THE man credited with commercially taking the sorpatels, vindaloos, xacutis and rechades out of Goa and putting them on the world cuisine map is a former medico by the name of Dr. Ivo Azaredo Costa. In Goa, he is simply known as Costa. And Costa�s products, which range from spices and mangoes to canned meats and seafoods and Goan sweets and wines, are to be found in every home. Actually they have been a part of the Goan�s life since 1885, which is when the Costa company began exporting the spices of the Orient and the evocative flavours of the exotic East to Portugal and its colonies in far flung recesses of the world. Today, over a hundred years later, Costa�s has become Goa�s largest food processing company. And its associate company, Vinicola, is one of the leading manufacturers of table wines in India.

The Costa�s business empire has been taken to dizzy heights in Goa by Dr. Costa, and further diversification of the business, into construction and development of real estate, was started hy his son, Ivo Jr. A new associate company, Venusta Builders, is into great building activity in Goa, and all the Costa constructions of residential apartments, row houses and commercial properties have the unmistakable flavour of Goan architecture. You can make them out by their stucco tiled roofs, tiled roofs, gables and sweeping verandahs, just as you can pick out Costa�s tins of cocktail sausages and luncheon meat and Vinicola�s Port Wine bottles from grocery stores and tavernas.

From a modest factory in Mapusa, Costa�s churns outs its culinary smorgasbord. Their canned seafoods and meats are packaged with such revolutionary techniques, that they all have shelve lives of two years. And this is without the use of any chemicals or preservatives. The seafoods include mackerel and sardines in oils, the meats are cocktail sausages, luncheon meat, corned beef, sorpatel, croquettes, frankfurters, ham, salami, pastrami and bacon. Costa�s also does sweets, the popular Goan specialities bebinca and dodol, and these are popular in even the small food stores of the metro cities of India.

Ivo Jr. shuttles between the factory and the construction sites in a maroon Cielo, taking care of the businesses and always on the lookout for new products and processes to upgrade the Costa range of food products. Dr. Costa sits at home in Margao, content with the way things are turning out. On his table, are the pick of Costa�s products for lunch, including a neatly cut bebinca. He must eat everything he sells. But not the wines. He is a teetotaler and cannot even imagine what his popular Vinicola Port Wine must taste like. It cannot be better than the sweet taste of success, can it, he asks.

It started with sardines!

At a comfortable 74, Dr. Ivo Azaredo Costa continues to head two of Goa�s most stable industries, food and wine. He is the first man to can sardines from the Kolva beach and send them around the world. There are few among us who have not eaten Costa�s sardines, tightly packed in oil in their cans, you have to rip the cans open with their metal key and dig out the sardines, oily, salty, heavy with flashy meat, and with the taste of Goa�s tropical seas about them. Veterans eat them with chopped tomatoes, and flakes of green chillis. And he packs in a lot of other meat also, cocktail sausages, luncheon meat. The Costas other industry is wine, vinicola and a range of ports, distilled in the time-honoured wsay.

The last time in Goa, I went to Dr. Costa�s home in one of the leafy lanes of Margao. It is a typical house of a Goan gentleman, wooden floors polished to a degree that you can see your face reflected in them as you walk across the drawing-room, and furniture that has lived with three generations of the family and appears as if it was acquired only yesterday. The family lives together, son, daughter, in-laws, grand-children, who are into computers like the grandfather, they have nine between them - computers, not grand-childern.

The Costa business goes back to 1885 and Bernarda de Costa, Dr. Costa�s great-great uncle. When the art of canning was just beginning in those days, they used to can mangoes. Dr. Costa studied medicine in Goa, then in Lisbon, and practised at the University Hospital there, he was a lung specialist. In 1945, his father died, and he learnt that Costa & Co. was going bankrupt. He returned to Goa with a Portuguese wife, gave up medicine and studied accounts and food technology. Colombo ordered 1 lakh cans of mackerel, but the Konkan bred no mackrels, it bred sardines, known locally as talei. And he started with sardines.

He packs corned beef, frankfurters, bacon, in 1970 he sent out his first bottle of wine. It was a red, sweet, fortified wine, a port. And he makes a cabernet type, red and dry. Plus two types of white, still and sparkling.

Provide a soul with meat and wine, what other physical comforts does he want!