Age is just a number. It's irrelevant unless, of course, you happen to be a bottle of wine.
Wine is bottled poetry!
Very truly said. So the post is all about wine and my very first experience of a Vineyard Tour. How it was planned and executed would be a quite nostalgic story to share. So here we go!
It was back in 2019 Oct, I had already invited my three close friends from different cities to Bangalore, everything was already planned for the bash and the occasion was my bachelor party. As planned, the party began from the moment they entered my home and it actually began in the morning itself. After having an amusing and enthralled party full day and night, we had no idea what are we doing next.
With a noble thought of wine and outing, the next we were standing in front of the Heritage Vineyard Winery, As we say, Wine is the answer to all the questions.
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| I along with my friends at Heritage Vineyard |
The notion of a stroll with the rose-colored, glasses of top-notch wine was enough to convince us. With a soft corner for wine in our heart and the lines of Tyrion Lannister from GOT - I drink and I know things somehow tricked and we began our drive in the afternoon around 12 PM towards the Heritage Vinyard, to learn the skill of making and tasting this fantabulous drink, Wine.
I had heard of Heritage Vinyard Winery before but never visited the place, although it was always on my checklist being a wine lover, maybe because now was the time to explore and check out the real process of winemaking.
Heritage Vinyard
Heritage Vinyard is located in Channapatna village in Ramanagara District, around 60 kilometers from Bangalore, and is extremely famous for the finest quality of wine and the choices they have. The rustic town Channapatna offers the best favorable climatic condition to produce remarkable grade wine and is exceptionally famous in Karnataka.
It is probably the best place near Bangalore to witness the winemaking process from the scratch and taste authentic wine. Other than the tour of winemaking and wine tasting, there is an in-house restaurant offering European, Italian and Indian cuisine, where you can grab an amazing meal with your favorite wine served.
The theme of the Vinyard is the barrel and big bottled theme, giving an amusing feeling and creating a perfect spot for a picnic or outing with friends and loved ones. The bamboo fences and the creativity around the whole compound were superb and impressive. They have many varieties of flavored, red wine, white wine, and sparkling wine, which they ship in and outside the country.
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| Heritage Vinyard is themed using barrels and big bottles |
How to Reach the Heritage Vinyard?
There are basically two routes to reach Heritage Vinyard:
1. Mysore Highway --> Shortest and easy way to reach. You can reach there, within 2-3 hours, and it's around 60 km from Bangalore.
2. The countryside route via Bylalu --> Since this is not the highway route, and the way is along the countryside, and villages, this route may be time taking.
If you are staying in Bangalore, you can book a car/cab or book a self-drive car and reach here.
Information About Heritage Vinyard
Timings: 10AM to 5 PM
Charges: Wine tasting and tour - Rs.250/person for 1-2 hours. Tour to the kids below 10 years is not chargeable.
Stomping Grapes: Rs. 500/person (you need to call prior to check the availability).
Wine Tasting and Tour Experience
To witness the process of winemaking is definitely an amusing experience. After taking the tickets, we were waiting for our chance to come as there was already a wine-tour session going on. The instructors are assigned to each batch of around 10-15 people. We waited for 10-15 minutes for our chance to come.
The tour begins with grape farming, we were taken through the fields and shown how grape cultivation is done, how different varieties of grapes are grown in different climatic conditions as well as how watering is done based on the timings of each grape quality. The grape should be ripe enough to have skin to seed to the pulp ratio as this define the texture and quality of the wine. The quality of grapes plays a major role in the taste, flavor, structure, and quality of the wine.
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| Big grape farms where different varieties of grapes are grown |
The next section of the tour begins with the tour of winemaking process, the guide took us to the crushing section first, where they crush the skin and pulp of the grapes. The Black grapes are used for Red wine and the green ones are kept for White wine. If you want you can ask for grapes stomping (you have to pay prior and check availability for this).
Next was the fermentation of crushed grapes juice. The fermentation tanks were around 16-20 times doubled layered. Yeast plays a major role in winemaking as it converts the sugar of the grapes into alcohol, heat, and carbon dioxide. Titration processes are used to check the acidity of the wine and classify it into different categories.
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| Wine Fermentation chamber |
In the next stage, wine is processed in centrifugal machines, which are used to deliver around 90% clear wine after removing the sedimentation then later the wines are transferred to softeners and tanks for bottling up. It takes around 35-40 days to make a bottle of wine.
Once we reached the tasting room, the aroma of rose-colored, glasses of wine was almost everywhere. Our instructor was explaining us the correct way of drinking wine. He referred to the wine as shy in nature and until you provoke, they won't open up at all,
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| Six different types of wine to be tasted |
He taught us to swirl the wine and try to get its aroma, take a sip of wine, let it stay in our mouth and roll it for like 5-8 seconds and then finally swallow. They served around six types of wines for tasting which include, dry, carbonated, and regular sweet wine. It took about half an hour to complete the wine tasting and by that time we were completely engrossed and thrilled by the subtle and elegant taste of the wine.
The whole experience of the tour was just amazing, incredible, and informative.
We finally grabbed some food from the restaurant there which was as wonderful as our trip here. We purchased a few bottles of wine, had a walk through the vineyard as it was almost sunset time and then we came back to our car, ready to move back to Bangalore.
Our experience here was wonderful and definitely a memorable trip for us to remember as part of my Bacherolate party.
I hope you liked this post and got some valuable information about the Heritage Vineyard Winery. Let me know in the comment section if you need any information.
Do visit and share your experiences as well.
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