Sula Vineyards

Rajeev Samant left his job at Oracle in Silicon Valley in 1992, spent a year travelling, and went home to India in 1993. He had a Stanford degree in economics and a master's in engineering management. What he did with them was plant grapes on his family's land in Nashik.

Not table grapes — Nashik already grew those by the tonne, and had for generations. Wine grapes. Varieties nobody in Nashik had ever grown for wine.

Everyone in Nashik knew how to grow grapes. Nobody there had made wine from them.

The unreasonable idea

The gap between "grows grapes" and "makes wine" is enormous, and it is mostly about conviction. Table grapes are a known business with a known buyer. Wine grapes in 1990s India meant planting vines that would take years to bear, to make a product almost nobody in the country drank, for a market that did not exist.

What made it plausible was a partnership. Samant spent three months working at a small California winery belonging to Kerry Damskey, who became Sula's long-time master winemaker. Together they planted the first wine grapes in Nashik — Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc. Chenin Blanc had no commercial history in India at all; Sauvignon Blanc did — Grover had been growing it in Karnataka since 1988 — but neither had been grown for wine in Nashik.

Those two choices look obvious now and were not. Both are white varieties that hold acidity in warmth, which is exactly the problem India poses to a winemaker. Planting a fashionable red instead would have produced something flabby and disappointing, and the Indian wine industry might have been set back a decade.

Why Nashik works

Nashik sits some 600 metres up — official figures for the city range from 565 to 700 m — inland in Maharashtra. That altitude is the entire argument: it drops night-time temperatures enough for the fruit to keep its acid, which is what stops a hot-climate wine tasting like syrup.

India also has no winter to speak of, which means the vine never truly sleeps. Indian viticulture therefore runs on a different calendar to Europe's, with pruning used to force dormancy and set the growing season by hand rather than by season. It is farming that has to be argued with.

What Sula actually built

The wine matters, but the more consequential thing Samant built was an audience. Sula pushed vineyard tourism hard — tastings, a resort, a music festival — at a time when the Indian wine drinker largely did not exist and had to be manufactured.

The result is that Nashik is now routinely called the Wine Capital of India, and Sula is the country's largest and most awarded wine producer. Both of those facts are downstream of one decision to grow the unglamorous white grapes that would actually work.

The name, incidentally, is his mother's. Sula comes from Sulabha.

What to drink

See Sula Vineyards in the directory for location and visiting details.

• Rasa ShirazRed (Shiraz) · ~14.5%
• Sula BrutSparkling · ~12%