This is the world’s first — a wine not from any vineyard but from tea gardens! And, the tea gardens of Assam.
You read that right — Assam’s very own Alpana Saikia had been crafting this beverage in her kitchen for long and when she read a news item in 2017 that Jorhat’s Tocklai Tea Research Institute has proved that good wine can indeed be made from Assam's tea, retaining all its health benefits, passion and a new-found hobby merged to go for it as an entrepreneur.
For this Nagaon girl, when marriage took her to a tea garden and its rather intimate circle of parties and exhibitions, little did she know how her life would change. Correct that… how she would change her life.
The year was 2000 and she was already a mother to two daughters. An avid tea drinker once she started at 18, and graduating to the heady pleasures of wine much, much later, it was at the Mariani Planters Club that Alpana first saw some fruit wine on display. Excitement bubbled within and she decided to try her hand at making it. This was the time when there was no YouTube, no internet. “And so I had to ask so many people for the recipe. My first was grape wine. I followed the steps properly and it came out rather well. Our colleagues and friends heaped praises and that instilled in me the confidence and soon I started making wine in small amounts, say 10-20 litres, from whatever fruit I got like peach, pineapple, mango, water melon, ginger, green tea, coffee, coco, etc. Most of the fruits were available in our tea garden bungalows”.
It was in 2000-end that “I suddenly thought of making wine from tea. I really put my heart and soul into it to extract a flavour full drink. Again, the result was amazing. I shared it with friends and family, and they were all very encouraging. I had never seen nor tasted tea wine anywhere, and buoyed with all that backing I plodded on. Moreover, it tasted good and is harmless”.
Talking about the process of making the tea wine, Alpana says it is quite lengthy and takes a lot of time to get the right taste. Fermentation takes almost two months. Without revealing the details, the ingredients she uses include CTC, Orthodox and green tea, natural spices and dry fruits with 12 per cent alcohol content. And the taste is sweet to semi-sweet.
As of now the kitchen is her lab, but Assam’s first winery, with a manufacturing capacity of 10 kl per month, is expected to be ready by this October at Tihu in Nalbari district. Surprisingly, Assam had no wine policy until June.
The commercial venture will ensure that the abundant fruits available in the state, like guava, litchi, gooseberry, pineapple would be sourced locally. The tea will come from the organic gardens. “We are talking with them, but not yet finalised. Other raw materials will be sourced from outside Assam for quality concerns”. The focus would also be on what kind of fertilizers etc are being used at the plantations.
The test reports are still coming in not only from the government, but also from other trustworthy institutions.
An entrepreneurial journey that began in the kitchen by a homemaker who diffidently claims to be neither a technical person nor a scientist, but through sheer grit, diligence and passion is set to become the Tea-Wine Queen to Assam, nay the world, and who knows an industrialist in the near future!
