agonising over the name, we decided to call it ‘Krsma’ — short for Uma and Krishna. We also applied to the state government to recognise this area as the appellation of Hampi Hills. This was the easy part.

Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, can prepare you to run a winery. Despite all my dabbling in winemaking, a short course at University of California Davis, and all our travels to observe viticulture and winemaking processes, making our own wine was an entirely different experience. Everything from long hours of manual labour and planning to the real romance of bringing to life a unique wine was (and continues to be) one grand adventure.

A season of hard labour

With the help of Peter Hayes, our consultant viticulturist from Australia, we quickly pulled out most of the existing vines on the estate and planted fresh acreage with selected varietals and clones. Uma and I dived in head first — quite literally. We were spending most of the day bent over at the waist, with our heads and arms submerged in the tangle of vines. Caring for grapevines, harvesting grapes and turning the juice into a delicious but complicated product is hard labour, and takes more knowledge, time and dedication than I had ever imagined. We had to rip the rocky soil to a depth of three feet and create ideal conditions for the roots to penetrate the soil. Thankfully, water was not a challenge, as a big reservoir for rain-harvesting was created to deal with the arid conditions. The dry climate certainly adds character to our grapes, but also makes cultivation challenging. Much of the terrain has dramatic hillocks of granite. Over the years, the topsoil has washed away, so finding arable land here was a bonus. The iron-rich, rocky soil has low moisture levels and the vines send their roots deep into the ground, searching for nutrients, and focus all their efforts on producing a few grapes that are robust with rich, concentrated flavours.

I often find it strange that when people experience the utter beauty and romance of sipping a cool glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, they almost never envision the long hours of care and labour that goes into cultivation, pressing the grape and the ageing process. The bulk of the work is done manually — every single plant is hand-inspected multiple times. Ever so often, Uma, who puts to use her knowledge in soil microbiology, excitedly shows me the first grapes of the season. Each time we go through the whole process of growing, harvesting, crushing and fermenting. After four vintages, I understand the work — but also the love required to create a product.

Like expectant parents

In any vigneron’s life, there is no greater, more dramatic part of the year than the Crush — which begins when the grapes are picked and continues through processing and fermentation until the last drop of wine is in the barrel. It’s like having a baby — about 9-10 months of preparation followed by the actual birthing. Like expectant parents, we wait for the grapes to ripen and for the crush to begin. And it is just as irrevocable; full of stress, hope, anxiety and elation. The decision to pick the grapes can be the single most important one in the life of a wine. If you pick too early, the grapes aren’t ripe enough. If you pick too late, the grapes will be overripe. Peter and the team use analytical tools to measure sugar, acid and pH in the ripening grapes. But he makes the most crucial decisions on a combination of intuition and experience.

As they say in Burgundy, you might only get a few chances in a lifetime to make a great wine. When we started out, we managed to build part of the winery in time for the 2010 vintage and crushed a small quantity of Cabernet Sauvignon from the existing vineyard. The winery itself didn’t have a roof in place as we were still building it. The wine we made was quite good, but it did not meet our expectations and we decided not to release it.

Later, of course, our 2011 vintage of Cabernet, mostly from the newly planted acreage, came out really well, and all vintages of different varietals for the subsequent years were also good. We continued to improve until our 2013 Cabernet, which was a shock. This vintage was not up to the mark, and again, we decided not to release this as our premium Cabernet and had to create a second-line blend. The whole experience made us realise that winemaking can be surprisingly simple — if you get grapes and put them in a vessel, you’ll get wine. On the other hand, it’s incredibly complex and subtle, and you’ll never completely master it. The more experience you have, the more variation you see, the more you realise you have to learn.

Some believe that winemaking is an art, but in my book, it is a craft. You take the uniqueness that the vineyard gives you and go with it. All the toil, labour, care and patience with which you nurture your vineyard will give you a wine with a sense of time, place and personality. Wine that can’t be made elsewhere, or by others. In short, wine with a heart.

Krishna Prasad Chigurupati is the owner of Krsma Estates, MD of Granules India

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