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Wine lovers from across the country thronged Maharashtra 's Pune city on Saturday to attend the 'Wine Tasting Festival'. Celebrations for the festive season have already kicked off here with Christmas and New Year around, and the annual Wine Tasting Festival is pulling big crowds day by day. More than 50 varieties of wine from 12 leading Indian wineries were on display in the festival that was hosted for the fourth time by the Pune Gourmet Club. A wine lover here said the festival is an excellent opportunity for those, who want to get a taste of variety of wines brought from across the world. "This is a very excellent festival because we get to taste variety of wines across the world. There are Australian wines, Italian wines, Indian wines and there are new wineries coming up every now and then and we get to taste everything," said Raj, a wine lover. "There is lot of fun involved like grape stomping is there, sea food and shawarma, and other continental foods. It is a huge exciting concoction of wine, food and glamour and lot of beautiful people and it is a lot of fun," he added. Every visitor was also handed a kit carrying a glass, a tasting card and a wine guide. Sweet flavoured wine was the most sought after amongst the girls. Shweta Santani, another visitor here, said the festival offered lot of different taste, which is usually not available in the market. "They have a lot of different taste and different flavours, which you don't usually get at any restaurant in fact. So if you want to taste different wines which are not ordinarily available and this is a good place to try it out," she said. Besides showcasing the different varieties of wine, the event also emphasised that the consumption of wine has positive effects on health. Pune Gourmet Club is a group of food and wine enthusiasts based in Pune with 200 members. The club organised India 's first ever-wine tasting festival in 2007, which attracted more than 1,000 visitors. The club also organises vineyard tours, ticketed gourmet banquets, wine appreciation sessions and markets wine preservation systems for restaurants and wine bars and has published a wine guide.

Wine aficionados throng Pune wine tasting festival