"Cultivating Ambrosia" Whew! The Goa elections are over, along with all those “dry days” and restaurants losing their bar licences for “violations” so let’s sit back and raise a toast to the winners!
Now after all that excitement, I began to feel this void in my stomach, even after meals, so I said to myself, ”All you’ll ever do now till the next round of politicking is sit around and drink beer”
So I decided to take affirmative action and get a hobby that will bring meaning and true fulfillment into my life. I am making wine.
I haven’t the slightest interest in traditional hobbies like coin collecting, religion and matchbox labels. My banker friend Ajay collects coins. He just sort of rushes to the Reserve Bank counters the moment they open to issue limited edition coins or notes, and then takes them home and just keeps them. A real action sequence happens when he discovers a coin that has been minted with a head on both sides, you should see the way he gets excited and just about wets his polyester pants.
For many years I did not have a hobby. Of course when I put down “drugs” in questionnaires where they asked what my hobbies were I was only joking.
Then one day I met Joe and Maureen from Kodaikanal, and Joe introduced me to a potent bottle of wine made on his farm, right in his own garage. It seems Joe needed a hobby too, and soon became a self-taught home wine-maker or “vintner” as they say in the pretentious wine phrase-making thesaurus.
Joe took me to a store where they have wine-making equipment, where a person named Maharaj told me how wine-making contributed to his artistic development and kept giving me free samples till I handed over my credit card.
I’m glad I got into wine-making, because the wine sold here is watery and sweet and tasteless and the sappiest, wussiest wine in the world. All the other wine-making countries are drinking Don Bradman wine, and we are drinking Mandira Bedi.
At first I was reluctant to make my own wine. I had heard stories about how difficult it was to make, about it being illegal, and making you go blind. My neighbour, the beautiful Avril, has given me her personal wine-making recipe and reassured me that these were tall stories, especially the myth of how it makes you go gmpph drrk, glpph@$&*$*
The truth is home-made wine, is perfectly safe, unless you shake the bottle and it explodes. And it is completely legal to make home-made wine. I read up on the updated Government Bulletin on wine-making and it says, that if you make your own wine you can get a rebate in income tax under Section 800 DD, provided you claim you spent it on agricultural research.
It’s simple making your own wine: You take any old fruit and crush them between your toes in the bathtub, and then quickly walk away. (Traditional wine makers fill empty swimming pools with grapes and stomp on them till their bunions, corns and toenails drop off – this makes for a sweeter wine with a more earthy flavour.)
Your main ingredients are (1) a bottle of wine ingredients that you can get from Avril or Joe or an equivalent person, and (2) sexually active wheat. This little organism has only one cell in its plant-like body but has figured out how to convert sugar to alcohol – this is a far greater accomplishment than we can attribute to complex multi-cellular gigantic organisms such as the Indian World Cup 2007 Cricket Team. (Traditional wine makers use yeast - an animal that can take on the whole Australian Cricket Team)
After the tiny wheat grains finish converting your fruit to wine they suffocate and die in their millions, but you should not feel bad about this, because, like the great expanding population of India, there’s plenty more where they came from, on those huge wheat farms in Punjab.
Next your job is to siphon out the wine into bottles. This is the tricky part, because while you’re doing this, the phone rings and you get involved in a lengthy conversation with your builder, while your little visiting grandchild Adwait, gets hold of the tube and spews new wine and pulp all over the garage, on the car upholstery and on himself. And you become the target of his parents wrath when they accuse you of being a bad influence on their offspring.
But that is the only negative I have found. The wine looks and tastes smooth and delicious, except at times when the bottle tends to explode. There’s also another advantage – next elections when those “dry days” come around you no longer need to worry about running dry. Hic!
