There is always a hedonistic downside to recession and I don't mean people losing jobs; work is by no means a luxury and no one should ever stoop down so low to afford some. I mean the replacement of the French hand-churned unsalted butter with an industrial spread. I am talking about the Bresse Poulet and the Australian lamb being substituted with local birds and sheep that are too skinny to be kept alive. Recession hits all areas but it leaves the most foul of tastes in the one industry which matters the least to financial people, but where taste itself matters the most - the field of food and beverage.

Posted in: Wine in India, Wine and Food | Comment (3) >>

The problem with wine is not how it is made, or drunk, but how it is presented between the making and the drinking. The bigger problem, of course, is the fact that I always find so much wrong with the world of wine (or world in general) but please reader, for a minute, focus.

Let's face it. We will never know enough about wines. We prefer to leave that whole tasting and judging bit to those boys who like to go by the name of wine writers. The rest of us actually have a life. This is perhaps where we are going wrong. Delegation has its downside and leaving things up to people who rarely step outside or get invited to the really cool parties, means that we have a lot of boring unimaginative stuff to sift and work our way through before we can extract anything useful, or shareable in public.

Posted in: Wine in India, Wine Awareness | Comment (2) >>

Blog: Magandeep Singh

It was while having a shower that I realised that old writers had it easy. Nothing had been written, which left them with the entire fairway to prance about on. The simple probability of stringing a few random words together to end up with a sonnet was much higher then than it is today. The novelty of saying “I Love You” made it easy to get away with forgetting an

Posted in: Wine in India, Indian Wine | Comment (0) >>

Blog: Magandeep Singh

I like crystal ball gazing. It is right up there next to voodoo dolls on my list of Xmas gifts. Don’t snigger; I can cast spells too...

2009 has been a jinxed year so far. Not because of itself but mostly because of all that preceded it. All that commotion and action in the hotels have shown us how much of a dog-eat-dog world we live in. And then the terrorist attacks worsened things. Markets were already low, and now Satyam has just made the equivalent of a substantial chunk of our defence budget disappear.

Posted in: Wine in India, Wine and Food, Indian Wine | Comment (2) >>