A sommelier, a master winemaker and an author — Rajat Parr is a man who wears many hats

Rajat Parr’s life has been defined by two geographies: that of Burgundy and California. For Parr, the latter is home and the former “feels like home”. For those who come in late, Parr is among America’s most well-regarded sommeliers. For the past decade or so, he has also ventured into wine making. He makes Burgundy-styled wines in California and Oregon, or “New World Wines using an Old World template”. The wine labels Parr co-owns include Sandhi and Domaine de la Cote, from Santa Rita Hills, and Evening Land in Eola-Amity Hills.

Sommeliers turning winemakers is not a rarity, but the first half of Parr’s journey was an unlikely one. Rajat Parashar (Parr is an Anglicised version of his surname) was born and bought up in Kolkata. The 46-year-old, an alumnus of the Welcomgroup Graduate School of Hotel Administration, was sure he was going to be a chef. And that’s one reason why he headed to the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), in New York, for his graduation in the mid-1990s.

“We are Punjabis. My father was a whisky drinker, and I don’t think we ever bought wine,” says Parr, who was in Mumbai recently for a talk. Parr first tasted wine at his uncle’s home in London, and that got him mildly interested in the drink. But he had his epiphany much later, when he was working with the master sommelier Larry Stone at the landmark Rubicon restaurant in San Francisco. Parr’s curiosity about wine increased while he was at the CIA and one of his instructors suggested he should apprentice under Stone. “I wrote him a letter and flew to San Francisco. His office told me there were no vacancies, but I could buss tables to begin with and see how it went. My visa was expiring in six months, I had nothing to lose, so I said okay. I was prepared to come back to India after working with him. “Two months into his stint with Stone, Parr says he tasted some Chablis. “It smelled gorgeous. I was hooked and from then on, I went deeper and deeper into wine.”