India

Asia

A vast table grape vineyard with a small wine industry inside it, concentrated at Nashik, and two harvests a year if you want them.

The figure above is wine grapes. India's total vineyard is enormous, roughly 150,000 hectares, but almost all of it is table grapes and raisins for a domestic market of over a billion people. Wine takes only a few per cent of it. Reading the national vineyard figure as a wine figure is the standard mistake with India.

Nashik in Maharashtra, about four hours north east of Mumbai, is the centre and holds most of the wine vineyard. The vines sit at 600 to 900 metres on the Deccan plateau, which is the only reason the wine works: the plateau takes ten degrees off the plain. Karnataka is the second producer, around Nandi Hills north of Bengaluru.

The vine never goes properly dormant in a tropical climate, so growers control it by hand. They prune twice: a foundation pruning after the monsoon that builds the canes, and a fruit pruning in October that sets the crop. Harvest falls in February and March. Two crops a year are possible, and for wine they are not taken, because the second is a lesser one.

The market matters more than the ladder here. Alcohol is taxed and licensed state by state, and moving wine across a state border can cost more than making it, which is why so many producers stay close to their own market.

What the label says

NoneNo appellation system
India has no protected origin ladder for wine. Maharashtra and Karnataka set their own production and excise rules, and those, not a quality tier, shape what reaches a shelf.

Signature grapes

our choice

Key regions

  • Nashik
  • Sangli
  • Pune
  • Nandi Hills
  • Bengaluru Rural
  • Akluj

A dashed outline is a region we describe but do not yet hold a page for.

Worth knowing

  • The 150,000 hectare figure is table grapes and raisins. Wine grapes are a few thousand hectares of it.
  • Harvest is in February and March, because the vine is pruned twice and cropped in the dry season.
  • Altitude does the work. Nashik at 600 to 900 metres is cool enough for wine; the plain below it is not.

More in Asia

Sources

The description, the reading of the classification system and the choice of signature grapes are ours. Region and grape records are built from Wikidata (CC0) and Wikipedia infoboxes (CC BY-SA 4.0). American AVA boundaries come from the TTB (public domain).