Sharing a passion for wine

This article first appeared in Winepress magazine and is republished with permission.

Growing up in the frenetic crowds of India’s Mumbai, Anirudh Inasu felt out of pace and place.

‘‘Everything there needs to be in a rush,’’ he says from the Fromm cellar door in Marlborough, where little is done at speed.

‘‘It is completely opposite,’’ he says with a laugh.

‘‘I always take the back road to get here, and it’s the most amazing feeling with the mountains on one side and vineyards on the other. What I would call traffic here is four cars ahead of me.’’

Inasu is in his last semester of a wine and viticulture degree at Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology (NMIT), but prefers to talk about wine than to make it, loving the opportunity to tell visitors about how it’s grown and made, what foods it can pair with, and perhaps the compost that helped it become what it is.

‘‘Composting is one of my favourite topics,’’ he admits.

His introduction to that ‘‘miraculous thing’’ came in India, when he realised his engineering career – forged at the behest of his parents and after years of study – was depressing him.

He took a break from his work, and he travelled to Annadana Western Ghats, part of the Annadana Soil and Seed Savers Network.

The main farm is in Bangalore, but the Western Ghats operation is more experimental, says Inasu, who adored working in the jungle, alongside wild elephants, the ‘‘humungous’’ great hornbill, giant red squirrels and peacocks.

‘‘I have seen 200 different types of ants,’’ he says.

‘‘I never knew there were freshwater jellyfish until I swam there.

‘‘It’s a beautiful place, even though I got stung by scorpions a few times,’’ he laughs.

After 18 months, Inasu couldn’t stay on the farm, but nor could he return to civil engineering.

He wanted to find a career in organics, which would help leave the land better for the next generation, so looked for opportunities in horticulture, then distillations and fermentation.

NMIT appealed, partly because he didn’t want to be in a city, and a Google Earth view of Marlborough revealed mountains, oceans and rivers, while high sunshine hours added to the attraction.

That made his first winter pruning job a bit of a shock. ‘‘I have never felt that cold in my life,’’ he says.

He’s also worked for Allan Scott, wanting to try a medium-sized conventional wine company as well as the organics he aspired to, ‘‘and I knew I liked their wines from the start’’.

But his heart was long set on Fromm, and he ‘‘waited patiently’’, then leapt at the opportunity to work at the cellar door.

‘‘It is something I really wanted and what I wanted to work towards.’’

He loves the slow pace of winemaking and the wines that result.

Talking about wine ‘‘is a bit of a passion’’, he says.

‘‘How wine can make you feel and how it can pair with food.’’

That passion means he wants to move his career more towards sales than the winemaking side of things, although he knows learning more in the winery helps him share it with others.

There are plenty of wines ageing patiently at Fromm, now celebrating its 30th vintage, but he’s in no hurry.

‘‘I plan to be here for a really long time.’’