New Delhi: The menu for the state dinner at the White House, hosted by US President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is finally out. The lavish spread, consisting of items such as marinated millet, grilled corn kernel salad, compressed watermelon and tangy avocado sauce, also includes a red wine with an Indian connection.
The wine is from Napa Valley’s Patel Winery that was started by Gujarat-born Raj Patel. Patel’s family had settled in the US in 1972. A report by The Washington Post says the red blend “pays a particular homage to the ties between the host and the guest”.
Prior to the dinner, the guests will walk across the South Lawns of the White House and take their seat at a pavilion draped in “rich greens” and “saffron coloured” flowers at every table. They will enjoy the performances by Grammy award winning violinist and conductor Joshua Bell — who had in 2007 famously played outside a metro station in Washington D.C. – and Penn Masala, a South Asian acapella group from the University of Pennsylvania.
Patel Wines
Founded in 2007 by Raj Patel, a former wealth management executive, Patel Wines produces no more than a few hundred cases of wine (a case of wine in the US roughly contains 12 bottles of 750ml each) a year.
“I was listening to a story about vintners who were custom crushing; buying grapes from established growers and then making their own wine at someone else’s winery,” Patel said in an interview with California Golf News & Travel Magazine published by Golf Lab Media in 2015.
This story of custom crushing interested Patel, which eventually led to the birth of Patel Wines. Custom crushing is “the idea of making wine in a facility with equipment and resources provided by the facility management team”, according to Gravity Wine House, a Californian wine consultancy and custom crush facility.
The first batch of a hundred cases of the 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon by Patel Wines sold out quickly, according to California Golf News & Travel Magazine, and was given a rating of 95 by Robert Parker’s The Wine Advocate, a bi-monthly wine publication based in the US.
Each bottle of Patel Wines is handcrafted — right from the hand-sorting of clusters, to de-stemming and hand-sorting of berries. In 2015, production of Patel Wines topped 1,000 cases, and Patel was quoted as saying, “We’d rather continue to focus on what our objective has always been, to make great wine”.
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