Nayan Gowda is 42 and one of a new breed of latecomers to the world of wine. He came back to his native England in 2007 after four years’ immersion in an oenology degree in Australia and is still living out of a suitcase. He is not proud of this. “Ladies prefer a more stable gentleman, I know,” he comments ruefully.
Since learning the ropes of winemaking at the relatively mature age of 35, he has overseen vintages in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Hungary, England, France, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Ukraine was fun. Kazakhstan, where he was engaged to turn around a vanity winery, was not. When he arrived, he found the tanks that should have been ready for that year’s harvest filled with the last three vintages. The owner, a politician who saw wine as a way to the top, asked Nayan if he thought he could make a fair copy of the president’s favourite wine. Nayan said he thought he probably could, and was then told the president’s favourite wine was Petrus.
This was only part of the problem in Kazakhstan. The other was that during his four-month stint he was required to remain inside the workers’ compound in the evenings. “At least in Ukraine there were bars,” he complains. And Kazakh food, so important to a man who was once a chef at The Ivy in London, was a disappointment too. “For somewhere that’s been on a major international trade route for thousands of years, there’s a real lack of flavour…” To counter this, he takes a spice grinder and “lots of hot sauce wherever I go, and I always make sure I cook for the winery staff. They liked my food in Kazakhstan but there was no one to share my bottles of wine with because no one liked wine.” Except the president perhaps.