Sula Vineyards Shiraz 2025
£10.75
The wine
Shiraz is India's most successful red variety and the one Nashik ripens most reliably. Expect dark plum and blackberry fruit with a peppery lift and soft tannins, made unoaked or lightly oaked for immediate drinking rather than cellaring.
The Deccan plateau's altitude gives cool nights that preserve the pepper and violet aromatics heat would otherwise strip out, and the dry post-monsoon ripening season means healthy fruit without the disease pressure that defeats viticulture in most of tropical India. Vines here are pruned twice a year, a rhythm found in few other wine regions.
The producer
Sula Vineyards
View all Sula Vineyards winesSula Vineyards was founded in 1999 by Rajeev Samant, who left a career in Silicon Valley and returned to his family's land at Nashik in Maharashtra to plant grapes where his father had grown mangoes. It is now by some distance India's largest wine producer.
India was not an obvious place to try. The country has a long history of viticulture but almost none of winemaking, and the modern industry dates only from the 1980s. Nashik works because of altitude: the vineyards sit at 600 to 900 metres on the Deccan plateau, high enough for cool nights despite the latitude, and the monsoon arrives in June and clears by September, leaving a dry ripening season. Vines are pruned twice a year, once to establish the canopy and once for fruit, which is a rhythm found in few other wine regions.
Sula built the Indian wine market as much as it supplied it, opening the country's first tasting room and running a music festival at the winery that draws tens of thousands. The Dindori Reserve wines are the senior range.
