The Savourer’s Progress

“Tasting is a farce,” she said with her eyes closed, nose deep in the bowl of the glass. “The only way to get to know a wine is to take a few hours with it. Let it change and then let it change you. That’s the only way to learn anything—you have to live with it.”

That’s Simone, the fictional senior server in Stephanie Danler’s 2016 breakout novelSweetbitter’s upscale New York restaurant. Nobody has the time to do that but everyone wants the illusion of good taste. Enter, the sommelier, the expert telling you what wine, tea, coffee, beer, chocolate—even water—to serve, drink, show off in the new experience economy where products and service outcompete by creating memories customers value. The sommelier lives the life, so he or she can tell you about it.

Indian cities are at the cusp of a food and beverage renaissance, where the focus is on beverages: according to ETAnalytics, the total consumption of the food and beverage segment in India is expected to increase from$369 billion to $1.142 trillion by 2025. First, there was beer on tap, then craft beers and now craft gin and curated drinks. Then there were sommeliers for wine and speciality coffee roasters. People want experiences to be personalised and curated. Exclusivity is in, especially domestic air travel has because almost universally economy-class. According to Manoj Kumar, founder and CEO, Araku Coffee, which is made by Tribals in Andhra Pradesh’s Araku Valley and was first sold in a tony Parisian store, the rise in demand for curated customer experiences has required businesses to look beyond the gourmet culture. This has resulted in specialist professionals becoming critical in the theatre of appreciation.

This has led to the emergence of domain experts in the beverage industry especially. This growing band of wine sommeliers, gin experts, tea experts, water sommeliers and coffee-ologists are expected to recognise in a single sip the provenance of various beverages and also the latest developments in the industry. It is all about the luxury experience economy, says Atul Bhalla, Head, Western Region, ITC Hotels, and it extends to water. At ITC Luxury Collection hotels they have replaced single-use plastic with Shunya Aqua, zero-km water bottled on the hotel premises. Elsewhere in the world where there is a greater variety of artisanal water, there are water sommeliers too who can talk about the origin and quality of the water guests are drinking.

Abhishek Basu, Executive Assistant Manager, food and beverage, The Leela, Mumbai, has seen the change in guests over the years. The hotel hired a sommelier from Italy for the very first time in 2006 when they opened a new Italian restaurant. Guests would often ask for a sommelier for wine recommendations, especially to pair with food. “But the real game changer,” he says, “was when the sommelier would start telling the story behind the wine—the history of the vineyard or the quality of the terroir [local ecology] or fun facts related to the wine. This would take the guests by surprise. Now guests are more aware about the role of a sommelier and like to interact with him or her.” Also, with time, awareness about wine in general has increased. Guests are well-travelled and like to experiment more. There are many instances now when a guest enquires if they house a specific wine before making a reservation.

The secret lies in the increasing complexity of beverages and foods. The chocolate flavour, for instance, is an extremely complex mixture of more than 500 naturally occurring flavour compounds. L Nitin Chordia, a certified chocolate taster, says while we may never be able to taste all the flavour compounds, there are some notes that can be detected quite easily with practice. When the cacao beans are fine and treated with care, the resulting chocolate offers an endless rainbow of flavour possibilities. As in wine, the flavour is not merely a result of the ingredients added to the chocolate, but inherent flavours that fine cacao carries as a mixed result of genetics, terroir, origin, weather and post-harvesting processes such as fermentation and roasting.

Coffee is a complex drink too; in fact, coffee-ologists argue it is more complex than wine. Its taste varies with roasting and brewing methods; the last decade has seen a lot of experiments in coffee processing. While most gourmet cafes in India specialise in enhancing coffee quality and taste and started the movement of ‘bean to cup’, Araku Coffee, says Kumar, took this further and pioneered the use of processionals in the complete coffee ecosystem, that is, ‘seed to cup’. What’s more, the coffee is grown organically under the guidance of coffee-ologist Hippolyte Courty and agriculture expert, David Hogg.

Tea is undergoing a similar resurgence with tasters and sommeliers explaining the tea. Not just where it is from but also how it has to be brewed. Anamika Singh who has her own brand of teas, Anandini Himalayan Tea, is a sommelier who has known the field and factory for over two decades. She makes a strong case for the distinction between a tea taster and a tea sommelier. “Most tasters can give you the notes but won’t be able to tell you much about the quality of the tea, its inadequacy or how to resolve it. It’s important to know if the problem is in the field, the manufacturing stage or in the leaf per se being average. Even though one has a batch of bad teas, how do you blend it with other teas to make it saleable?”

These are precisely the questions Radhika Chopra Anandan had when she got the entire team (including the accountant) of her luxury tea label, No. 3 Clive Road, take a tea sommelier course. If there were a variety of courses offered in Delhi, she says, she would have had her team take those as well. “It’s incredible how the Indian palate has become more discerning. Of course, with tea, we have been experts for well over a century now. But our tastes have expanded to fine wines, artisanal gin, craft beer, artisanal chocolates, bread… the list goes on. We now even have Michelin-starred chefs consulting on menus. It’s just such an exciting time for the food and beverage industry. The idea of reaching out to experts—whether it’s sommeliers, mixologists, star chefs—feeds into the Indian consumer’s expanding knowledge of food and beverage,” she adds.

From the era of takeaway coffee, the world, including India, is now moving to pour-over coffee. Brewing is the new therapy for de-addiction from everyone’s trainwreck lifestyle fuelled by screen addiction, notes Kumar. The tea or coffee ritual will become the new meditation at homes and offices. This requires cafes and bars that will have experts who will teach customers how to brew tea and coffee. This is the only way to resolve the disconnect between the supply chain and the retail chain, notes Anamika Singh. “Tea is enormously versatile. One just needs to handle it with care and treat it with respect.”

We are witnessing the beginning of an era where more than what we eat the provenance of what we eat is the new Maslowian hierarchy. Fast food is for the masses and the ones on the run; slow food is for the hipsters; and expertly curated food and beverages the new luxury for the growing breed of global foodies. For topend hotels and restaurants, it can be the biggest differentiator. At Old World Hospitality which runs Indian Accent and Comorin, two of the country’s finest restaurants, there is a non-alcoholic beverage pairing for those who do not consume alcohol and customised non-wine alcoholic pairings as well at the former and a dedicated tea and coffee bar where baristas offer a curated range for every taste and preference at the latter.

In this new culture even appreciating chocolates has become an art, something to be savoured, not merely consumed. A professional chocolate sommelier doesn’t merely advise you on what chocolate to eat, he or she does it after carefully analysing its appearance (shine and colour), snap, acidity, astringency, bitterness and sweetness. Chordia, who has tasted over 2,000 chocolates in his six-year-old career and operates Cocoatrait, an initiative to promote knowledge, production and consumption of fine chocolates in India, even has a nine-step appreciation guide: Choose an environment free of distractions/background noise; never taste cold chocolate; ensure your palate is clean; eat by breaking a moderate-size piece, large enough to accommodate the full evolution of the flavour profile; smell the chocolate; place the chocolate on the tongue and do not bite into it; allow the chocolate to melt slowly; allow time to build an aftertaste; and enjoy it in moderation.

It works as well as a guide to good living.

About The Author

Kaveree Bamzai

Kaveree Bamzai is an author and a contributing writer with Open

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