India, Dec. 23 -- Tomorrow, on Christmas Eve, the faithful will gather in churches across the city, as they do each year, for Midnight Mass. They will joyfully welcome the Christ Child and receive Communion - consecrated bread and wine - and partake of it, following His injunction to 'eat my flesh and drink my blood'.

With Communion being such a core Christian ritual, it is no wonder that both yeast- leavened bread ('double roti') and wine came to India, officially at least, with the Portuguese, at the fag end of the 15th century.

Unofficially, wine was known in the subcontinent for millennia; it was Persian traders who, in 2000 BCE, first introduced us to their ancient grape-based ambrosia. Two thousand years later, the Indian medical ...