THE FINE ART OF GOOD WINE KNOWLEDGE

“TIME IN A BOTTLE”

Wine is called the nectar of the Gods. A lot has been written about this wonderful drink and what better occasion than to tell our readers about wine. After all we in Nashik are privileged to live in a wine producing State especially since grapes grow in the District. In my travels around the country as an Army officer, I have tasted, enjoyed and even gifted this wonderful drink. I used to hoard the few bottles of wine I could lay my hands on in what I called my “cellar”. It was not the true blue blood cellar one is familiar with, usually a basement or cooler place than the rest of the house; but the word “cellar” worked just fine. A place to keep my bottles safely was the bedroom cupboard that my wife often wrinkled up her nose at. The space was overheated by wine standards. Because I took care in selecting the type of wine, each bottle was to me an investment and became a collection. It was a dream that while this horde grew there was some organic change taking place in the wine bottle thereby transforming my precious collection into a silken treasure. I had my share of nightmare too. I often dreamt that the corks were disintegrating in the night. Apart from my precious treasures being reduced to naught, I was in fear of the damage the linen cupboard would come to and a tirade from the wife.

But let me give the reader an account of my wine drinking forays. I would invariably ask myself the question as to whether a wine regardless of its vintage was really ready, I would let my desire get the better of me, and go ahead and open the bottle. Unlike the rich Barons who have overstuffed cellars beneath their medical castles, I had no margin for error. Wine made by friends was treated the same way as the prized Claret or Bordeaux, I had been gifted by a well to do friend. The nobility inherits bins of claret, all of it maintained under near perfect temperature and humidity, which for claret is a slightly damp 55 degrees. Should they pop the cork from a ’61 Latour and find that the wine was unready, they merely drink up and ruminate pleasantly upon the other thirty or forty bottles remaining in the cellar.

Few of us lowborn have the kind of liquid assets it takes to invest in cases of wine. We usually own one or two bottles of a favorite. The Goa wines and more recently the stuff one gets from Hyderabad, was then treasured. And yet we drank as if there was an endless flow of the nectar. That kind of drinking of wine is gauche as a wine regardless of its vintage, must be drunk in moderation, with the appropriate company and if even in solitude it is not to be what I call “guzzled’ down. Even if we did have the resources to buy an additional bottle, we’d have nowhere to store it. So we keep the odd few hidden away, from the teenagers who might find it amusing to share a ’53 Lafitte with friends. When I was a teenager years, I did know where my father kept his wine, and I did sneak off a bottle of Australian 999 Port to sip with my friends. I did not have the faintest inkling on the quality or the methods of wine drinking, except it tasted sweet and did make us at the time feel delightfully heady.

We often do not drink our wine collections. We cradle, inspect them, fondle them, but never end up opening a bottle and drinking. The usual excuse we give ourselves is that it’s being saved up for an occasion. Some of us turn into collectors instead of drinkers, loath to deplete our hoard by consuming part of it. Some follow the financial appreciation of their wines, gloating as a ’71 Burgundy purchased for around Rs 75/= turns up in a wine-store catalogue years later for Rs750/=. They do not drink their wines because they are worth too much. It is a terrible thing to consider yourself unworthy of your wines.

My eternal problem was always a lack of confidence, a fear of opening a prized bottle at the wrong time. I know that if I am too early, the tannin --- the chemical extract from the skin of the grape that acts as a preservative --- will dominate the wine. If I wait too long the wine will dry out. Vintage charts give an idea of when a particular wine is ready to drink, but the variables are endless. Every wine is different, and every wine merchant worth his salt is different --- you seldom know how your wine was treated before you bought it.

Recently, I read an extraordinary statement from a noted Manhattan merchant, Peter Morrel, who wrote, “ A wine that would normally mature in ten years at 60 degrees will mature in seven or eight years when stored at 66 degrees.” I excitedly assumed that Morrel had stumbled upon one of the more important finds of the twentieth century, a scientific means of determining when a wine is ready to drink. No longer would wine storage be guesswork. Alas it was not so. Morrel, by no means a modest man, conceded on persistent questioning that he had overstated his point. He said the theory that wine ages faster under warmer cellaring is sound, but there is no way of quantifying it. His general rule for Red Bordeaux is ten years from harvest to drinkability, but it is clear that some of the best wines, such as the 1966 vintage are not ready to drink.

In the years to come, the formerly arcane problem of wine storage will bedevil many of us, partly because of the growing interest in wine futures, a means of buying wine before it is even bottled. In 1983, merchants began touting the 1982 Bordeaux as one of the so-called vintages of the century and advised buying immediately, before it was all gone. There were a lot of semi frenzied wine buyers who lined up to buy wine they wouldn’t receive for more than a year, and when the wine arrived had to shove it under beds etc. All those who bought their 1982 Bordeaux without considering whether they could store it properly were lucky. They did not have to wait for the ten-year aging time, since the wine was rich in fruit and moderate in tannin and was good well before the ten-year restriction. What with the growing interest in wines and their consumption in the metropolitan areas of India, wine tasting is arranged with the oddball Indian wine connoisseur from one of the many French language academies masquerading as an “expert”. Often they are as good as anyone else, with advice on what bread or cheese to nibble with a glass of Château, but not able to tell which vineyard it actually came from. They invariably go wrong when it comes to the simple and practical method of how to hold a wine glass. But there is the genuine get together where wine drinking has found acceptance and is slowly taking over from more stronger spirits.

There was a friend of the family who was an ICS Secretary, who hailed from Goa, that beautiful State of India so many of us know so little about. He was a true wine connoisseur, who knew his way around wines. He used to narrate to us how the wine industry would go through a tremendous change, since it all depended upon the fruit and the tannin, in the skin of the grape. The variety being experimentally then grown in parts of India (I talk of 1962) would one day change the concept of an old or vintage wine. How correct he was, since wines nowadays taste just the same as they would even if bottled over ten years ago.

In truth, people without ideal storage facilities should avoid buying any wine they plan to keep for more than a few months. This is very sound advice, but there will always be the odd wine enthusiast like me who will try to store a wine, in the hopes that it will taste better after a few years. Every budding wine drinker would do well to learn up on his wines, before he or she drops a brick in public about a vintage, when for all they know it may be a wine that was just bottled a few days earlier. As a tip from an old tippler, any wine that is about 5 to 6 years is safely called a vintage though the ten year limit still holds good. So buy up and drink up, its fun and its also good for the health.


Lt Col(Retd) Sukhwant Singh
10 Aug 2001

CLUB LIFE IN MODERN INDIA

The following article is about the origins of Club life in British India. The author has extensively researched the subject, and in addition writes on some of his own experiences in the better known and popular Clubs of modern India.

“ In any town In India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain” George Orwell in Burmese Days 1935.

A lot of fun has been poked at Club life in India, without those who indulged in this sort of sport realizing how vital a part of the life it was. Getting together for games and exercise and talk was an important part of life in British India. It was the social center of the civilian and military station. A place to meet was the eventual epitome of all social life, something that seems to have effectively been passed down to Independent India of the 21st century. Club life in the Country today can easily be typecast into very distinctive divisions. There are purely ‘military’ clubs where ‘civilian ‘ membership would be ‘passe’; little do most know, that it was essentially this very reason to have civil-military interaction, that Clubs in the first place came into existence. The Club represented the ‘hub of local society’, principally of senior officials. To quote in the words of Kenneth Warren who was the son of the founder of the Tea Industry in India, ‘There would be the Collector, the Sub Collector, the Sessions Judge, the District Forest Officer, the District Superintendent of Police, the Excise Assistant Commissioner and several other officials from the public works department and so on’ who were members of the Club as an institution of pre War British India of the 1930’s. Not surprisingly there were only a limited number of places at which there were any Europeans who were not officials. At such places army officers swelled the list of members and the Club provided a meeting place between the Civil and the Military.

Many of the upcountry clubs had their origins in sporting institutions. When Kenneth Warren first went to Assam all the clubs were polo clubs and it was only in later times that these clubs became more social clubs. This mixing of sport and social activities was a feature in all but the largest stations. ‘ You had to belong to the club before you could play any games’ says John Morris a one time District Collector in his memoirs. Those who could join were not expected to do otherwise. It was considered obligatory to belong, even if one never went and attended the club functions. After all we must understand the ethos of the times. In British India of the 1930s, the Country was ruled by them and being from the ‘mother country’ with little else to do there was great need for interaction. The British also believed a great deal in sport as a means of character building and exercise. This aspect is something we in modern India still are not quite clear in our minds about. Philip Mason an ex Collector writes, ‘ I regard it as a duty to go to the Club at least every night,’ he used to say. He was a very light drinker and always used to drink what was called a pau-peg of whiskey when he got there.

Some men by virtue of their occupations made bad ‘club men’. Arthur Hamilton a forest officer in 1940, wrote, ‘ My life was so different from theirs.’ When a forest officer returned from a long tour, and came to a club he was looked down upon rather as a ‘jungle wallah’. ‘And of course he was a jungle – wallah.’ It was just his job. It was nevertheless considered unwise not to become a member of a club as people who were not members were considered as outcasts. There were some people who refused to become members of Clubs and these were mostly the intellectuals, who preferred to spend their evenings studying history or the Indian languages or the classics and who thought a Club was a waste of time. Either you were a rebel, and a rather courageous rebel, who didn’t belong to the Club, or else you were a social outcast who wanted to belong to the Club and couldn’t get in.

Club membership was dependent almost entirely upon occupation. This is the exact same case in modern India. There is the Lion’s Club where one invariably finds only the business class. Then there are the other clubs for the new moneyed classes. Then there are the nouveau riche who often form a club, since it’s the ‘done’ thing. The status of being in a Club is all they search for. But then it’s a meeting place and thus the original concept remains secure and carries on. In the times of the British, FC Hart who was ‘country bred’ and so prevented from joining the Indian Police at the same level as his public school contemporaries, was able to play hockey and cricket with them but could not join their clubs. Similarly, in a District dominated by cotton mills ‘all the office people - nearly all Europeans but some Indians -- were allowed to be members of the Club, but the technical people who mended the looms and even operated them, who were also Europeans and skilled workmen and even drawing higher pay than most of the white collared workers, were on no account permitted to be members of the Club. Clubs had committees that decided who would and ho would not become a member. Potential members were vetted and the process was as lengthy as it is in the Clubs of modern India. Clubs were ‘very carefully ruled’ as Kenneth Mason another District officer writes. Army officers were not eligible for the Bengal Club, which was mainly commercial, nor could a man who was in commerce eligible to join the United Service Club. One was in commerce and eligible for the Bengal Club, but the other was not, being in trade and a distributor of wines. So he joined the Royal Bengal Horse Cavalry, became an Army man and thus joined the United Service Club. Calcutta was the place where anyone who mattered lived during the Raj, and it was only later that Delhi on becoming the capital of India changed things for the Clubbers of modern India. However the true blue blood member of a Club was invariably someone who was from the great city of Calcutta. One had the Saturday Club where young men joined up as it was a social club for dancing and squash and swimming and a generally active social life. Then there was the Tollygunge Club on the then outskirts of Calcutta a very select club with a then waiting list of six years, that had a golf course, a racecourse and a swimming pool. Many people used to ride into the countryside and come back to have breakfast in the Club. Then a young man got senior enough he could join the Bengal Club, which was famous for its cuisine and was quite a landmark in those heady days of the British Raj.

The subject of Indians as members or even the permission to let them join was what ‘almost split the Empire’. L t Gen Sir Reginald Savory, Adjutant General of India and who left in 1946-47, maintains that ‘one of the greatest mistakes we ever made was to frown upon Indian becoming members of the Club. Certain Clubs did not permit Indians to become members. When one considers that it was not every Englishman who came to India who came from the upper classes, and that there were in India some of the most highly bred and cultivated educated men in the world, to keep them out and allow Englishmen in, was utter nonsense’.


Lt Col Sukhwant Singh
Sep 1999

A MODERN VERSION OF ONE OF THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

Abridged

            I  do  not  know  who  made up the list  of  the  Seven  Deadly  Sins,  probably  the  same  person  who  made  up  the  list  of  the  Muses,  but  I  can  never  remember  the  name  of  even  one  Muse,  whereas  I  can  rattle  off  four  or  five of  the  Deadly  Sins  off  the top  of  my  head,  usually  forgetting  Pride  and  Wrath,  the  two  sins  I  like  to  think  I  have  conquered. (Actually,  it’s  not  that  I’ve  conquered  Pride,  and  if  you  don’t  believe  me,  read  Pride  and  Prejudice  and  tell me if  you  think  there’s  anything  seriously  wrong  with  that  young  woman).  Of course  the  person  who  made  up  the  Seven  list  left  out  Vanity,  which  everyone  thinks  is  a  Deadly  Sin  but  isn’t,  and  who  left  out  a  large  number  of  sins  that  these  days  people  cheerfully  admit  to  in  a  spirit  that  falls  somewhere  between  charm  and  out-and-out  bragging.  Besides  if  you  accuse  someone  of  having  a  bad  case  of  one  of  the  Deadly  Sins  ---  if  you  call  him  down and  out  lazy,  or  a  greedy  person  or  a  fat  pig ---  it  doesn’t  really  count  for  much.  I  know  a  man  whose  lust  is  truly  out  of  control,  but  that  failing  fades  entirely  when  weighed  against  his  bullying,  hectoring,  arrogant  stupidity.  Stupidity;  now  that’s  what  I  call a  Deadly  Sin.  And  here  is  a  list  of  some  more  I  have  come  across   in  a  long  life  of   watching  many  of  our  righteous countrymen  and  women.  There  are  those  who  are  constantly  checking  themselves  in  the  mirror,  talking  in  animal  voices  loud  and  nastily,  breast-feeding  at  dinner  parties,  picking  all  the  cashew-nuts  out  of  the  mixed  nuts,  breaking  a  date   because  something  better  has  come  up,  and  inviting  a  separate  group  of  people  to  come  after  dinner.  The  types  who  seem  to  have  forgotten  the  niceties  of  good  behavior.   The  category  we sometimes  called  the  pseudos.  As  might  be  expected  one  comes  across  these  types  in most  of  our  urban  watering  holes.  We  call  these  by  that  delightful  but  strangely  out   of  place  word,  ‘pubs’.  Modern  urban  India  is  reinventing  the places  where  one  can  ‘chill out’,  ‘freak out’  or  just  ‘party’.  Aha   but  we  are  digressing.  On  to  the  Deadly  Sin  I  have  selected.

 

            A  MAN  OF  SLOTH.    There are  lots  of  men  or  even  women  of  Sloth.  All you  have  to  do  is  look  around  carefully.  They  are every  middle-class parent’s  nightmare  of  their  child  turned  giant ----undisciplined,  unstructured  or  disorganized. 

            The  culprits  are  wedded  to  their  beds.  The  bed  is  a  natural  habitat.  Prone  is  the  preferred  position.  Mess  is  their  hallmark.  Their  bedrooms  are  a  nightmare,  their  workplaces  like  horror  movies.  Since  the  workplace  is  invariably  next  to  the  bedroom,  work  need  not  overly  conflict with  work  time.  One  comes  across  this  category  of  urban  dweller  a  lot  nowadays  in  our  big  cities.  They  read  only  in  bed,  stretched  out,  dozing  periodically  so  that  the  dreams  are  caught  up  in  the  reading  matter.  Books  and  papers  lie  everywhere – unread,  meant  to  be  read,  soon  to  be  read,  never  to  be  read – papers  on  the  bed,  on  the  bed  table,  on  the  floor,  under  the  bed.

            A  man  of  sloth  has  files  of  sloth.  Their   files  lie  in  piles  on  top  of  cabinets.  The  drawing  room  table  lies  under  a  pile  of  books  that  litter  the  place,  the  dirty  transistor  radio  long  dead,  the  batteries  long  leaked  out,  the  dirty  coffee  cup  never  washed  and  old  stains  from   a  myriad  of  sources  wrestling  for  space  on  the  study table.  He  is  the  hypothetical  author  who  writes  supposedly  for  a  living,  so  everything  gets  swept  under  the  bed  when  its  time  to  churn  out  another piece  for  the  papers. 

            Such  men  and  women  are  what  I  call newspaper  and  magazine  pack  rats.   The  latest,  well  not  really  latest  Cosmopolitan,  lies  half-open  with  a  planned  article  for  possible use  to  plagiarize.   Our  authors,  well some  of  them  are  really  fairly  efficient  copycats.   There  are  hardly  any  original  writers  left  nowadays;  you  are  either  a  bad  copycat  or  a  good  one.  Take  your  pick.  Are  some  of  my  compatriots  reading  this?.  A   man  of  sloth  hates  the  phone.  The  phone  is somebody  who  wants  you  to  do  something.  The  sloth  has  lots  of  things  not  to  do.  They  hate  the  mail.  Now  it’s the  email.  They  do  not  read  it,  they  just  hide  it  or  better  still  misplace  it.  Once  every  two  months  when  the  state  electricity  board  threatens  to  cut  off the  electricity,  or  the  Phone Company  the  phone,    the  sloth  then  tries to  find  that  misplaced  bill  or  the  chequebook  to  try  and  write  out  the  correct  amount.  Many  sloths  are  late  bill  payers,  and  eventually  someone  else  makes  good  the  debt  they  owe.  The  problem  is  that  in  corporate  India  we  have  to  pay  by  cash.  The  new  plastic  money  payment  method  is  still  in  its  infancy.   Gone  are  the  days  of  payment  by  cheque,  well can  one  really  trust anyone  anymore?.  

            At  regular  intervals  the  spouse  of  the  sloth  or  his  mother  or  other  family  members  scream  at  him  to  change.  The sloth  promises  to  do  so.  What  a  lie.  To  men  and  women  of  sloth  the  concept  of  change  is  less than  a  joke – it  has  no  meaning.  Without  inherited  wealth,  sloth  is  not  easy  to  maintain.  It  calls  for  passion,  dedication,  and,  ironically  hard  work.  But  hard  work  that  some  are  good  at  is  very  close  to  play,  and  well  practiced  play crosses  back  and  forth  into  sloth,  with  no one  but  the  player  any  the  wiser.  So  most  rich  men  and  women  get  away  with  it.   Well  dear  reader  have  you   got  the   direction  I  am  talking  about.  Do  something  instead  of  just  ‘enjoying’  your  inheritance.  It’s a  real  disease  this  problem  of  being  a  sloth.  Enjoy. 

Sukhi