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Generation Y-ine
Anirudh Inasu at Fromm
Anirudh Inasu on taking his time SOPHIE PREECE
GROWING UP in the frenetic crowds of India’s Mumbai, Anirudh Inasu felt out of pace and place. “Everything there needs to be in a rush,” he says from the Fromm cellar door in Marlborough, where little is done at speed. “It is completely opposite,” he says with a laugh. “I always take the back road to get here and it’s the most amazing feeling with the mountains on one side and vineyards on the other. What I would call traffic here is four cars ahead of me.” Anirudh is in his last semester of a wine and viticulture degree at Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology (NMIT), but prefers to talk about wine than to make it, loving the opportunity to tell visitors about how it’s grown and made, what foods it can pair with, and perhaps the compost that helped it become what it is. “Composting is one of my favourite topics,” he admits. His introduction to that “miraculous thing” came in India, when he realised his engineering career – forged at the behest of his parents and after years of study – was depressing him. He took a break from his work, and he travelled to Annadana Western Ghats, part of the Annadana Soil and Seed Savers Network. The main farm is in Bangalore, but the Western Ghats operation is more experimental, says Anirudh, who adored working in the jungle, alongside wild elephants,
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the “humungous” great hornbill, giant red squirrels and peacocks. “I have seen 200 different types of ants,” he says. “I never knew there were freshwater jellyfish until I swam there. It’s a beautiful place, even though I got stung by scorpions a few times,” he laughs. “You develop antibodies after a time.” The “crazy” skies were a different shade of pink, purple and orange every day and the variety of vegetation, both endemic and planted, was extreme, says Anirudh, who helped plant 14 different types of potatoes and many different types of orchids. After 18 months, Anirudh couldn’t stay on the farm, but nor could he return to civil engineering. He wanted to find a career in organics, which would help leave the land better for the next generation, so looked for opportunities in horticulture, then distillation and fermentation.
