Maharashtra's wine country

When Fredric Schermesser says his name is in the dirt, he's being more literal than you think. "A good wine," declared the 27-year-old French oenologist, waving his arm expansively, "is merely the sensory expression of the terroir."

It's the richness of terroir - an estate's physical features (the way it slopes towards a lake, the strength of the sun in summer) and its biochemical characteristics (the composition of its soil, the way in which herbicides are used) - that lets the mud of a vineyard nurture fruit that can be alchemised into a liquid that's much more than value-added grape juice.

As I gargled a mouthful of Cabarnet Sauvignon and tried my damnedest to taste the verdant carpet of vineyards rolling on towards a stone chateau, I discovered that talking about terroir inspires winemakers to poetry much the way a few glasses of their finest creations do. "Terroir," asserts the Wine Spectator, the bible of wine snobs everywhere, "gives a wine its soul, its connection to its place of origin."

Terroir is a word that aspiring oenophiles learn early, like beginners at a French language class being instructed that the pen of my aunt est sur la table. Now, thanks to the efforts of Schermesser's firm and a handful of others around Maharashtra, wine lovers are discovering that majhi maushichi pen is on the table (and has been used to sign memorandums of understanding to bring the products of 40 wineries around the state to market over the few years).

Two of India's three most respected wine producers are located in Maharashtra's hardy Sahyadri Valley, and we'd set out from Mumbai early in the morning on a terroirist mission to gaze deep into the state's soul through as many glasses of wine we could possibly gulp down.

The sun rose hazily behind the city's gargantuan Deonar garbage dumping grounds as we turned our way onto the winding slopes of the American-style Mumbai-Pune Expressway. A quick pit-stop for coffee later, we'd taken a bypass before Pune and were on the highway to Nashik, coasting past yellow-and-red State Transport buses coughing clouds of black exhaust into lush jowar fields.

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