Raj Parr profile/Mint Lounge

When viewed from the sky—or at least Google Earth— Phelan Farms in Cambria, California is a picturesque piece of land that hugs the Pacific Ocean.

It is here, three hours from San Francisco, that acclaimed winemaker and self-taught sommelier, Rajat Parr, 49, has leased 12 acres of land. He wants to farm the land, and create wines with minimal intervention, using organic, biodynamic and regenerative farming practices that give back to the earth, and sing to his soul.

Parr’s wines are not inoculated with yeast cultures to activate or speed up their fermentation process. They’re not made with over-ripe grapes to create the big bold ’California Cabs‘ that have an alcohol content of 17% or more. In contrast, the alcohol content in most Old World wines is 13.5%. It’s a slower way of living, growing and drinking that Parr wants to revive.

This isn’t new of course. Organic wines are gaining steadily in the global market but they are still a fragment (3.5-4% by most estimates) of all the wine that is consumed.

“Once you figure out how to make wine, it is not rocket science,” says Parr. “It gets repetitive. I want to go deeper now, be a farmer.”

It seems like the logical next step for a man who has experienced a meteoric rise in the rarified echelons of the US wine world.

A self-taught sommelier turned winemaker now turned producer-farmer, Raj Parr has seen it all, tasted it all, and has views on everything. Parr serves on juries, appears on talk shows, has a Rajat Parr wine club, and is profiled in movies and magazines.

Not bad for a Kolkata boy named Rajat Parashar, who didn’t taste wine till he was 20 (in 1993), and studied at the Welcomgroup Institute of Hotel Administration in Manipal before moving to the US in 1994, becoming a naturalized American citizen and shortening his name.

In person, Parr is unprepossessing. He doesn’t seek to impress and almost mumbles his answers. I cold-messaged him on Instagram, saying that I was driving down the California coast and would like to meet. He graciously agreed and picked me up in his dusty four-wheel drive.

Clad in an orange windbreaker, Parr is of medium height, stocky build and hides his baldness with a cap. He’s mild-mannered, and describes himself as a “Buddhist following the lunar calendar,” yearns to stay connected to nature and the seasons in a visceral way—at the centre of his plot of land is an apple orchard planted in a mandala, a circle with strategic trees denoting the chakras. His scent memory is the stuff of legend. You can see it in action in the two famous wine documentaries, Somm 3 and Somm: Into the Bottle, where he is one of the few sommeliers featured.