Wines made from Grillo grapes of India
Discover the best wines made with Grillo as a single variety or as a blend of India.
A very ancient grape variety still grown today in western Sicily. Very often associated with catarratto and inzolia, it produces the famous Marsala liqueur wine. It is also increasingly being vinified as a single variety and produces excellent dry wines full of freshness and fruitiness. Grillo is believed to be the result of an intra-fertile cross between catarratto and Muscat of Alexandria or zibibbo, obtained in 1869 by Antonino Mendola. It is represented by two biotypes that can be easily recognized, but it seems that winegrowers attach little importance to them. Little known in other Italian regions - in Liguria it is known as "rossese bianco" - it can also be found in Australia and South Africa. It is not widely grown in France, although it is interesting because of its ability to withstand hot climates and drought, and to ripen quite late.
India is an emerging wine economy, both in terms of production and consumption, and has the potential to become a major player on the global wine scene. This is because the country has consistently experienced the highest growth in consumption in the world, at around 20-30% per annum between 2002 and 2010. To meet this demand, a significant amount of wine is imported every year, but India also has a set of well-established and evolving domestic wineries. Historically, the introduction of grapes to the Indian subcontinent and the subsequent proliferation of viticulture came from Persia in 500 B.
We all have different motives in choosing wine. There are those hoping for a journey into unexplored regions of sublime sensation, and those with earthier desires, happy when the first glass has them seeing double. There are wines to accommodate them both: a prickly little Mosel on the one hand and a 15% Barolo on the other. Doesn’t the ideal wine, though, combine the two – inspiration with stimulus, perfume with punch? The three little letters ‘abv’ (alcohol by volume) only tell half the story, ...
I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...
I’m busy, lazy or just tired… it’s half past twelve. I open the fridge and the same familiar labels smile up at me. The same with the repurposed coal hole under the front steps where the red wines live. I won’t tell you exactly what they are – although regular readers can have a pretty good guess. The ones that get mentioned least frequently are the ones that make an appearance on every routine day. When the soup (winter) or the salad (summer) comes out for a ‘working’ lunch, the bottle be ...