This is a tale of two sisters—Luca and Zoya. Luca, alluring and exotic, is the rising star of the family, while Zoya is fruity, younger and more playful. DARE toured North India’s first winery, owned by Nirvana Biosys(www.nirvanabiosys.com), to meet and greet the delicious duo.
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Enroute to the two-acre production facility, located in Bawal Industrial Area just off the Delhi-Jaipur highway, Joint Managing Director M K Rustagi tells us about his company and the heady joy of running it, along with chief promoter Dr J P Gupta, Chairman & Managing Director of the company.
The winery impresses us right at first glance, with its mansion-like white façade and the sprawling green lawn that showcases it. This, we are told, will soon be developed into a wine tasting garden.
We walk through the automatic bottling plant from Bertolaso, Italy, and learn that it has a capacity of 4500 bottles per hour, expandable to 5 million litres per annum. This is the first winery in the region to produce international quality wines from grape/grape juice/must, indigenous/imported of the finest quality.
It is fascinating to watch how wines are bottled and labelled—excise duty varying from state to state, each label must be printed separately and secured to the bottle correctly. Hundreds of bottles, waiting for their corks. Roll upon roll of wine label, ready to announce its flavour and price on those bottles. And the laboratory where the company’s ‘nose’ is sniffing to decide on the best flavour and fragrance of a particular port wine…sights and scents that will stay with us.
Incorporated in the year 2008, Nirvana Biosys boasts a bouquet of high quality wines, including exotic tropical wines, grape varietals, blended wines and fruit juices for the Indian and international markets.
The range includes red, white, sparkling, port, lychee and mango wines. Of these, the lychee flavour is already a huge hit.
The project is a joint venture with E C Oxenham & CY Ltd., Mauritius - wine makers for over 75 years with a French lineage. Patrick Oxenham, a renowned oenologist from Dijon University, France and an internationally acclaimed wine maker with over 40 years of wine making experience, is the man who creates the fresh and fragrant varieties of Luca and Zoya. And then there is the very special SHE, a rose sparkling wine designed especially for women. The family grows!
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Fast Facts
• Growing at the rate of 25% p.a. over the last five years, India’s current market size for wine stands at 1.5 million (15 lac) cases a year.
• Fruity wines such as lychee and mango are low in saturated fat, and cholesterol. They contain polyphenols which bestow vital health benefits. Consumed in moderation, they can be an excellent alternative to harmful alcohol varieties.
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