FORTUNE COOKIE: The toughest test in human history
It is only when you meet the World’s Best Sommelier, which is an honour bestowed every three years upon a person I can only describe as the human encyclopedia of wine, that you realise how demanding and lonely the road to becoming one can be.
I can declare with pride that I was at a wine master class conducted by Paolo Basso, the most recent of the recipients of this coveted life title since 1969, but I must admit with utter dejection to my abject failure in the blind tasting conducted by him.
I felt almost like the winemaker I knew who couldn’t identify one of his own wines at a fun blind tasting that an importer had conducted before dinner at his home!
Paolo Basso, who was in Delhi last week for Kempinski's World Gourmet Summit, spent more than 20 years preparing for the arduous road to the coveted title of World's Best Sommelier
I could identify three of the four wines, but I fell flat on my nose when asked to zero in on the vintage and the production region, so much so that I was sure that a Rhone Valley Syrah of the year 2009 was an Australian Shiraz (true, the two share a common genetic pool, but their expressions are very different), circa 2012.
Basso was addressing Kempinski’s top global food and beverage honchos at the luxury hotel chain's first World Gourmet Summit in Delhi - at the Kempinski Ambience Hotel in Suraj Mal Vihar - and had us riveted to his account of how he became the World’s Best Sommelier.
The impeccably mannered Swiss-Italian’s exacting quest began two decades ago, when he started preparing for the Best Sommelier of Switzerland title, which he won in 1997.
Since then, he has spent thousands of waking hours and euros travelling across the wine regions of the world, visiting vineyards, sampling wines and mentally cataloguing them according to vintage and region, and evolving into a walking-talking encyclopedia of wine.
“It took me 18 hours a day of hard work and a lot of money to become the World's Best Sommelier,” the ever-smiling Basso said.
“Each time I drank a wine to prepare tasting notes, I had to spend money.”
That must be quite a lot of money, for Basso must have tasted thousands of wines to become the World’s Best Sommelier.
Conducted by the Association de la Sommellerie Internationale (ASI), or the International Association of Sommeliers, the road to the title, which is awarded once every three years, is the toughest test in human history - the only test that measures the capabilities of all five senses of a candidate.
And worse, the last two rounds, after all but nine of the 55 candidates (each the champion sommelier of his or her country) are eliminated from the competition, are conducted in front of a live audience and televised live, so you have to look good, dress smart, talk well and, above all, keep a cool head.
Basso had to perform in front of a crowd of 4,000 people in Tokyo and the runner-up, Canada’s Veronique Rivest (the first woman to make it to the final round of this gut-wrencher), suffered the ignominy of having her violently shaking hands being zoomed in on national television.
It’s like being on a reality TV show. The big difference is that you’ve got to know the answers to such questions as, how many times does the Bible make a reference to wines and vines (241 times, in case you are curious), or what is glera (the grape that goes into making the sparkling wine Prosecco - the grape variety was also known as prosecco till 2009).
That is the easier part. The competition also requires all those vying for the title to write tasting notes for wines served to them out of decanters, to recognise wines (including their vintages and regions of origin) in a blind tasting, and to serve wines while answering random questions from experts who pose as customers. It takes a razor-sharp brain and nerves of steel just to survive the challenge.
Well, Paolo did, and now he's on top of the world.
Burger King engineers a reinvention
The Whopper has defined the Burger King menu since 1957
Ray Croc must be squirming up there each time it is said that the McAloo Tikki Burger is the top-selling item on the McDonald's menu in India. It's a best-seller even in the United Arab Emirates.
International fast-food chains have learnt for their own good that when in India, you've got to be like the Indians.
McDonald's did it with the Maharaja Mac, a first-of-its-kind reinvention of the Big Mac; Domino's did it with chicken tikka and keema do pyaza pizzas; and now, Burger King is all set to make history by opening its first store in India - at Select Citywalk in Saket - by launching the vegetarian, chicken and mutton versions of the Whopper.
The Whopper has defined the Burger King menu since 1957 and it has always comprised of a quarter pound (133 grams) of "savoury firegrilled beef topped with juicy tomatoes, fresh cut lettuce, creamy mayonnaise, crunchy pickles, and sliced white onions on a soft sesame seed bun".
It may pack in 650 calories and 60mg of cholesterol, but it has never been made with anything but beef. Not so in India.
What I'd love to see is if Burger King, or BK, will be able to push its Mutton Whopper, or quietly withdraw it in the same way as McDonald's made its Maharaja Mac into a 100 per cent chicken product.
After failing to break free from the United Kingdom, the Scots now have egg on their face.
Jim Murray's Whisky Bible, the most authoritative voice on the subject, has just released its rankings for 2015 and the winner is The Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013 (priced at $160, or Rs 9,600 at the present exchange rate, in the U.S.).
Yamazaki dates back to the year 1923, but the Scots have been making Scotch for aeons. To add insult to injury, there's not one Scotch in the Top Five, and the honour for the Best European Whisky has gone to a littleknown English label, Chapter 14 Not Peated.
Why Nooba rocks despite the cyber hub
Gurgaon's Cyber Hub may have rattled the economics of just about every restaurant within a 5km radius, but the one nearest to it carries on as if nothing has happened around it.
All those who work at Tower C of DLF Cyber City’s Building No. 8, and they include a substantial number of those on the staff of American Express, treat Nooba like their proud secret.
The Chinese restaurant, whose kitchen is presided over by a talented man of few words and many smiles, Ding Jiming, is owned by Rahul Bhatia, the brain behind IndiGo who knows more about food and wine than most of us, and Gurgaon’s expat Chinese community just loves it.
Nooba is Delhi-NCR's best standalone Chinese restaurant
I call it the local Chinese dhaba - somewhat like the Japanese gem, Raifu Tei at the Dia Park Premier, at Sector-29, Gurgaon - and I have yet to see any diminution in the number of Nooba’s Chinese clientele.
I usually order one of Nooba’s innumerable meal-in-a-bowl options listed on my table mat and I have never been dissatisfied. The other day, dining at Nooba’s second outlet at Pegasus One next to the Ibis hotel on Golf Course Road (Sector-53, Gurgaon), I discovered that Nooba has an ‘authentic’ menu that has evolved out of suggestions made to the chef by its Chinese clientele.
Nooba’s second menu took shape after Aditya Bhaskar, a hospitality industry veteran who now heads Bhatia's restaurant business, encouraged Chef Ding to list the requests made by his Chinese guests.
Those dishes were first presented to guests on a printed sheet and eventually put together in a colourful menu book.
From this menu, I had the most memorable steamed fish skewered on asparagus spears served on a thin bed of light chilli sauce, followed by mildly chilli-hot, batter-fried, Sichuan-style chicken chunks, a heart-warming fish hot pot, chicken in oyster sauce (not gravy!) with oyster mushrooms, and a sublime steamed sea bass in soy.
Even the darsan (fried noodles drizzed with honey) were in a league of their own.
Go to Nooba. You’ll love it.
