This tea-wine will give you a kick

The aromatic flavour of tea in the morning prepares you for the day. The same tea will now give you a kick, thanks to a bunch of scientists who made a wine from the brew.

Rich in health boosting chemicals, the tea-wine has been created by a Himalayan laboratory that is set to transfer the technology to a firm in Mozambique. Two Indian units in Pune and Hamirpur are interested too.

The brown coloured wine is made from tea dust, yeast, sugar and four varieties of fruit, including a Himachal fruit named Kafal and a type of yellow berries. Its alcohol content is 10-13%
The tea-based wine has the potential to compete with the red wine as both are rich in anti-oxidants, which protect the body from cell damage. It contains an anti-oxidant component known as Catechin, which helps remove dangerous free radicals from the body. Green tea is considered beneficial to health because of the its high Catechin content.

“We are going to compete with high-end wines. As the global market of organic wine is worth several billions of dollars, we intend to pitch in with our product,” Sanjay Kumar, director of the CSIR Institute of Himalayan Bioresources Technology (IHBT), Palampur told DH.

At the IHBT laboratory, four varieties of these wine are available. The most popular one has been named Kargil Sepoy after it was found popular with the armed forces during a three year trial.
Incidentally, one of the Kargil war heroes Captain Saurabh Kalia, who was captured and killed by the Pakistan, hails from this Himachal town.

Though the tea-based wine was developed several years ago, sources said Indian wine industry was not interested because of inherent complexities in the Indian excise rules as the raw material is a new crop. But a fresh push on commercialisation has now come from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research headquarters after the CSIR was asked by the government to earn more revenue.

Scientists took up the tea-wine project more than a decade ago when the Kangra valley tea sector faced a major economic crisis. The underlying aim was to create more value added products from tea to boost the local economy.