INDIA. Drinks and travel retail sector veteran Rajiv Bhatia is the winner of our Readers’ Competition dedicated to the recent Cricket World Cup final between Australia and India .
The long-time Inver House Distillers and William Grant & Sons is now
Courtesy of The House of Sōmrus (sponsor of The Moodie Blog) and its travel retail agent Duty Free Global, and independent Australian spirits company Otter Craft Distilling, we offered fantastic prizes to the lucky reader who most accurately answered the questions below.
- Who will win the final, India or Australia? – Result: Australia
- Who will be player of the match? – Result: Travis Head
- Who will top score for India? – Result: KH Rahul
- Who will top score for Australia? – Result: Travis Head
- Tie-breaker: How many runs will the winning team make? – Result: 241
Like the match itself, our competition turned out to be a low-scoring contest. No reader got any more than one of the first four questions right so the result was decided via the tie-breaker.
Rajiv (who had correctly picked Travis Head to top score for Australia) picked 325 as the winning score, a differential of 84, just one run better than Ivo Favotto, Sydney-based Founder & CEO of The Mercurius Group (who naturally predicted Australia to win) and five better than former TFWA Managing Director John Rimmer (the only entrant to select KH Rahul as India’s top scorer) with 330.
Top prizes
The House of Sōmrus and Duty Free Global have joined forces to offer our winner a tastebud-tempting trip of Sōmrus Chai, Coffee and Mango cream liqueurs, an India-inspired hat trick of flavours delicious straight or (as the Aussies may be) on the rocks.
Julie and Eduard Otter, brother and sister Co-Founders of Sydney-based Otter Craft Distilling – the acronym OCD also stands for ‘Obsession, Creation, Destination’ – have generously complemented that offer with a bottle of the fabulous Mary St Citrus Gin, adorned just like the Australian cricket team in green and gold.
US-based, India-born House of Sōmrus Founder Pankaj K (PK) Garg has created one of the world’s great drinks success stories of the past decade.
You can read our fascinating interview with him here, in which PK Garg describes how he and his wife Swati came up with the Sōmrus recipe in their home kitchen as they strove to create the world’s first Indian cream liqueur.
“My story is actually more than my story and than that of my brand. In some ways, it’s also the story of our country,” PK says.
In 2010, PK took a business class flight from Delhi to Chicago. “On the flight I had a spicy Indian meal… and they asked me what I would like for dessert. I am not a dessert person, so I asked for a 50cl miniature of Baileys Irish Cream instead. That was my nightcap and dessert – I loved Baileys. Then the lady serving me said we have a dessert from India, which I would highly recommend you try,” he recalls.
“The dessert in question was called rasmalai, very famous in India – if you wake up any Indian in their sleep and give them a spoon they’ll want a bowl of it! It’s that popular for a billion-plus people. So I wasn’t expecting much, but I had this fantastic bowl of rasmalai, which is made from cardamom, saffron, almond rose, pistachio, and cream.”
Suddenly the prospect of his Baileys paled alongside the explosion of delectable flavours in front of him. “That’s when the epiphany came to my mind,” PK remembers. “That dessert has a liquid emulsion of cream. I said, if this emulsion had alcohol in it then I would totally want it because that’s the flavour I like. And then I thought, ‘Oh my god, we have no drink like this in India that represents such a big civilisation.’” The rest is, as they say, history and today Sōmrus is a fast-growing force in North America and overseas, notably in duty free where Barry Geoghegan and the Duty Free Global team have done an outstanding job for the brand.
OCD boasts a similarly inspirational and perhaps unlikely entrepreneurial story. Eduard and Julie Otter’s respective backgrounds included strategic brand and business development, as well as CEO roles for local and international brands.
With a corporate background in hospitality, including almost three years at Pernod Ricard, Eduard began formulating ideas that reflected his love of whisky and other spirits, along with his strong respect for tradition, provenance and innovation.
In 2015, after years of experimentation and distillations in his garage – and creating his own mash by hand – Eduard produced the first 50-litre barrel of whisky.
In mid-2019 he and Julie walked away from their successful corporate careers to create the family business; an independent distillery which would use only sustainable and traceable ingredients and would reflect their shared values of creativity, style and taste. You can read their full story here.
Mary St Citrus Gin reflects the core DNA of the OCD brand, ensuring the best sourced botanicals, lengthy research and development and a distillation process that is aligned to the innovative methods the brand is recognised for.
The name reflects the location of where the gin was created at the original OCD distillery in Mary Street, St Peters.
The message on the bottle reads: ‘From our street to your street – however you want, wherever you want to, from wherever you are. The heart of Sydney’s inner west, from us to you – no judgement… just great gin!’
This delicious Citrus Gin is filled with sustainably sourced lemons, limes, oranges & mandarins.
It is notable also for:
- Sustainable & traceable ingredients
- Fair Trade payment to all suppliers
- No additives or preservatives
- Organic juniper base.
- Being Australian-mad ✈
