Pilgrimage to Sula Vineyards
A recurring theme of this blog has been the bourgeois wave washing over India. Indians are learning how to spend money on things they didn’t use to spend on. And Indians are now learning to drink wine. Nasik, a town about 180km from Mumbai, is nearby India’s most famous winery, Sula. Sula has been making wines for about ten years. Nasik itself is a holy pilgrimage town for Hindus.
Jingyi, Christine, Alvin, and I made the pilgrimage to Sula Vineyards last weekend. During our long and arduous journey to the foreign land of Nasik my fellow pilgrims and I were hindered by pestilence, catastrophic weather, death-defying mountain passages, numerous incidences of stranding, filth, and greasy food, only to make it to Nasik where I, the white man, was worshiped as a god.
Advice given to me in Mumbai was to take the Mumbai suburban railroad as far as possible, and then catch a bus to Nasik from there. There is a stunted mountain range that separates Nasik from Mumbai, and the road that passes over this range is narrow, twisting, and there are a lot of wrecks on it. Taking the train wouldn’t allow us to avoid the road, just the traffic that backs up at the base of the mountain due to all the wrecks.
The road is dangerous enough as it is, but the road is made much more dangerous by the Indian drivers driving on it. In the U.S. when we drive around mountain bends on narrow roads, we don’t try to pass. We don’t trust that when we round the mountain bend in the wrong lane to come face to face with oncoming traffic, that the oncoming traffic will stop, and the car we passed will slow down, so that we may weave safely back to our own lane.
Our bus was a newer model Volvo with air conditioning. It was of average quality for an American bus, but luxurious by Indian standards. Still, it wasn’t really the sporty little dart that our driver drove it as, weaving around trucks like he did. There were a lot of trucks plying this narrow mountain passage, and most of them were fuel trucks. As if this weren’t dangerous enough, the road was cut out of a cliff. We had thousands of feet to fall if we weren’t just killed by a head on collision or exploding fuel trucks.
As reported last week, I am suffering from what we foreigners affectionately call Delhi Belly, but what doctors might call Travelers’ Diarrhea. The slamming of breaks, the twists and turns to get back into our lane before oncoming traffic smashed us, plus the bouncing of the bus from the roughness of the road, accentuated the pains in my stomach. Jingyi and Christine were both suffering from relapses of Delhi Belly as well. Something about the changing weather brought by the monsoon must hit us delicate foreigners hard.
But the ride up the mountain wasn’t particularly scary. It hadn’t started raining yet. It started raining that evening, which was Saturday, and it kept raining and kept raining. Mumbai flooded. Something like 100 people died in storms across India. Driving back down the mountain to Mumbai on Sunday night was particularly scary. Riding through the driving rain and intermittent fog was dangerous enough, but the ride was made much more dangerous as our driver sought to pass the slow moving trucks even if passing meant driving blindly around mountain bends in the wrong lane. It’s ok because the truck being passed will stop, and the traffic heading straight for us will also stop so that our bus can return to its appropriate lane. Truthfully, the ride didn’t keep me on the edge of my seat, even though we were sitting in the second row and had an excellent view of the death-defying driving tactics of our bus driver. I easily resigned myself to the fact that I was trapped in that bus and was probably going to either die or not die, but probably not die. Maybe I’m just used to close calls after riding with so many Indian rickshaw drivers.
In Nasik
There are so many people in India, even the “small towns” like Nasik have over a million people. And like most towns in India, Nasik is not real lovely: poverty and pollution. It is, however, a holy town. There are over 2000 temples in Nasik, and it is thought that putting the dead’s ashes in the River Godavari in Nasik will release that person’s soul from the cycle of life. The largest religious gathering in the world of course happens in India. It’s called Kumbh Mela, and Nasik is one of the four towns that hosts the gathering. Astronomers pick where and when the gathering will happen. It wasn’t happening while we were there. But we did go down to the holy bathing ghats. No one in my party bathed. We also visited a temple.
bathing ghats
After the temple we sat in a shack with benches where they served chai because Christine felt like she was going to die from her sickness. This is where the young couple (you can see them in the background of the photo) asked me if I would hold their baby while they took my picture. Holding the baby kind of felt like holding a huge sausage.
People in Mumbai stare sometimes, but a white person isn’t so special in Mumbai (even though I really haven’t seen that many at all). In Nasik, however, everyone stares. At one point, I was standing in the street with Christine, and this group of boys gathered around us and just stared. They didn’t say anything. They just looked at us with serious faces, like they were determined starers. I said to Christine, “When I was a kid in the U.S., I was taught to not stare.” And throughout Nasik I did a lot of hand-shaking and hello-responding.
On Saturday night I went to a grocery counter to buy some Cadbury chocolate bars for the sick girls. A man who appeared to be the owner came out from the back and shook my hand and asked where I was from and if I liked India. He gave me a small chocolate caramel as a present. He gave one to Alvin too, but he didn’t seem very interested in Alvin. Later we discovered that one of the chocolate bars I had bought had gone bad, and since the grocery wallah liked me so much, I went back there to return it. He was apologetic, and brought out a notebook and asked for my email address. I was thinking this was standard procedure for all returned merchandise. I asked him what was the purpose, and he said, “I want to friendship you.” I bought three more chocolate bars and got one in return for the rotten one. He shook my hand, and I left. Three of those chocolate bars were bad too. The next day I got my money back for them, but my friend wasn’t there.
And because it had started raining and because three of four of us were sick and Christine felt like she was going to die and because Nasik just isn’t that interesting of a town, we stayed in our ghetto hotel for the evening and watched tv. I was just starting to get into Back to the Future when the hotel lost power. The power came back on for the very end of the movie, and then we watched Back to the Future Part II. I went to bed at the beginning of Back to the Future Part III. I did take the time to reflect to myself how ironic it is that I had to come all the way to Nasik, India, to watch Back to the Future.
During the power outage, we ate takeout Indian food out of plastic bags by candle light. Indian food is famous for being oily. Especially at cheaper restaurants, the food is just dumped with oil. Nasik is not home to gourmet restaurants, or at least none that were convenient for us to trudge to in the rain. And Nasik is where my stomach decided it misses the comfort of American food.
To the Vineyard
All four of us could have crammed into the back of a rickshaw and gone the 7 km from Nasik to Sula, but our hotel told us we could take a bus there. We made it to the bus depot, but which bus to get on? We gathered a large congregation of people who wanted to stare and people who wanted to help, and one girl got us to the right bus. We got dropped off at a country crossroads where some rickshaw drivers told us they’d drive us the rest of the way to the Vineyards for Rs. 60. Someone earlier had told us that it would only be Rs. 20. We figured these guys were trying to rip us off, so we said screw it; we’ll walk. There was a sign pointing to the right road to take to the vineyard.
We didn’t realize the lane to the Vineyard would be so long or that it would start raining en route. We walked for about 30 minutes, part of it in the rain. India’s rich were zipping by in their new Toyotas and Hondas up to the Vineyard. Once it started raining we hitched a ride with a man who turned out to be a Vice President of Sula Vineyards.
There is a tasting room at the winery. It’s on a second story balcony, and you sit and sip wine and look out over the vineyards, and there are mountains and a lake in the background. I’m sure it would have been a lot more relaxing if we knew how we were getting back to Nasik and Mumbai and if we’d gotten there earlier in the day and weren’t sick and dirty and wet.
Tasting Room and view from the Tasting Room
We did a tasting. We had Chemin Blanc, Sauvignon Blanc, Rosé Zinfandel, Cabernet Shiraz, and a reserve Shiraz. The whites were probably better than the reds. All were 2006. The reds were too young to drink, but the wine bartender conducting our wine tasting told us these Sula wines are made to be drunk young because the hot Indian climate isn’t conducive to aging. We went on a tour of the wine-making facilities, and our tour guide was careful to tell us that the wine stored in the huge cylinders is stored at European room temperature, not Indian. Indian room temperature is, of course, hot. Sula will soon not be using any corks, just screw caps. Corks have to be imported to India, and already the cork used is not cork, I’m pretty sure. I’m pretty sure it’s cut from fiberboard, boards made from compressed sawdust.
My friends and I decided to buy a bottle of sauvignon blanc, and we had a cheese, olive, and nut platter. The nuts and olives were pretty normal, but the cheeses were a little strange. One was a goat cheese, and it was totally normal and delicious. The other two cheeses appeared to be packaged cheese slices, and they weren’t so delicious. Normal cheese to us Americans isn’t so normal in India. Even “normal” cheeses like cheddar and swiss are imported and expensive. I miss them so much, especially with my Delhi Belly. I think some cheese courses could be theraputic.
We’re all looking particularly lovely in this picture because an hour before this we’d been out walking in the rain. Christine looks healthy enough, but actually she felt like dying and only drank half her glass of wine.
Toward the end of the bottle, the reality began to set in that we had no ride to the bus stop, that waiting for the bus would mean standing in the rain, that we weren’t sure what time the bus would come, and that getting back to Nasik was just not going to be so simple. After we paid our bill, we were contemplating our predicament, and we spotted a couple leaving. We said, should we ask them? Alvin said, “Make the white guy do it.” Actually, I thought, that’s probably the best idea. I followed them out and asked, “Excuse me sir.” He said they had driven past us walking up to the winery. He said he’d take us, and the four of us climbed into the back of the little hatchback. They took us all the way back to Nasik and even dropped us off at the bus terminal where we could catch the bus to Mumbai. It turns out that the man worked in Nasik for a Singapore company.
This is where Jingyi discovered she’d lost her wallet. She and Alvin filed a police report for it at the police station. I’m sure the Nasik police will get right on it. I told a lawyer friend that in the U.S. we expect our police and local and national politicians to be honest, and when they’re corrupt, we’re surprised. The lawyer told me that in India you expect them to be corrupt and are surprised when they’re honest. But I guess filing the police report will help with the insurance claim.
We didn’t have tickets to go to Mumbai. When we showed up at the bus depot on Sunday afternoon there were no tickets left, but by the grace of God an extra bus was supposed to be coming, and that bus would have seats available. I bought the bus tickets, and we began our crazy and reckless slide down the mountain.
Some Final Nasik notes: (1.) while we were waiting for the bus, an Indian guy asked me if I worked for IBM. I told him sorry but no. He said he wanted to get a job with IBM in the UK or the US. I guess it didn’t hurt to ask. (2.) I saw a handful of people with green eyes. Indians usually have brown eyes, but apparently there are some green eye genes lingering in Nasik. (3.) There was no hot water at our hotel, and our rooms were just generally falling apart. Alvin’s headboard fell off and would have fallen on his face if he had been lying down. In the middle of the night, the bedside table collapsed and scared the hell out of us. (4.) I would think Nasik wouldn’t be overly Muslim since it’s a holy pilgrimage town for Hindus, but from our hotel we could here the Muslim call to prayer floating through the city. This is the first time I’ve ever heard one in person. Now all I have to do is see a cock fight before I die, and I will have accomplished everything on my list. (5.) And “Talent Hunt 2006-07 – It’s a Unique Steps for Handicapped & Others – Acting, Modelling, Dancing, Singing & Special Talent.” This sign was at the bus terminal.
Jingyi, Christine, Alvin, and I made the pilgrimage to Sula Vineyards last weekend. During our long and arduous journey to the foreign land of Nasik my fellow pilgrims and I were hindered by pestilence, catastrophic weather, death-defying mountain passages, numerous incidences of stranding, filth, and greasy food, only to make it to Nasik where I, the white man, was worshiped as a god.
Advice given to me in Mumbai was to take the Mumbai suburban railroad as far as possible, and then catch a bus to Nasik from there. There is a stunted mountain range that separates Nasik from Mumbai, and the road that passes over this range is narrow, twisting, and there are a lot of wrecks on it. Taking the train wouldn’t allow us to avoid the road, just the traffic that backs up at the base of the mountain due to all the wrecks.
The road is dangerous enough as it is, but the road is made much more dangerous by the Indian drivers driving on it. In the U.S. when we drive around mountain bends on narrow roads, we don’t try to pass. We don’t trust that when we round the mountain bend in the wrong lane to come face to face with oncoming traffic, that the oncoming traffic will stop, and the car we passed will slow down, so that we may weave safely back to our own lane.
Our bus was a newer model Volvo with air conditioning. It was of average quality for an American bus, but luxurious by Indian standards. Still, it wasn’t really the sporty little dart that our driver drove it as, weaving around trucks like he did. There were a lot of trucks plying this narrow mountain passage, and most of them were fuel trucks. As if this weren’t dangerous enough, the road was cut out of a cliff. We had thousands of feet to fall if we weren’t just killed by a head on collision or exploding fuel trucks.
As reported last week, I am suffering from what we foreigners affectionately call Delhi Belly, but what doctors might call Travelers’ Diarrhea. The slamming of breaks, the twists and turns to get back into our lane before oncoming traffic smashed us, plus the bouncing of the bus from the roughness of the road, accentuated the pains in my stomach. Jingyi and Christine were both suffering from relapses of Delhi Belly as well. Something about the changing weather brought by the monsoon must hit us delicate foreigners hard.
But the ride up the mountain wasn’t particularly scary. It hadn’t started raining yet. It started raining that evening, which was Saturday, and it kept raining and kept raining. Mumbai flooded. Something like 100 people died in storms across India. Driving back down the mountain to Mumbai on Sunday night was particularly scary. Riding through the driving rain and intermittent fog was dangerous enough, but the ride was made much more dangerous as our driver sought to pass the slow moving trucks even if passing meant driving blindly around mountain bends in the wrong lane. It’s ok because the truck being passed will stop, and the traffic heading straight for us will also stop so that our bus can return to its appropriate lane. Truthfully, the ride didn’t keep me on the edge of my seat, even though we were sitting in the second row and had an excellent view of the death-defying driving tactics of our bus driver. I easily resigned myself to the fact that I was trapped in that bus and was probably going to either die or not die, but probably not die. Maybe I’m just used to close calls after riding with so many Indian rickshaw drivers.
In Nasik
There are so many people in India, even the “small towns” like Nasik have over a million people. And like most towns in India, Nasik is not real lovely: poverty and pollution. It is, however, a holy town. There are over 2000 temples in Nasik, and it is thought that putting the dead’s ashes in the River Godavari in Nasik will release that person’s soul from the cycle of life. The largest religious gathering in the world of course happens in India. It’s called Kumbh Mela, and Nasik is one of the four towns that hosts the gathering. Astronomers pick where and when the gathering will happen. It wasn’t happening while we were there. But we did go down to the holy bathing ghats. No one in my party bathed. We also visited a temple.
bathing ghatsAfter the temple we sat in a shack with benches where they served chai because Christine felt like she was going to die from her sickness. This is where the young couple (you can see them in the background of the photo) asked me if I would hold their baby while they took my picture. Holding the baby kind of felt like holding a huge sausage.
People in Mumbai stare sometimes, but a white person isn’t so special in Mumbai (even though I really haven’t seen that many at all). In Nasik, however, everyone stares. At one point, I was standing in the street with Christine, and this group of boys gathered around us and just stared. They didn’t say anything. They just looked at us with serious faces, like they were determined starers. I said to Christine, “When I was a kid in the U.S., I was taught to not stare.” And throughout Nasik I did a lot of hand-shaking and hello-responding.
On Saturday night I went to a grocery counter to buy some Cadbury chocolate bars for the sick girls. A man who appeared to be the owner came out from the back and shook my hand and asked where I was from and if I liked India. He gave me a small chocolate caramel as a present. He gave one to Alvin too, but he didn’t seem very interested in Alvin. Later we discovered that one of the chocolate bars I had bought had gone bad, and since the grocery wallah liked me so much, I went back there to return it. He was apologetic, and brought out a notebook and asked for my email address. I was thinking this was standard procedure for all returned merchandise. I asked him what was the purpose, and he said, “I want to friendship you.” I bought three more chocolate bars and got one in return for the rotten one. He shook my hand, and I left. Three of those chocolate bars were bad too. The next day I got my money back for them, but my friend wasn’t there.
And because it had started raining and because three of four of us were sick and Christine felt like she was going to die and because Nasik just isn’t that interesting of a town, we stayed in our ghetto hotel for the evening and watched tv. I was just starting to get into Back to the Future when the hotel lost power. The power came back on for the very end of the movie, and then we watched Back to the Future Part II. I went to bed at the beginning of Back to the Future Part III. I did take the time to reflect to myself how ironic it is that I had to come all the way to Nasik, India, to watch Back to the Future.
During the power outage, we ate takeout Indian food out of plastic bags by candle light. Indian food is famous for being oily. Especially at cheaper restaurants, the food is just dumped with oil. Nasik is not home to gourmet restaurants, or at least none that were convenient for us to trudge to in the rain. And Nasik is where my stomach decided it misses the comfort of American food.
To the Vineyard
All four of us could have crammed into the back of a rickshaw and gone the 7 km from Nasik to Sula, but our hotel told us we could take a bus there. We made it to the bus depot, but which bus to get on? We gathered a large congregation of people who wanted to stare and people who wanted to help, and one girl got us to the right bus. We got dropped off at a country crossroads where some rickshaw drivers told us they’d drive us the rest of the way to the Vineyards for Rs. 60. Someone earlier had told us that it would only be Rs. 20. We figured these guys were trying to rip us off, so we said screw it; we’ll walk. There was a sign pointing to the right road to take to the vineyard.
We didn’t realize the lane to the Vineyard would be so long or that it would start raining en route. We walked for about 30 minutes, part of it in the rain. India’s rich were zipping by in their new Toyotas and Hondas up to the Vineyard. Once it started raining we hitched a ride with a man who turned out to be a Vice President of Sula Vineyards.
There is a tasting room at the winery. It’s on a second story balcony, and you sit and sip wine and look out over the vineyards, and there are mountains and a lake in the background. I’m sure it would have been a lot more relaxing if we knew how we were getting back to Nasik and Mumbai and if we’d gotten there earlier in the day and weren’t sick and dirty and wet.
Tasting Room and view from the Tasting RoomWe did a tasting. We had Chemin Blanc, Sauvignon Blanc, Rosé Zinfandel, Cabernet Shiraz, and a reserve Shiraz. The whites were probably better than the reds. All were 2006. The reds were too young to drink, but the wine bartender conducting our wine tasting told us these Sula wines are made to be drunk young because the hot Indian climate isn’t conducive to aging. We went on a tour of the wine-making facilities, and our tour guide was careful to tell us that the wine stored in the huge cylinders is stored at European room temperature, not Indian. Indian room temperature is, of course, hot. Sula will soon not be using any corks, just screw caps. Corks have to be imported to India, and already the cork used is not cork, I’m pretty sure. I’m pretty sure it’s cut from fiberboard, boards made from compressed sawdust.
My friends and I decided to buy a bottle of sauvignon blanc, and we had a cheese, olive, and nut platter. The nuts and olives were pretty normal, but the cheeses were a little strange. One was a goat cheese, and it was totally normal and delicious. The other two cheeses appeared to be packaged cheese slices, and they weren’t so delicious. Normal cheese to us Americans isn’t so normal in India. Even “normal” cheeses like cheddar and swiss are imported and expensive. I miss them so much, especially with my Delhi Belly. I think some cheese courses could be theraputic.
We’re all looking particularly lovely in this picture because an hour before this we’d been out walking in the rain. Christine looks healthy enough, but actually she felt like dying and only drank half her glass of wine.
Toward the end of the bottle, the reality began to set in that we had no ride to the bus stop, that waiting for the bus would mean standing in the rain, that we weren’t sure what time the bus would come, and that getting back to Nasik was just not going to be so simple. After we paid our bill, we were contemplating our predicament, and we spotted a couple leaving. We said, should we ask them? Alvin said, “Make the white guy do it.” Actually, I thought, that’s probably the best idea. I followed them out and asked, “Excuse me sir.” He said they had driven past us walking up to the winery. He said he’d take us, and the four of us climbed into the back of the little hatchback. They took us all the way back to Nasik and even dropped us off at the bus terminal where we could catch the bus to Mumbai. It turns out that the man worked in Nasik for a Singapore company.
This is where Jingyi discovered she’d lost her wallet. She and Alvin filed a police report for it at the police station. I’m sure the Nasik police will get right on it. I told a lawyer friend that in the U.S. we expect our police and local and national politicians to be honest, and when they’re corrupt, we’re surprised. The lawyer told me that in India you expect them to be corrupt and are surprised when they’re honest. But I guess filing the police report will help with the insurance claim.
We didn’t have tickets to go to Mumbai. When we showed up at the bus depot on Sunday afternoon there were no tickets left, but by the grace of God an extra bus was supposed to be coming, and that bus would have seats available. I bought the bus tickets, and we began our crazy and reckless slide down the mountain.
Some Final Nasik notes: (1.) while we were waiting for the bus, an Indian guy asked me if I worked for IBM. I told him sorry but no. He said he wanted to get a job with IBM in the UK or the US. I guess it didn’t hurt to ask. (2.) I saw a handful of people with green eyes. Indians usually have brown eyes, but apparently there are some green eye genes lingering in Nasik. (3.) There was no hot water at our hotel, and our rooms were just generally falling apart. Alvin’s headboard fell off and would have fallen on his face if he had been lying down. In the middle of the night, the bedside table collapsed and scared the hell out of us. (4.) I would think Nasik wouldn’t be overly Muslim since it’s a holy pilgrimage town for Hindus, but from our hotel we could here the Muslim call to prayer floating through the city. This is the first time I’ve ever heard one in person. Now all I have to do is see a cock fight before I die, and I will have accomplished everything on my list. (5.) And “Talent Hunt 2006-07 – It’s a Unique Steps for Handicapped & Others – Acting, Modelling, Dancing, Singing & Special Talent.” This sign was at the bus terminal.
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