Wine Country: Terrano Food Trail

My parents are disappointed in me. And not for any other reason than the fact that I do not understand wine. When both your parents work in the hospitality industry and have been in kitchens all their life, your knowledge of wine should ideally go beyond the cheapest port wine you can get your hands on at the local supermarket. Mine doesn’t. Imagine their forlorn faces when as a teenager I started devouring car magazine after car magazine instead of the latest issue of Sommelier. Time to make some amends then?

It was that time of the month when I took our trusty Terrano somewhere around the country to discover new food. Nashik has some of the country’s finest vineyards and wineries, and I’m pretty certain it has some insane restaurants to pair them with. Nashik is a stone’s throw away from Pune — some 210km if you head up NH50, the Pune-Nashik highway. But this road is being widened and the roadworks have turned this route into nothing short of an obstacle course, so we headed to wine country via Mumbai. This route is about 70km longer, but the roads are flawless and distances could be covered much faster.

The Terrano kept us comfortable all the way from Pune to Nashik

Once past Mumbai, you get on to NH3 which heads all the way to Agra, but we were going only up to Nashik. This road has a lot of truck traffic, all sorts of goods carriers from central India and north Maharashtra frequent this road and being in an SUV like the Terrano is a real godsend. The SUV’s 1.5-litre diesel is a real punchy motor and has a whole lot of accessible torque — 248Nm right from 2,250rpm. Keep the car on boost and overtaking these long convoys of trucks is no problem at all. There is one interesting bit of road — the twisty hill climb just before Igatpuri. It is a one-way stretch with no nasty surprises waiting on the other side of a corner so you can really enjoy your car all the way up. You’d think being a burly SUV, the Terrano would have trouble cornering hard. But no, it stays planted and offers plenty of feedback through the steering and pedals, keeping you on top of things.

Now we weren’t heading inside Nashik, we were visiting the wineries just outside the city limits and our first stop was the York winery. It’s located on a 9-acre property and is surrounded by its own vineyards. We made it here just in time for lunch with Kailash Gurnani, the man who owns the place. The York property is rather tranquil, and has a small restaurant called Cellar Door on the ground floor, and an open air lounge with a stunning view of the adjacent vineyards and the Gangapur reservoir for you to enjoy your wine. No wine for us though, we were driving.

Remember, always enjoy your alcohol responsibly.

The speciality of Cellar Door is Indian cuisine, and we didn’t hold back — chicken tikka, mutton kheema and since we were in the heart of Maharashtra, chicken maratha curry as well. The mutton kheema was especially nice, the meat wasn’t as finely minced as the kheema you get in Mumbai, but it sure as hell tasted good. All this, and a couple of piping hot butter kulchas were washed down with a glass of juice (not fermented, mind you) and we headed out for a drive around the vineyards.

If there was anything the Terrano was designed to do, it was this. The trails around the vineyards are bumpy and dusty and the Terrano is a perfect fit for the job. The 205mm ground clearance is ample enough to avoid the stray rock, and the nicely tuned suspension keeps all drama out of the cabin. The trails around the vineyards are quite narrow and they don’t really lead anywhere, but trundling along with acres and acres of grapevines all around you is not something you get to do everyday.

The food and the ambience at Soleil is absolutely divine

As the sun set, we headed over to Sula. This sprawling 30-acre property is where the first of Sula’s vineyards came up, way back in 2000. They have over 1800 acres across the country now and this place is more of a tourist destination than anything else. It still has cellars and a barrel room where wine is fermented and aged, but the main draw is a deck overlooking the vineyards and a restaurant, where I’d be eating dinner. Called Soleil, it lies on the Sula property but the kitchen is run by the same people who run a shack on Ashvem beach in Goa called La Plage. I’ve been to La Plage on multiple occasions — the food is absolutely divine, and I knew I was in for a treat.

I started off with a simple dish to whet my appetite and set the tone for the evening, the chicken and mashed potato baby cakes, one on top of the other served with a mustard sauce and roasted cherry tomatoes and thyme. The restaurant grows its own produce — the potatoes and tomatoes were from their own garden. The chicken was marinated with vinegar and the tartness was balanced by the sharp mustard, it made for quite a delectable starter. Next up was a lovely roasted leg of chicken. The chicken spent a full hour in the oven before reaching my plate and was cooked to perfection. It came with a reduced thyme jus and potato gratin, a typically French accompaniment. And for desert, I had another French classic — crepes with Nutella and walnut. Phew!

Wine is fermented in these massive towers.

I wouldn’t mind coming back to Nashik to eat at Soleil alone; it’s that great a place. They change their menu every six months, that’s reason enough to return. And it isn’t just the food that is fabulous, the ambience is rather inviting as well. It’s plush and warm, and makes for quite an intimate setting. The interiors have been done by the head chef’s wife, and she’s furnished and decorated the entire place using trash she’s found trawling through scrapyards and waste dumps.

Post fermentation, wine is sent to the barrel room to age

We stayed the night at Beyond, a resort 3km further down the road from the Sula winery run by Sula itself. It’s a lovely place, nestled in the vineyards with each room named after a type of wine. My room had a huge balcony that overlooked the infinity pool and a small vineyard. The minibar in the room is stocked with all sorts of fancy wines and there was no shortage of ingredients for a night of revelry. But I was there on work and had to be up early so instead, I sat down with a glass of Sula’s Chenin Blanc and just soaked in the calm of the place.

The restaurant at York specialises in Indian food, and we didn’t hold back.

After a typical continental breakfast of eggs, sausages, croissants and orange juice at Beyond’s coffee shop, we headed back to the Sula winery. At the vineyards, you can take a tour of the winery where you will be shown step by step the multiple processes in wine making. You can even take part in a wine tasting session where you can learn to appreciate finer wine than what I’m accustomed to. Or you can get ankle deep into a bucket of grapes and stamp on them until it becomes a big pool of mush, but I frankly found it too nauseating to even try. Instead, after the tour, we headed to the open air deck on the first floor and reclined with a book. This place is essentially designed for you to sit back, sip your glass of fine wine, listen to some nostalgic music and just unwind from all the stress of city life. They don’t serve full meals here, but they do serve plenty of snacks to accompany your wine. A quick bite of goat’s cheese and kebabs was just enough to see us back on the road.

The Terrano is completely at home around the Wineyards.

Oh, what a weekend it has been! Not only did I have my fill of great food, but I did get a slight education in viticulture and wine making. And you know what, a lot of parallels can be drawn with cars, and the Terrano in particular. In winemaking, it is possible to make countless blends but not all of them taste good. A good wine works when all the elements of the wine — the sugar, the alcohol, the flavours come together in the right balance and work. And Nissan have a properly balanced car in the Terrano — great highway manners, completely manageable in the city and it isn’t afraid to get a bit muddy off the road. How’s that for a crash course in wines, huh? Alright, I still can’t tell the difference between a Sauvignon Blanc and a Chardonnay, but I’ll get there. Eventually.