Smita Salunkhe, a farmer, starts her day at the Motewadi farm at about 6 in the morning. A truck collects her and a few more of her colleagues from the nearby villages before taking them to the vineyards. Solapur has been known as the sugar bowl of India. Although sugarcane is one of the major cash crops of the area, a new crop is revolutionising the area like never before. Grapes, more specifically wine grapes, have become the new employer. With Fratelli investing in vineyards across the district, homemakers are learning new skills that are enabling them to run their families in a better way.
Fratelli has more than 240 hectares of land under production in Akluj and employs more than two dozen farmers. Come February spring and the harvesting season is on in Maharashtra. This means picking up clusters of the Sauvignon Blancs, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlots and many others from all over the farm and segregating them into baskets.
Unlike many of the vineyards abroad, the Indian vineyards do all the grape picking by hand. Besides not only are the berries used separately to make the wine, even the stems are put in sometimes to assign herbal notes to the wines, especially to the Sauvignon Blancs. The stems also add tannins (the substance that makes your mouth go dry on drinking red wine) and are sometimes kept on for the Pinot Noir, a red wine grape with a thinner skin and therefore, less tannin.
Not only are the grapes supposed to be plucked and turned into wine, there is a lot that goes behind tending to the vines which have been brought over from France. They need regular pruning along with the addition of manure while others help in ploughing and laying seeds for some of the new vineyards. Smita hurdles through about three hours of picking the grapes before taking a break with her friends. The sun is already high up in the sky when the food truck arrives.
The morning breakfast cooked at the kitchens of Fratelli allows the women to relax a bit more. Today’s menu is ‘poha’ (flattened rice) and a glass of ‘chaanch’ (buttermilk). After that, it is back to herding the boxes filled with grapes to the winery and pressing the grapes into wine.
The first step of the wine-making process is de-stemming and grape-crushing, and this is where Master Wine Maker Piero Masi and his decades of experience kicks in. He has been training the staff at Fratelli for nearly a decade now. Although sorting and sifting through the best bunch of grapes isn’t an easy job, some of their workers have evolved a keen eye and are the reason behind Fratelli’s successful vintages.
Next comes the fermentation process which employs people from the same families, usually husbands and sons of farmers like Smita. The juice from the berries is squeezed out before leaving it to ferment in steel tanks where the sugars convert into alcohol. There is production of a lot of heat and the wine literally seems to be boiling at this point, with bubbles of carbon dioxide escaping to the surface.
This area is lorded over by Ajay Ghulay as he checks in every morning on the produce that is being created, making sure that the temperature of the wine does not rise beyond 29 degree Celsius (85 degrees Fahrenheit) or all the aromas will be killed off. The red wines derive their colour and the complex set of flavours during this process, as the tannins, aromas and flavours leech from the skin into the juice
The final step before bottling the wine is the maturation and the mixing, which is exclusively Piero Masi’s fiefdom. His hawk eye over the wines maturing in the French Oak is the reason behind the mélange of flavours that Fratelli’s wines showcase. Although single grape wines are a bit easier to make, it is the blends which tend to make life difficult for the winemaker. Take for example the MS Red, Fratelli’s signature wine that combines three different grape varietals: Sangiovese, Cabernet Franc and Shiraz and is an explosion of flavours on the palate. It is all up to the wine maker’s well-trained nose and palate which helps create this masterpiece. You can taste some red fruits such as raspberries along with spices when you try out this wine.
The Fratelli vineyards aren’t just about the wines and the vines, they also have a small residential complex where guests can stay. The food that is cooked here is a traditional Marathi-style thaali made by the locals along with Continental-style, if you want it. A vineyard has always been considered a wanderlust location with flowing grape vines and fashionably dressed people holding a glass of wine. But there is way more of hard work to the world of creating wines than we realise.